From balancing on a wingtip to circling with eagles, Take Flight tells the stories of Australian women who have leapt, tumbled and dived, and reached for the stars.
Helicopter pilot Alida Soemawinata ascends over Kata Tjuṯa. Paramotor pilot Sacha Dench follows migrating swans from the Arctic tundra to the English countryside. Birdwoman Stef Walter wing walks. Hot air balloonist Donna Tasker glides over Bristol, Myanmar and much of Australia. Gomeroi astrophysicist Krystal De Napoli studies the Seven Sisters in the dark night sky. Aerobatic pilot Emma McDonald debuts her solo routine at an airshow high above the glittering Gold Coast.
Read on for the author’s introduction to the book.
A FLYING START
There’s a broad cross-section of aviators – some powered by fuel, and some by their own gumption – who have shared their stories in this book. There are common intersections in the flying, and – from studying the stars, to high-speed aerobatics – some wide diversions. After the release of Australian Women Pilots, I was often asked why I only wrote about fixed-wing flying. It’s because that was a dominant and logical place to start. For this book I have explored some ‘other’ types of flight, and the adventures and careers that accompany them.
Aside from their courageous undertakings, I was astonished at some of the personal stories these women told me – stories so surprising that I had to take my hands off the keyboard and wonder, ‘Do we stick to the flying, or do we explore these parts that make up their whole? The stories they share to make sense of their experiences. Can I do them justice?’
Despite their different pursuits, there are some close crossovers in their flying. Catherine the glider pilot, Kirsten the paraglider pilot, Stef the birdwoman/wing walker, and Donna the balloonist all do or did fly fixed-wing aircraft. Sacha the paramotorist started off in gliders and paragliders. Heather the BASE jumper had to learn skydiving, and Jess the skydiver wants to BASE jump. Emma the aerobatic pilot also flies some aeromedical work in NSW, as does Alida the helicopter pilot in Borneo. Krystal the Gomeroi astrophysicist, with her feet planted on the earth, is looking beyond them all at a universe so vast and colourful that her work is cut out for her just describing it.
My connection to these stories of the sky, and the desire to fly, starts on the back lawn of my childhood home in Finley on the NSW–Victorian border, where summers can be so hot that the dark is barely cooler than the daylight. On one such stifling hot night while I was still in primary school, nobody could sleep. We were leaving for the beach the next day – no matter which way you drove out of Finley, it seemed like a long way to the beach for our annual holiday.
On this long hot sleepless night, Dad rallied some of us to go outside and look at the stars. We lay our towels on the buffalo grass under a sky so brilliantly lit that it looked like a sequinned blanket. It was adventurous to be slipping out the back door at this strange hour. I was awestruck by the incredible display above us as, lying in the dark, Dad quietly pointed out the Pot and the Southern Cross. ‘See those four stars with a little one just to the side?’ For such a bustling household (eight kids plus cousins and interested others), the night was memorable for the silence, which was broken only by our father initiating this moment of connection.
We slept fitfully because the mosquitoes kept eating us, until finally Dad said, ‘Bugger it. Let’s go now’. At a time that belongs to the wise old owl and the insomniac, Mum, Dad and whichever kids were still living at home, piled into the car with the already packed trailer. The car was facing the exit and we drove off, leaving our hot and dusty small town for two precious weeks at the hot and sandy beach. Forever since, the starry sky has been ours. At a school reunion yesterday a group of friends reminisced about the Riverina skies and the different places they sat or lay to observe them.
In my twenties I returned to Finley after some years overseas and again was stopped in my tracks one night and craned my neck in wonder at the unpolluted sky, spread wide with our endless stars. I felt like I was seeing it for the first time. Had it been so familiar that I never knew I’d missed it?
For this reason, I was compelled to include the starry night in the book as it is connected to our fascination with the sky. Gomeroi astrophysicist Krystal De Napoli started her story an hour away at Benalla. On a hot summer’s night, her mother lay with a couple of her children on the trampoline, pointing out the same patterns in the sky. That simple moment of connection inadvertently set the pattern for Krystal’s future, during which she learned to understand the skies in a way that was beyond the reach of most of us.
In 1969, television brought the moon landing into our school library. I sat in my scratchy box-pleat grey winter tunic, squashed into the tiny room with the whole class and more, supervised by nuns, and surrounded by books and the distinct smell of methylated spirits and purple ink on the Gestetner. I remember so clearly watching the grainy black and white footage of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon, saying those immortal words, ‘One small step for man …’
Reaching the stars was clearly off limits to me, but the desire to try flying was irresistible and a few years later we four younger siblings started on the roof of our back verandah. My brother Brendan jumped off it without fear and assured me I’d be fine. ‘Come on’, he encouraged, laughing the way kids do when even they don’t believe what they’re saying.
Soon there was a steady stream of us and the neighbourhood kids shrieking, ‘I can fly!’ for the couple of seconds that we were airborne. Eventually Mum came out to see what the din was, just as we were attaching a cape to the youngest. She told us to get down, so we went back to kicking the footy until she went back to peeling the potatoes, and then we got back on the roof.
Brendan recently reminded me that our intention was to make the cape stream out behind us like Superman. I loved it then, when I saw a clip of Heather Swan learning to BASE jump. She ran off the edge of a clifftop and shrieked, ‘I can flyyy!’ before throwing her chute.
Eventually we kids graduated to the roof of the shearing shed on our farm at Blighty. The freefall from that roof was about as high as we were brave enough to jump. It was BASE jumping without the parachute! Dad soon put a stop to our shenanigans with the old adage, ‘you’ll break your leg’.
‘Maybe’, I thought, ‘but what if we don’t?’
I think the desire to fly is as primal as the first person who saw the first bird and thought, hmmm … In a more sophisticated Superman- like moment a couple of years ago, I jumped off a mountain to fly like a bird. Fortunately, I was attached to Kirsten Seeto and we flew from ‘Mystic’, the paragliders’ launch place outside of Bright, Victoria. Once rigged up and attached to Kirsten, the instructions were simple. I had to run as fast as I could towards the edge of the 2200-foot mountain. At some point there would be a jolt as the wing lifted, and I just had to keep running. So I ran, the wing jolted, I jolted, she shouted, ‘Keep running!’; ‘I’m running, I’m running’, I called back, and as the hill sloped away and the pine forest came into view, the wing gently lifted us aloft and we spent the most beautiful nine minutes hovering above the blue hills, doing a slow turn back to look where we’d just been, and then silently floating over a ridge line down to the landing zone. I could see how it is addictive, and so much better than jumping off the shearing shed roof.
I hope you enjoy meeting these women of the skies and take inspiration from them. I’ve told the stories as best I can, and generally as they were presented to me. Thanks for reading.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kathy Mexted is a writer, photographer and editor. Inspired by her father, she learnt to fly in 1991, before she became a writer. Now she writes more than she flies, though her eyes and mind are usually turned skywards. She grew up in Finley, New South Wales.
She married into, and then created, a flying family. She currently lives with her husband Denis on 40 hectares in Central Victoria, and they fly a Cessna 180. She is the author of Australian Women Pilots.
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