Red Dust Tapes
OVER 55 YEARS AGO multi-award-winning journalist John Francis interviewed ageing Australian Outback characters, before their voices were lost in the red dust.
THIS IS UNIQUE Aussie history.
NEARLY ALL lived largely solitary lives, in the harsh and lonely inland, on the edge of deserts, in a world of searing droughts, and occasional fierce floods.
THEY WERE prospectors, sheep and cattle men, boundary riders, drovers, railway workers, truck drivers, Aboriginal groups, and isolated but hardy women.
AUSTRALIA'S AVIATION HISTORY also started in the red dust. You'll hear interviews with some of Australia's most famous pioneer airmen (many of whom started flying in the First World War), who used aircraft to make the Outback a little less lonely.
JOHN ALSO interviews the descendants of other unique characters, reads fascinating tales from Australia's Outback past, and spins tales of his own red dust adventures.
WEBSITE: www.reddusttapes.au
Red Dust Tapes
Some ’naughty bits’ on Australian airline pioneer Sir Norman Brearley.
SEASON 1, EPISODE 5
They wouldn’t let Brearley look at the bodies. A women said it was the first time she’d ever seen a man cry.
'I made all the rules, and I followed every one of them'.
World War One dogfighter Major Norman Brearley was the first off the ground with an airline in Australia, dramatically changing the lives of people in Outback Western Australia.
Major Brearley had been ruthless and cunning in the skies over the Western Front, and was the same in business. In this second episode on his establishment on Western Australian Airways, two researchers from the Old Flyers’ Group in Perth entertain and inform us by uncovering what one of them describes as the ’naughty bits’ of the story of this great pioneer.