Tony Smith (Casey, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I want to take the opportunity this morning to mention an important event I attended recently, on 25 October, together with the member for La Trobe and the member for Wannon. I attended a memorial service to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the crash of the Kyeema, a DC-2 plane that was en route from Adelaide to Essendon airport in 1938. Tragically, it crashed, in heavy fog, into Mount Dandenong, in the outer east of Melbourne. Madam Deputy Speaker Burke, you would be very familiar with the history. It is still Victoria’s worst air crash. All 18 people on board died. It was a tragic story in the infancy of Australian aviation. A state-of-the-art plane, of the time, got lost in very heavy weather. The crew mistook their bearings, mistook Sunbury for Daylesford. In fact, they were some 30 miles ahead of where they thought they were and, in heavy fog, crashed into the side of Mount Dandenong. It shocked Australia and the aviation industry.

I mentioned that I was at the service with the member for Wannon. One of the 18 passengers on board was Charles Hawker, a relative of David Hawker, the member for Wannon. He had been a federal minister in the Lyons government and he was a member of parliament at the time. Another notable Australian on board was Thomas Hardy, a name familiar to many of us. It was great to see his son Sir James Hardy at the memorial service, with his recollections of that tragic event.

Mount Dandenong was a wonderful place to be to remember what was obviously a sad occasion and to see the families come along, mostly from Adelaide, to remember what had occurred on that day, at that place, at that time, 1.45 pm. The plane came down in unusual weather. Witnesses from the time said that it was the worst day of weather in the Dandenongs that they could recall in their lifetime. You literally could not see the top of the Dandenongs. The tragedy was that the plane crew thought they were on descent to Essendon airport but they crashed into the top of Mount Dandenong. There was good news and a positive element to the day, though, because we heard how that crash signalled the start of major aviation reform and safety reform in Australia from that point on.

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