“The Typical Australian Attitude.
“The most consistently successful types of men at this work taken over a long spell of years are perhaps those represented by a group of three young Australians, Hawker, Pickles, and Busteed, who came over here determined to realise their dreams of lives of adventure in the air on the distinct understanding that there was plenty of money in the venture. As one student of human nature remarked:
“They don’t want the Archbishop of Canterbury to hold a special service for them before they get off the ground; they are not going to die until they have done everything mortal man can to prevent it; if they do die, they will take it to be absolutely as natural a process as to be born; and, in the meantime, instead of wasting their time collecting mascots and inventing fancy names for the machines they fly they prefer to do as much of the building of them as time and opportunity allow, and they see to it that the financial side of the business is so fixed up that they will not be leaving spots of poverty behind them.
“Undoubtedly that touch of self-reliance which we associate pre-eminently with the Australian temperament will go a long way towards securing success in such efforts as the race across the Atlantic.
“Among our home-bred pilots of the same class, too, we have many men who have acquired this habit of clear-thinking in essentials, of eliminating emotionalism from their temperament, and of always taking off their shirts to get right down to their job. Occasionally a man who is not of that temperament may score a notable success; but if an eye be kept on the performance of flying feats year after year, and the average of each man’s achievement, it will be found that the man whose name for consistent achievement year after year advances with the progress of the science of flight is one with ‘no frills about him.’
“What Makes for Success.
“It is right that the thing should be so. These men follow on the lines of those masters by whose enterprise flight is alone possible. The late Wilbur Wright was a plain man, and his brother Orville remains so to this hour. They found that they had to know, and to do so much that there was no time for social life as such, even if they had had the temperament for it, which they had not.
“You do not find Hawker and Company lounging about in clubs in the intervals between their big aviation undertakings, for the sufficient reason that they give themselves no intervals of leisure, because they are always busy working for money, which they know how to look after when they get it. A result is that they never get overawed at the prospect of any one of their aerial feats. Each is to them merely part of the ordinary day’s work, imposing no more strain than any other day’s work. For instance, I recollect some years ago the effect exercised on one of the best aero engine mechanics in the country on first coming in contact with Hawker: