Archerfield Who's Who
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Distinguished and Famous people from Archerfield
Archerfield's place in aviation history comes through its airfield and the record-breaking journeys that began there. These are documented flying connections, rather than claims that the pilots were born in the suburb.
✈️ Lores Bonney
Lores Bonney left Archerfield in August 1932 on a flight around Australia, returning to Brisbane the following month as the first woman to complete that journey by air. In April 1933 she departed again, this time for England in her Gipsy Moth, My Little Ship. A forced landing and repairs in India interrupted the trip, but she reached Croydon in June. Her preparations included overhauling the engine under Qantas engineer Arthur Baird's supervision: pioneering aviation involved spanners as well as courage.
On the England journey, bad weather forced her towards a beach near Thailand’s border with Burma. Water buffalo crossed her intended landing path, and the aircraft overturned in the water. Bonney escaped, arranged salvage and repairs in Calcutta, and resumed the journey to reach Croydon. The incident adds an unexpected hazard to the usual list of pioneering aviation difficulties: even a well-prepared pilot could not schedule the buffalo.
✈️ Charles Kingsford Smith and P. G. Taylor
Charles Kingsford Smith and navigator P. G. Taylor took off from Archerfield in October 1934 in the Lady Southern Cross, beginning a west-to-east crossing of the Pacific to the United States. It reversed the direction of Kingsford Smith's celebrated 1928 Pacific flight. The journey included stops in Fiji and Hawaii before San Francisco. Archerfield Airport's historical account records hundreds of people gathering before dawn to farewell them, turning an early start at the airfield into a major local occasion.
✈️ Keith Chisholm
Keith Chisholm flew with No. 38 Squadron from late 1945, when it was based at Archerfield and operated across the south-west Pacific. The posting followed an extraordinary wartime journey through captivity, repeated escapes and resistance work in Europe. Awarded the Military Cross for persistence and planning, he returned to Australia before resuming transport flying. After demobilisation in 1946 he moved into wool buying and later the textile business. Archerfield’s association is the squadron posting, a working aviation chapter after the far more dramatic travels for which he became known.
