68 Australian GeographicAt the centre of their attention
was 150sq.m of Mylar film. It was
just one-fi ftieth of a millimetre thick.
During the days to come, the Mylar’s
aluminium coating would shimmer sil-
ver, mirroring bright cobalt skies and
brown, hard-baked fi elds. On these
days, there would be no spectators
and their strange activities would go
unwatched. The fourth of July, how-
ever, was different. Thousands of
onlookers had gathered, braving mid-
winter’s grasping dawn chill, because
the young engineers were attempting
the country’s first manned balloon
fl ight in nearly half a century.
Unlike previous balloons, Archimedes,
as they had named their craft, was equipped with an onboard
burner. This was Australia’s fi rst modern hot-air balloon and
tiny by today’s standards. Balloons now average a volume of
2500cu.m; Archimedes was one-fi fth that size. Nor was there
was a passenger basket. There was just an open platform, large
enough to carry one gas cylinder, a single passenger and no more.
The group had built Archimedes themselves. In a cafeteria at
The University of Sydney, they had cut out 28 sections of Mylar
(a form of plastic polymer of cially known as polyethylene tere-
phthalate) and taped them together to form the envelope. When
Archimedes was complete, they performed an unmanned trial on
a football fi eld in Sydney, with the balloon tethered by ropes.
Their next step was to remove its constraints – they wanted
Archimedes to fl y free. So they headed to Parkes, where they could
run their trials outside restricted airspace.
On the day of the attempt, a light breeze blew. The students
struggled to steady the infl ating balloon. Eventually they were
ready for take-of. The president of their ballooning club, the
Aerostat Society, stood on the platform. His added weight was
too much for the tiny, rudimentary burner, which lacked the
power to suf ciently heat the air within Archimedes for lift-of. But
it was close. All they needed was to lighten the load. Then the
pilot removed his parachute and Archimedes began to fl oat. Within
minutes, it was half a kilometre up. By the time it landed, a quarter
of an hour later, it had travelled 5km. History had been made.However, no-one had considered
the dynamics of the landing. When
Archimedes touched down, for an
instant the weight of the pilot, the
platform, the burner and the gas bot-
tle were no longer supported by the
balloon, but by the ground. Relieved
of this encumbrance, Archimedes shot
skywards. The pilot lost his footing
and was left dangling from the plat-
form some 30m in the air, before the
balloon descended again. When spec-
tators arrived, they were relieved to
fi nd him uninjured.
Eleven years later, he would not
be so lucky. In another Australian
ballooning fi rst, he would die in an
accident, closing a pioneering chapter of the sport. For me, too,
just 8 years old at the time, the world of ballooning ended. That
was because the pilot, Terry McCormack, was my father, and for
the next 35 years I didn’t think about hot-air ballooning at all.F
OR YEARS I HAD known of a box my mother kept. It smelt
musty and, although I’d never rummaged through it, I
knew roughly its contents: yellowed newspaper clippings;
black-and-white photos; hand-drawn designs on paper browned
at the edges; and the odd silverfi sh, squished and dried between
promotional brochures.
I’d never closely examined this evidence of my father’s
ballooning endeavours, nor spoken with any of his friends from
those times. I’d never even really asked anyone about him or
what he was like. However, because several of Dad’s friends
had recently died, in 2012 I decided that if I was ever going
to learn more about him, or the contents of that box, now was
the time to start.
As a form of transport, ballooning predates cars, bicycles,
and even steam locomotives. It seems at odds with the fast pace
of modern life. A fl ight in a balloon is a languid af air, fl oating
through the skies, drifting over the landscape in slow, mean-
dering lines. Yet nostalgia was not what attracted the Aerostat
Society members to ballooning. Precisely the opposite; it was
innovation, research, adventure. And, at least according toa group of young engineering students and recent graduates gathered around a shapeless
object in a paddock near Parkes, in central-western New South Wales. They looked like
members of an esoteric sect, clad identically in simple white overalls and performing curious
rituals, the function of which few onlookers could have guessed.
ON 4 JULY 1964,
Treasure chest. While sifting through one of his
mother’s cupboards, James found a box of his Dad’s
photos, clippings, slides, brochures, fi lm and hundreds
of pages of hand-written calculations.BEN HANSEN