70 Australian Geographic
one clipping I found in the box, humour, because it all began
with an idea for a stunt.
In July 1962, as is the wont of students, Dad and others gath-
ered at The University of Sydney’s St John’s College devising
mischief. Dad suggested a party, one that couldn’t be stopped.
“Imagine it,” he said. “The Poms are playing at the SCG. You
fl oat over in a balloon, singing and dancing at 100ft [30m]
and nobody can get you. The cops are bristling with rage and
frustration, the fi re brigade is called in with ladders and the
air force with rockets.”
Stan Grincevicius, who later became my godfather, was there.
“It was just students sitting around in – pardon the French – a
bullshit session, everyone going of on tangents with big ideas.
But every once in a while somebody grabs the idea and runs
with it. In this case, it was Terry,” Stan says.
I hadn’t seen Stan since my father’s funeral. But he was possi-
bly my father’s closest friend, so I travelled to Melbourne to pay
him a visit. He showed me hundreds upon hundreds of pages
Dad had sent him: drawings and sketches; designs and costings;
calculations of payloads, lift factors, gas densities, vapour
pressures, BTUs (British thermal units), spring-loadings, fuel
consumption, drag coef cients and temperature dif erentials.
Done in the pre-computer, pre-calculator age, every equation
was handwritten – scrawled lines of calculus, of derivatives and
integrals, of sines and cosines.
“He was an engineer,” Stan says. “He liked working things out
and researching. And he was very, very intelligent. For every three
hours [of study] we had to put in, he only had to put in one.”
The joy of research seemed to be at the project’s heart. This
didn’t surprise me; the original Aerostats were, essentially, all
math and science geeks. There was Dad and his brother Lau-
rie, brothers Peter and Brian McGee, Stan, Zenon Kocuimbas,
Mopsy Mauragis and Terry Golding. And they had to start from
scratch. There were no books for guidance, no hobbyist mag-
azines, and no ready fl ow of information to Australia about
international ballooning developments. American Ed Yost had
made the fi rst modern hot-air balloon fl ight just a few years
earlier; no-one in England would do so for years.
“It was first principles. There
were no do-it-yourself
manuals or texts to follow.”
WATCH historic footage of ballooning
in Australia. Download the free viewa
app and use your smartphone to scan
this page.History made. The moment of Archimedes’ lift-off. Newspaper
reports at the time estimated a crowd of 3000 had gathered to
brave a cold winter’s morning and witness the fl ight.