76 Australian Geographiccase with thermals. “We would just have to learn to avoid them.”
When Dad and Tony departed, Michael and a few others
followed by car. “They weren’t fl ying as high as we had in the
morning,” Michael says. “I remember losing sight of the balloon,
quite often behind hills. But coming around a corner, [we saw]
smoke maybe one or 2km away. We prayed they were okay.”
Newspapers say Dad and Tony were at an altitude of about
100m, and chatting with onlookers below them, when a
willy-willy moved through. The basket began swinging violently
and, in all the movement, the cable leading to the chimney’s
release pin was pulled. Chimneys were large vents in balloon
envelopes that could be used to rapidly release air upon landing.
But the defl ations they induced were termed ‘catastrophic’, in
that they were irreversible. The James Cook plummeted. Tony
jumped, but his parachute had insuf cient time to deploy. Dad
stayed with the balloon. Neither had a hope of survival.I
F I WAS TO UNDERSTAND the attraction of ballooning for
Dad, I had to fl y again. It seemed fi tting it should be with
Phil Kavanagh and that it should be in Canowindra. Not
only had Dad been infl uential in the town becoming Australia’s
ballooning capital, but also some of my earliest memories are
from time spent there with him.
For me, a kid from the city, Canowindra had seemed exoticallybushy. I remember the land appeared hard and leached, the gum
trees veneered with dust. I remember fi elds of Paterson’s curse
and thistles as high as my chest. I remember learning to negotiate
barbed wire to reach paddocks where the balloon had landed.
Returning to Canowindra in November 2012, it seemed vir-
tually nothing had changed. That was not the case, however, with
modern balloons. Dad’s accident cemented in people’s minds
the danger of afternoon fl ights and chimneys were banned.
Skirts, too, were added to balloon bases to allow safer ascents
in higher winds. Infl ation fans are quieter and burners infi nitely
more powerful. Most importantly, defl ation vents can now be
opened and closed on demand.
Phil demonstrated the vent in the moments before we
ascended. Unlike the swatch-patterned colours of so many mod-
ern balloons, Phil’s was almost wholly a single hue; a lustrous teal
blue to match the rich depths of the dawn above. Then, with a
couple of blasts of the burner, we were of.
The lift was so gentle it could barely be felt, and we rose in
near silence over the dawn-kissed fi elds. The land seemed soft
and slow, as if waking drowsily from sleep. Soon we were high
enough to no longer hear the calls of livestock or songs of birds.
We took in aerial views revealing the patterns of the landscape:
the spidery webs of sheep tracks near dams; the rows of vine-
yards; the angularities of fence lines; the crooked haphazardnessFull of hot air. Silhouetted
by the dawn sun, Jan Kerr is
dwarfed by her balloon Hippy
while it infl ates in Canowindra,
Australia’s balloon capital.BOTH IMAGES: JAMES MCCORMACK