Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 421
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[Page 421]
207
In my new engagement I was provided with an office in the big suite tenanted by one of the city's leading accountancy firms, which was to look after the financial side for me. It was a convenient arrangement, and as these accountants also acted for other very big concerns it resulted in my getting good introductions to some very influential people.
I soon had an architectural and an engineering draftsman busy designing the buildings and specialised machinery for the plant to be erected on a site at Botany. Progress was good and the directors at their three-weekly meetings, which I attended, seemed very satisfied with results. I must say though that I was decidedly disillusioned by the ability of what were supposed to be some of Sydney's brightest business brains.
Sydney at this time, the late twenties, was having an extensive building boom in the city centre. Nearly all the old head offices of the banks, insurance firms and shipping companies were being replaced by reinforced concrete or steel framed structures rising up to the maximum legal height of one hundred and fifty feet. Departmental stores, newspaper offices and hotels were either modernising and extending their existing premises or completely rebuilding. The top architects and structural engineers were overloaded with new building projects.
In 1920, the brothers Ross and Keith Smith, with air-mechanics Farer and McIntosh, had made the first aircraft flight from England to Australia in a Vickers-Vimy wartime bomber, thus winning the prize of ten thousand pounds awarded by the Commonwealth Government to the first aviators to complete the journey. Stunt flights over hitherto unflown routes then became common; mostly sponsored by the leading newspaper companies in Britain and Australia. Now the first regular interstate air-passenger serice, Australian National Airways, was established with half a dozen of the latest aircraft, by a local company in which Kingsford Smith and Ulm, fresh from their epic flight across the Pacific, had an interest. One of the 'planes, "Southern Moon" was lost on a scheduled flight to Melbourne, and was not found until about twenty years afterwards; in the Australian Alps.