Sundowner of the Skies

A fascinating and compelling biography of Oscar Garden, an unsung hero of aviation. A warts and all story written by his daughter, Mary Garden, who not only celebrates his achievements, but reveals his failings as a father. He is a damaged man who inflicts damage.

In the early morning of 16 October, 1930, Garden set out from Croydon Aerodrome in South London in a second-hand, open-cockpit Gipsy Moth. On his feet he wore carpet slippers, and he had half a dozen sandwiches on his lap. His plan was to fly to Australia. He was 27 years old and had just learnt to fly, with a mere 39 flying hours under his belt. There was only one person there to see him off - a representative of the Vacuum Oil Company, who had agreed to provide fuel supplies of Plume and Mobiloil at his planned stops along the 12,000-mile route.

At that time, the flight from England to Australia was considered to be 'the most formidable feat in aerial navigation and the sternest test of pilot and machine'. Eighteen days after leaving Croydon, he landed at Wyndham Aerodrome in Western Australia. He was lucky to survive the trip, as he had several forcedlandings, including a spectacular crash in darkness near Jhansi in central India. He found himself hanging upside down in the seat's safety straps listening to petrol dripping out from the rear tank and watchedwith horror as a localIndian ran towards him with a hurricane lamp.

Oscar became the fifth aviator to complete a solo flight from England to Australia. Even thoughhe was the youngest and the most inexperienced, at 18 days his flight was the third-fastest after veteran pioneer aviators Charles Kingsford Smith and Bert Hinkler.

Unlike most of his contemporaries who died in crashes, Garden survived and went on to a career in commercial aviation. In April 1940, he delivered the flying boat Awarua to Auckland for Tasman Empire Airways Limited, and steered this fledging company through its formative years. He suddenly resigned in 1947 to become a tomato grower in Tauranga, New Zealand. After that, he was soon forgotten.

In 1979, Ian Driscoll, a noted aviation writer, pointed out that 'Oscar Garden must be the most unnoticed of New Zealand's airline pioneers.' What puzzled the author was: if he was that famousand successful, why was he forgotten? And if he was so successful at navigating the skies, why was he such a failure on earth and at family life? Her mother had always described him as 'a bastard of a father. And a bastard of a husband.'

As Mary discovered, from researching his family and his bleak childhood in north Scotland, there was violence and trauma cascading down the generations. As well as gifts.