My God, It's a Woman - Nancy Bird

My God, It’s A Woman!

The Autobiography of
Nancy Bird

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216 Pages
Foreword by Gaby Kennard
The title of Nancy-Bird Walton's autobiography is pretty much the story of her early life, My God, It's A Woman!   The title was the response of one grazier, trapped on an outback property, when told that the pilot flying to his rescue was called Nancy.   The young pioneering aviator, philosophical about the response, picked him up. She had started flying when a female pilot was still called an aviatrix and constantly surprised people when a tiny (she was 150 centimeters tall) person wearing a dress emerged from a cockpit and took off her helmet
My God! It’s a Woman!, is the extraordinary story of Nancy Bird, one of Australia’s pioneer aviatrix. Not an autobiography to read for its literary quality, but one which related a fascinating time and lives. It is a survey of the early years of aviation in Australia and around the world.   It is full of accounts of planes found nose down in Chinese vegetable gardens, of pilots navigating through bush-land by telegraph lines (because if you got into trouble you could land on the cleared strip, climb a pole, cut the line and wait for a technician to come and rescue you), of hair-raising landings, of lives and loves lost without a trace over oceans, of thrilling air-races, planes that were known to fly backwards during sandstorms, the forgotten women pilots of WWII, of Thai princesses smuggling Persian kittens into the planes of pilots, of pilots lost and found in New Guinea, of the surprise of a farmwife at having two women land in her paddock and come up to the house for morning tea. It narrates in first person the heroics and politics experienced by a young woman trying to make a living as a charter pilot in outback Qld and NSW during the 1930s.
The reading describes that in spite of the great enthusiasm generated by aviatrix pioneers, Australian aviation was still in its infancy and fraught with many dangers and...