ABORIGINES

Thames Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 19622, 1 February 1936, Page 4

ABORIGINES

FLIGHT IN AEROPLANE.

“DON’T WANT ANY MORE OF IT.”

Six North Queensland aborigines, visitors from the stone age, made flights in an aeroplane at Mascot yesterday. It was a great occasion for them, and they dressed in ceremonial paint—wide stripes of white pigment down their chocolate chests, white rings round their legs, and a drab or two on their faces. They belong to the company of ;S3origines who are encamped at Pagewood, and are appearing in the film “Uncivilised.” The three aborigines who made the first of two flights over Sydney by the W.A.S.P. Company’s Gannet machine seemed oddly unimpressed by their new experience, while they were in the air, and by the discovery of the new world one looks down upon from an aeroplane, with its dolls’ houses, miniature cars and railway trains, and toy gasometers. One of them took a pet python with him and sat with it curled round his glistening, almost-naked body, stroking it and taking little notice of the world below him. The others sat motionlessly looking out of the windows, and their faces did not flicker even for bumps or the banking or the landing. The second party was more excited, and one of them said he did not want to go up again; so did Frank Laura, who had taken the snake with him. He remarked wryly that he had had enough of it, but the snake did not seem to mind it. The others, however, were delighted, and ready for more It was fitting that the machine—a Gannet just back from a routine flight to Broken Hill —should have been one designed and made in Australia.