Out of Africa: The Biography of the Ruins of the Southern Cross Minor

When:  Nov 2, 2020 from 19:00 to 21:00 (ACST)
Associated with  Adelaide Section

Mon., 2 November 2020
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm ACDT (08:30 - 10:30 UTC)

Lead Chief Investigator of the ‘Heritage of the Air’ Linkage project Tracy Ireland joins us to share the story of Southern Cross Minor.

In 1962 a French Foreign Legion patrol in the Sahara found the wreck of a small plane, the Southern Cross Minor, and the body of its pilot Bill Lancaster, apparently undisturbed since it had crashed in 1933. In 1975 Mr Ted Wixtead, a librarian at the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, successfully launched a mission to recover the plane’s remains, based largely on their brief association with Charles Kingsford Smith. After overcoming many adventures and obstacles, these relics are now found deep in a storage facility for the Queensland Museum’s permanent collection. Despite this remarkable provenance, the museum’s catalogue tersely describes this object as a ‘box frame aeroplane in exceptional state of wreckage’. Somewhat unusually for aviation heritage collections, the remains have never been restored and the airframe’s skeletonised, twisted form still carries the perceptible tang and texture of its long sojourn in the Saharan sand.

As part of the ‘Heritage of the Air’ project at the University of Canberra we are using museum collections and archives to explore the cultural impact of aviation, and as a way to complicate nationalistic narratives of aviation as a purely technological phenomenon. Approaching the Southern Cross Minor archaeologically as a ruin, and using a methodology known as object biography that foregrounds the social life of things, we will tease out what we can learn from the materiality of the remains of the Minor and the dramatic human narratives that surround them.

About our Guest:

Tracy Ireland is Professor of Cultural Heritage at the University of Canberra and Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research. She is currently Lead Chief Investigator of the Heritage of the Air Linkage project, a partnership with Airservices Australia, National Museum of Australia, Queensland Museum, SFO Museum (San Francisco) and the Civil Aviation Historical Society.

Tracy is known internationally for her work on heritage ethics, the social values of heritage and she has published widely on historical archaeology and heritage, nationalism and colonialism, drawing on research in Australia, New Zealand, Quebec, USA, and Cyprus. Tracy has prepared heritage assessments and management plans for some of Australia's most significant places, including the Old Great North Road World Heritage site, the Australian War Memorial, and Old Parliament House, Canberra, and is Editor of the Australia ICOMOS journal Historic Environment.

About the webinar organisers:

AIAA - The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, is the world's largest professional society dedicated to aerospace activities, with over thirty thousand members worldwide. The Adelaide Professionals Chapter of the AIAA is proud to carry out the mission of the Institute here in Adelaide and more broadly throughout our community and region by advocating for aerospace at all levels. For more information about the AIAA, please visit https://www.aiaa.org/

Free registration link below:

https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/out-of-africa-the-biography-of-the-ruins-of-the-southern-cross-minor-tickets-126497947767

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Contact

Steven Pietrobon
+61 8 8332 0319
steven@sworld.com.au