from the collections of Museum Victoria, the Qantas Founders' Outback Museum, Queensland Museum, Katherine Museum, The Australian Aviation Heritage Centre & the Australian War Memorial

In Australia today, air travel is a part of life. There are aircraft overhead day and night in cities, and if you live in a rural area you might depend on a light plane for your mail, or to get around. Aeroplanes are so common these days that it's hard to believe how many failed attempts there were over many thousands of years before the first successful flights. It's amazing that people can fly at all!

Many cultures have been fascinated by flight for thousands of years, and there are lots of stories to prove it - like the Greek myth of Icarus and his father Daedalus, who flew like birds with the help of wings made from wax and feathers. The unfortunate Icarus flew too close to the sun, melting his wax wings and falling into the sea. There are also success stories, though! One myth tells of the Emperor Shin, who flew successfully from the top of another high tower over 4000 years ago in China, using two large straw hats as wings.

It wasn't until 1783 that anyone managed to stay in the air safely, when the Montgolfier brothers flew the world's first manned hot-air balloon. It was a great acheivement, but they had no control over where they flew and had to go where the wind blew them! Controlled flight was still the real aim, so people returned to studying the way birds fly and built flying machines with flapping wings. These machines were not the answer: They were all too large and heavy, so they either didn't have enough power to get off the ground, or they broke.

In Australia, over one hundred years later, Lawrence Hargrave paved the way for the first true aeroplanes with his invention of the box-kite. In 1894 Hargrave demonstrated safe, stable flight by tethering four kites together and sitting on a sling seat underneath. He was hoisted five metres into the air! Over the next few years people all around the world attempted to create the world's first controllable flying machine, using Hargrave's box-kite as a model. In 1903 in the USA, the Wright brothers finally succeeded, flying a plane nearly 300 metres.

People kept working on the design of aircraft and aeroplanes began to look more like they do today, with an enclosed fuselage - the body of the plane which contains the engine, seats for the pilot and passengers, and all the mechanisms that control how the plane flies.

Aerofoils were another important development in the design of aeroplanes. An aerofoil is a wing shape that is more curved on top than underneath. When the wing moves forwards, the air going over the top has to travel further and faster than the air going underneath. This lowers the air pressure above the wing, which creates lift, causing the wing and anything attached to it to rise upwards. Modern planes still use the aerofoil wing shape today.

Aircraft are a vital part of Australian transport and communications, where vast distances separate far-flung towns and cities. In 1919, two ex-Flying Corps servicemen, W Hudson Fysh and Paul McGinness surveyed a section of the outback - from Longreach in Queensland, to Katherine in the Northern Territory. Their journey was long and very difficult, and inspired them to set up a regular air service connecting isolated parts of northern and eastern Australia.

With financial assistance from Fergus McMaster, an affluent grazier, McGinness and Fysh purchased an Avro light aircraft in August 1920 and in November the same year, they established their new company - Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Ltd. Can you guess what this name was shortened to?

Seven years earlier, a man named John Flynn had begun a task that was to become his lifetime mission. He saw the emerging technology of air travel as a means not only to connect people, but to protect them. Between 1913 and 1927, he used his magazine 'The Inlander' to gain support for his idea of a flying doctor service that would cast a 'mantle of safety' over people in remote communities.

Despite many setbacks, the first Aerial Medical Service call was answered in May 1928 (using a Qantas plane) and with the introduction of pedal-powered radios, the service quickly grew in size. Today, the Royal Flying Doctor Service has 13 bases covering an area of 6.9 million square kilometres, 80% of Australia's landmass. The ability to answer emergency calls quickly and transport patients hundreds of kilometres to the nearest hospital continues to help save many lives.

In the early days of flying, records were being set almost daily. The first people to fly around Australia, Wing-Commander Goble and Flight Lieutenant MacIntyre, managed it in 43 days in 1924. Two years later, Colonel H C Brinsmead and Captain E J Jones did it in half the time!

In 1927, Millicent Bryant became the first Australian woman to get a pilot's licence and women joined the record-breaking game with much enthusiasm. Lores Bonney was the first woman to fly round Australia in 1932 and the following year she also became the first woman to fly from Australia to England. New Zealander Jean Batten made the first ever flight from England to New Zealand in 1934 and her record - 11 days and 45 minutes - stood unbroken until 1980!

Charles Kingsford Smith, affectionately known as 'Smithy', was another of Australia's great aviators. He was the first to fly from San Francisco across the Pacific Ocean to Australia, the first to fly from London to New York and also the first to fly across the Tasman Sea. Sydney's international airport is named after him and his best-known plane, the 'Southern Cross', is kept in a specially-built hangar at Brisbane Airport.

In 1927, with co-pilot Charles Ulm, Smithy circumnavigated Australia in 10 days and 5½ hours - a record time. Today, you could complete the same journey in 15 hours! Apart from faster aeroplanes, can you think of other changes that have taken place since then?