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Meet the Originals: Paul McGinness

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Renowned for his skill and daring

In the Middle East during the Great War, a young soldier, Paul McGinness, wrote home:

Now in the flying corps you can get a commission at 21, and with a DCM to my credit I ought to have a good chance.

McGinness in the Avro 504K with QANTAS' first female passenger (Photo: QANTAS Historical Collection)

Now another reason is aviation is only in its childhood and say if a man had a great deal of experience in it here after the war he might follow it up in Australia, if not in the military, perhaps as a profession.

To imagine such a career in 1916 reveals his restless intelligence. It says much about his energy and resolve that he achieved it so soon after his return.

McGinness won his Distinguished Conduct Medal at Gallipoli. Hudson Fysh fought on the same hill but they did not meet then. Transferring to the Australian Flying Corps as a pilot, McGinness became renowned for his skill and daring. In selecting McGinness as partner, Fysh noted that McGinness not only had seven confirmed victories, but had been hit only once. A bullet had passed through the tail of his plane.

In their first flight together, they shot down an enemy plane while McGinness flew them upside-down at the top of a loop. Each man was later awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery.

Back home in 1919 with an uncertain future, McGinness and Fysh were hired to build bush landing strips across Australias north for contestants in the Great Air Race from London. It was on this epic overland trip that their vision of an air service crystallised into Q.A.N.T.A.S.

From early 1919, dashing around Queenslands west to gain support for the company, to winning the Charleville-Cloncurry airmail service in 1922, the McGinness magic and ingenuity never flagged. But when Q.A.N.T.A.S. settled into a more routine existence, his restless spirit did not settle with it.

Just before the inaugural Charleville-Cloncurry airmail flight, he resigned. Aware of the pressures on Q.A.N.T.A.S., he did pilot that inaugural flight but soon after, he was gone.

Fysh described him as the bravest of the brave, full of the spirit of adventure and never admitting any obstacle.

After Q.A.N.T.A.S., he tried unsuccessfully to start another airline in Western Australia, and tried farming as well. In 1938, he tried to enlist in the Chinese airforce. He died in 1952.

Fysh wrote that McGinness had something great, something born of the young, immature, but intensely venturesome Australian, returned from the war, groping with gusto for something ahead, something undreamt of but which he must do.

Q.A.N.T.A.S. would not have happened without him.