Sir Charles Kingsford Smith - Brisbane birthplace Claimed

The weatherboard cottage named Corbea on this site, before being demolished in 1936 to make way for today's flats at number 12, was the birthplace of Australia's greatest aviator, Sir Charles Kingsford Smith in 1897. The riverfront road is named after him and his beloved Southern Cross Fokker Tri-Motor aircraft now rests in air conditioned comfort at Brisbane Airport, near the International Terminal. It was in this aircraft that Kingsford Smith, Charles Ulm, Jim Warner and Harry Lyon made the first crossing of the Pacific, landing at nearby Eagle Farm Racecourse on June 9, 1928.

From the book, Smithy

A vivid description of Charles Kingsford Smith's birthplace forms the beginning of author Ian Mackersey's biography, Smithy, first published in 1998 by Little, Brown and Company in the UK (ISBN 0 7515 2656 8):

The Brisbane into which Charles Kingsford smith was born three years before the turn of the century was already a sizeable town of around 100,000 people. A collection of wooden houses and low brick and stone buildings it sprawled, among palms and banana trees, along the banks of the Brisbane River, which bustled with square-rigged sailing vessels and long-funnelled steamships. Life was leisurely.

Photographs show the dusty main street, Queen Street, deserted but for a few gigs and horse-drawn double-decker trams. People travel mainly by bicycle or on horseback. Bushy bearded men with wide side whiskers wear bowler hats, pith helments and straw boaters, and the women, in long white flared dresses, flutter about under parasols.

The Smith family, who had yet to add Kingsford to their name, lived in Rverview Terrace in what is today the suburb of Hamilton. The streets lay on the edge of town in dense eucalypt woodland above a bend in the river about 3 miles from the centre. The unnumbered cottage, named 'Corbea', no longer exists -- it was demolished sometime before 1936 -- but is believed to have stood on the corner of Riverview Terrace and Whyenbah Road, on a site now occupied by a block of large, old, wooden flats (number 12 Riverview Terrace). It is a mixed sort of street, shabby weatherboard houses scattered among elegant mansions. There is nothing to commemorate the birth there of one of Australia's most famous men.

His arrival, on Tuesday 9 February 1897, has been awaited by his mother, Catherine, and her husband with some dread. With good reason they believed that, because of her age -- she was in her fortieth year --  she might not survive the birth of this, her seventh child. It has been ten years since she had delivered her sixth, a son, and she had earlier had a number of miscarriages. It is probable that, long before, she and William had ceased trying for more. But she survived to produce the most remarkable of all her children.

Catherine's diary, in which , unfailingly, she made brief, factual entries -- mostly devoid of emotion or opinion -- every evening for over four decades, recorded the event: 'Feeling very poorly,' she wrote the day before. 'Kept Leof [Leofric, her twelve-year-old son] at home in case of emergency. Taken ill at night. Mrs Macdiamidcame to sit with me while Will went for doctor and nurse.' 

Around dawn the next day, Charles was delivered, according to the birth certificate, by Dr W.F. Marks, apparently without complication. 'Baby born at about half past 5 or quarter to 6am,' she wrote matter-of-factly.

During the following hot February week, which Catherine spent confined to her bed, the diary records a constant procession of visitors who arrived on foot, bicycle and buggy, come, in the absence of a telephone, to congratulate her and to bring the baby gifts in the shape of a large collection of frocks. In one of his earliest photographs, Charles is dressed in one and, with his golden curly hair, resembles a good-looking baby girl. 'He was pretty, really pretty, with those blue eyes, rose-leaf skin, and the reddest lips imaginable,' wrote Winifred, his eldest sister, in a private tribute after his death.

However, charles quickly developed into a tough, very mascluine and unusually adventurous child, well endowed with the genes of some vigorous and distinguished forebears  whose roots on both sides of the family were in rural Kent in England. William's were seafarers and tradesmen, Catherine's well-to-do middle-class farmers and businessmen. The parents of both had arrived as first-generation immigrants in search of new lives in this vast and raw land of promise.

ends

Note: The above report by author Ian Mackersey laments the fact that there was no memorial at Smithy's Brisbane birthplace, but that has been remedied (in March 2013) by an informative plaque on the corner of Riverview Terrace and Kingsford Smith Drive, as recorded by the superb historical website, Monument Australia.

Image by Diane Watson on MonumentAustralia.org.au: