INTO OBLIVION -
THE SOUTHERN CLOUD ENIGMA

On 21 March 1931, the airliner Southern Cloud disappeared en route from Sydney to Melbourne, and the nation held its breath as an exhaustive search was conducted throughout south-eastern Australia. No trace was found of the missing aircraft or its eight occupants, and the intriguing mystery of our first major aviation tragedy entered Australian folklore.

The enigma was finally resolved 27 years later, when a Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme worker stumbled across the skeletal remains of the aircraft in the rugged Toolong Range in southern New South Wales. But do we really know what happened to the Southern Cloud? Did anyone survive the crash? Why was a crucial piece of evidence suppressed from the official report?

So many years afterwards, the riddle of Australia’s first major airline disaster still poses more questions than it answers.