Nancy-Bird Walton AO, OBE, DStJ

Readers note: This is an excerpt from the 200 Treasures exhibition catalogue, developed in 2017. This content was written as a brief biography on why this person was included in the exhibition.

Nancy-Bird Walton was an aviation pioneer. It is poetic that one of Australia’s foremost pioneers of flight was born to the Bird family in 1915, in Kew, near Taree, NSW. She experienced her first taste of aviation at the age of 15 – and was hooked.

In 1933, Walton became one of Charles Kingsford Smith’s first students at his Mascot flying school, and although she quickly qualified for a licence, she was underage at 18 and had to wait until she was 19 and had 200 solo flying miles before she could carry passengers. She finally received her licence in 1935 and retained it for 71 years, handing it back in 2006 at the age of 91. Walton was not the first qualified female pilot in Australia (that was Millicent Bryant), but she was the first to gain her commercial licence.

After she qualified, Reverend Stanley Drummond asked her to help set up a remote air ambulance service based in Bourke, NSW, and so she began flying for the Royal Far West Children’s Health Scheme. For navigation, Walton often used road maps, and made many landings in rough paddocks crammed with dangerous obstacles. Despite the very real daily dangers, she never had an accident. At 24, she married Charles Walton, with Reverend John Flynn of the Royal Flying Doctor Service officiating. She altered her first name at this time to Nancy-Bird. At the outbreak of World War II, Walton joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and was commandant of the Women’s Air Training Corps.

She founded the Australian Women Pilots’ Association in 1950, and remained its president until 1990. In 1966, she was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 1990.