In August 1919, WWI flying ace Harry Butler pointed a scarlet Bristol monoplane across Gulf St Vincent toward his home town. The plane still lives in Minlaton.
The farm boy who looked up
Henry John "Harry" Butler grew up on a farm at Koolywurtie, in the wheat and barley country near Minlaton, tinkering with engines and dreaming about the new science of flight. When the First World War came he made his way to Britain, where he became a celebrated gunnery and flying instructor with the Royal Flying Corps, training hundreds of young pilots and earning the Air Force Cross.
Most decorated airmen came home quietly. Butler came home with two aeroplanes.
Twenty-seven minutes over the gulf
On 6 August 1919, Butler took off from Adelaide in his Bristol M1C monoplane - painted brilliant red and nicknamed the Red Devil - and pointed it west across Gulf St Vincent. No aircraft had carried mail across water in the Southern Hemisphere before; if his single engine failed over the gulf, there was nowhere to land but the sea.
It didn't fail. He covered the roughly 108 kilometres to Minlaton in 27 minutes, climbing to some 15,000 feet on the way, and delivered his bag of mail to a jubilant home crowd. The flight made him a national celebrity, and the tiny farm town at the centre of the peninsula found itself with one of the great stories of early Australian aviation.
The sole survivor
About 200 Bristol M1C monoplanes were built during the war. Today, exactly one survives anywhere in the world - and it lives on Minlaton's main street. After Butler's death in 1924, aged just 34, the Red Devil passed through other hands and other hangars until a campaign brought it home; a purpose-built memorial opened in 1958, and the aircraft has since been restored and re-housed behind glass to protect its fabric from the sun.
Standing at the Captain Harry Butler Memorial, nose to nose with the little scarlet machine, the bravery of that gulf crossing feels very real - it is a startlingly small aeroplane.
Following the story
The Minlaton Museum, a few doors away in part of an 1889 general store, keeps a dedicated Harry Butler room of photographs and memorabilia. Make a morning of it with coffee and a bakery stop, then drive the quiet roads east to Port Vincent - over country Butler would have seen from the air. For more of the peninsula's living history, start with our heritage highlights of the Yorke Peninsula.
