"It'll never fly, Lawrence"

I'm not used to the vast throngs of humans on our precious 1,285 metres. I counted nearly 20 today.

But you won't hear me object. In fact, the sight of people enjoying the last hurrahs of the Summer holidays at Sandy is exhilarating to me, just as the eleven months of relative desertion have their own delights.

A sand castle on the beach today affirmed that there's hope for the future of the planet, for as long as there are children making sand castles on sandy beaches, and as long as clean tides wash them flat when the kids are tucked up in bed, all will be well.

And dads and kids with kites. The blue and red delta-shaped kite fluttering and swooping like the swallows that nest outside my cabin, on the beach today was a beauty. In a 22-km/h breeze it was remarkable what perpendicularity the guy on the controls could achieve. If the boy has as much fun being a man as the man has being a kid, we have yet another reason for hope.

The kite brought to my mind the great flyer of kites, Lawrence Hargrave (1850 - 1915), engineer, explorer, astronomer, aeronautical pioneer and inventor of the box kite. At another beach south of Sandy on this Pacific coast (Stanwell Park), on November 12, 1894, he was able to fly in one of the home-made box kites that obsessed him and helped improve the lives of us all. "It'll never fly, Lawrence," I can almost hear his friends and families say. "Get a job."

Hargrave, seen above with his friend, fellow inventor Alexander ("It'll never ring, Alex") Graham Bell, believed that a "patentee is nothing but a legal robber", preferring his inventions to be used for the betterment of mankind. Apart from the kites that helped the birth of aviation, he contributed to the early study of the curved aerofil and the rotary engine, which was to power many early aircraft up until about 1920.

Hargrave had papers published in the journal of the Royal Society of New South Wales (Australia), that were published abroad. In the USA, Octave Chanute, another pioneer of aeronautics and aviation, became aware of Hargrave's experiments and reported on them in the October, 1893 issue of the American Engineer and Railroad Journal, spreading the Australian inventor's discoveries even further afield.

He was in correspondence with the Wright Brothers before their December 17, 1903 flight at Kittyhawk, although they denied that his studies had influenced them. This is entirely possible, despite Hargrave's international influence, because all this stuff was "in the air" at the time.

Hargrave was nearly lost to science and aviation. On February 26, 1872 the brig Maria ran aground on a Queensland, Australia, reef, with the loss of 21 by drowning and 14 killed by natives. Among the passengers was 22-year-old Hargrave.

When I see the occasional aircraft flying over the blue South Pacific, I'm kinda glad Larry lived to become one of the greats in a long line of Australian beach bums.