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  • Australian Flying

    Aviation’s Gold Medallists

    Dec 16, 2019 8 minutes
    STEVE HITCHEN

    Dick Smith’s Wikipedia entry contains a long list of awards and honours that mark his greatest achievements. It mentions his Companion of the Order of Australia, Australian of the Year, Centenary Medal, Lowell Thomas Award, Father of the Year, induction into the Australian Aviation Hall of Fame and even Dick’s little-known Academy Award nomination.

    But Wikipedia has completely missed his Oswald Watt Gold Medal.

    You can’t really blame a do-it-yourself encyclopaedia for missing things occasionally, but the Oswald Watt Gold Medal just happens to be the highest honour awarded in the field of Australian aviation. That such an honour should go unrecognised should raise the ire of everyone in the industry, but the Oswald Watt has become a somewhat forgotten award that deserves to be remembered, even within the greater aviation community.

    The list of recipients reads like an aviation Team of the Century: Hinkler, Kingsford Smith, Percival, Taylor, Bennett, Millicer, Connellan, Fysh, Brearley, Wackett … only the greatest would do. Add to that a long litany of names that have served in silence and known only unto the industry and you have a virtual history of aviation in Australia.

    “From 1927 to 1934, no-one but these two won an Oswald Watt.”

    It has been awarded many times since the first year it applied to, 1921, and several winners have multiple Oswalds in their cabinets, but over the last few decades so few

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