Association plans to bring airport history into spotlight

THE Air Force Association’s Ballarat branch members hope involvement with this year’s heritage festival will bring their dream of making the Ballarat Airport a tourist attraction in its own right a major step closer.

Entertainment of the Air will take place at the airport next weekend, 17 and 18 May, and has its own Facebook page with details of activities.

But according to branch sub-committee member Mark Pilkington, the branch has grander plans.

He said the decision last year to bring a Douglas DC3 to the event, with return flights from Essendon Airport and 30-minute joy flights around Ballarat, led to an expansion of ideas and attractions for the two days – and beyond.

“This site is an important site because it was part of the Empire Air Training Scheme,” Mr Pilkington said, adding that the local training school was among about 14 built to respond to the scheme’s requirements.

Schools were established to recruit and train aircrew from around the British Empire, primarily for Bomber Command and its air war against Nazi Germany.

“The one here was the No.1 Wireless Air Gunnery School and it specialised in training wireless radio operators, and they were also trained to be turret gunners,” Mr Pilkington said.

The site has two museums – the Ballarat Aviation Museum and a privately-owned Avro Anson museum in the former training base gymnasium – but also still has many of the original base huts and Bellman hangars.

“This place is on the Victorian Heritage Register but it’s also an operating airport, so there’s a lot of, call it administrative tension, between managing a heritage site and managing and operating an airport,” he said.

“There’s about 40 buildings from World War Two here, so it exceeds any other current air force base or historic Empire Air Training Scheme base in terms of its intactness.”

Mr Pilkington said remaining facilities include messes, administration huts, a parachute drying hut, the headquarters building, married officers’ quarters, the laundry, the gymnasium, the hangars, and the former parade ground that now has trees on it.

“It’s like a World War Two Sovereign Hill,” he said. “You can walk around Sovereign Hill and you’re visiting the past; you can walk around this place and visit the past, but the problem is…there’s nothing to tell you what’s here.

“We’re wanting to see signage and interpretive information; the great thing would be if you could walk up with your phone, press a QR code and it would start to tell you.”

Mr Pilkington said the branch by no means wants to interfere with the existing community and club occupants of the various huts, but would simply like the buildings’ stories told in a consolidated fashion.

It could make the airport an extra destination for visitors to Ballarat by creating and designating an official aviation museum precinct, he said.

“We want this to play its part in promoting that part of Ballarat’s history. It was a bustling World War Two training base,” Mr Pilkington said.

Mr Pilkington said the branch was planning to submit a detailed proposal to the City after the Entertainment of the Air event.