Bart Bear's Blog

In a park at Bundaberg in Queensland there is a very special house. It is just about as important as Captain Cook's house in Melbourne. It is the house that Bert Hinkler built in 1925 at Southampton in England. Bert was one of the best pilots in the world at the time. He set records flying solo between England and Australia, and was first to fly solo across the South Atlantic. He was killed in a crash in Italy in 1933. In 1983 the citizens of Bundaberg decided that the right place for his house was back in the town he was born in. They dismantled the house, shipped it out to Australia and now you can see it when you visit Bundaberg and the Hinkler Museum. You can go all through the house and I decided to see if I could climb through the open second-storey window and slide down the glass roof of the conservatory. As usually happens, one of the Oldies stopped me. Dad grabbed me while I was getting across the window sill. Would you believe it? He dropped me, so I got to do the death-defying drop after all and Unka Ray caught me before I slammed into the concrete. It was great fun. Oh yes, and the house is pretty good too.