Miss Batten Enthusiastically Welcomed: Finance and Defence Problems Frost Ovn Owx Sydney, June 11.
The story of Miss Batten, the young New Zealand airwoman's great fight, is now history. The first Dominion girl to cly from England so Australia In record time has added another chapter to youth's brilliant conquests. Miss Batten has added lustre, not only to womanhood, but also to the finest traditions of the British race, by tempering daring with skill and resource.
When she arrived at Mascot, N.S.W., Australia's premier aerodrome, it was mere slip of a girl, somewhat frail Joking, with laughing brown eyes, who was rushed by a crowd of en: thusiastic admirers. "As she climbed out of her small single-engined Moth plane, and discarded her goggles and white head piece, one was struck with her diminutive physique, with a suggestion of fragility that might ordinar-fly be associated with a nervous, highly strung temperament which makes all the more remarkable a flight that called for infinite courage and resource, especially after the nerve-racking mishaps associated with the two unsuccessful flights that preceded it The success of her flight, however, was more easily understood when one disregarded the smallness of her phy-pique and of her plane and was given roof of her resourcefulness and composure. With a second's warning, and After the trying ordeal of a tumultuous welcome, Miss Batten was called on to stand' before a microphone, in a crowded room at the Aero Club, an answer a fusliade of questions by radio-telephone from London. For most persons, even seasoned speakers, {t would have been an embarrassing moment. She spoke to London with extraordinary calmness, and with regard for the niceties of English diction that might easily have suggested that she was reading from well-prepared notes.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.