The "monument" outside the Post Office at Narrabeen to George Augustine Taylor - the first
man to fly in Australia

TODAY, in front of the Post Office at Narrabeen, just down the road from Ocean Road - up which Lawrence and Frieda had walked on Sunday May 28, 1922 - is a monument, consisting of a bas-relief plaque and an inscription on a stone plinth.

It has been erected in memory of George Augustine Taylor, the first man in Australia to fly in a heavier-than-air aircraft.

On December 5, 1909, Taylor took to the air in a makeshift glider from the dunes at the end of Ocean Road, at North Narrabeen.

Later the same day his wife Florence became the first woman in Australia to fly in a heavier-than-air aircraft. Several others present also "flew".

Most did not get far, and Taylor himself had to be rescued from the ocean by local North Narrabeen Surf Club members.

This was an important event, even as important for Australia as the Wright Brothers' flight, in a powered aircraft, six years previously. (The first powered-flight in Australia came early the following year when the escape-artist Harry Houdini accomplished that feat.)

Like Orville Wright, Taylor was also a publisher. Yet his "official" profession was that of town-planner (his wife Florence was the first female architect in Australia).

Yet Taylor was a man of many parts and vocations.

He was a cartoonist (for Punch in the UK and The Bulletin in Australia) and a bohemian of some standing in Sydney in the late 1800s and early 1900s. He was a drinking mate of the Australian "bush" poe, and fellow-Bulletin contributor, Henry Lawson. Taylor's book, Those were the Days [Building Limited, Sydney, 1918], chronicled bohemian life in Sydney in the 1890s.