There are two distinct parts to this episode: first, more revelations about an early aviation legend. Then, we visit Ada (Sis) Mcrae, born 1889, who recalls the hardships and joys of life in a small Outback town.

SIR NORMAN BREALEY really made the dust fly with his biplane-era airline in Western Australia, but the maverick way he ran his business also raised the ire of our early aviation authorities.

In this final instalment on Sir Norman, we hear of more of his brazen business antics.

SIS McRAE in Hawker, South Australia, was the big-bodied, big-hearted grandmother of Australian Country Music legends Peter Coad and the Coad Sisters.

In this 1967 interview with Sis, she shared with me some of her swag-full of yarns about small-town life over a century ago. And through the Coads’ song, ’Sing Me That Old Song, Granny’, we hear the ancient violin Sis would play all night at country dances in the Flinders Ranges.

They wouldn’t let Brearley look at the bodies. A women said it was the first time she’d ever seen a man cry.

'I made all the rules, and I followed every one of them'.

World War One dogfighter Major Norman Brearley was the first off the ground with an airline in Australia, dramatically changing the lives of people in Outback Western Australia.

Major Brearley had been ruthless and cunning in the skies over the Western Front, and was the same in business. In this second episode on his establishment on Western Australian Airways, two researchers from the Old Flyers’ Group in Perth entertain and inform us by uncovering what one of them describes as the ’naughty bits’ of the story of this great pioneer.

Within a few short years after the First World War, over the heads of horses donkeys camels and bullock teams, a new sound could be heard in Australia’s interior: the droning and spluttering of aircraft.

First it was the 'barnstormers' offering thrills and first flights to small country communities. Then came airmail services, then passenger routes were opened.

It was Sir Norman Brearley, with his Western Australian Airways who first made it to airline status, with a route from Geraldton to the far north-west of Australia's largest State.

As he told John Francis during an interview in 1971, Sir Norman, born 1890, was 13 when the Wright Brothers first took to the air. In the early days of World War One after less than two hours instruction, when his flight instructor refused to go up with him again, Norman said he 'taught myself to fly'.

By June 1916 he was in action on the Western Front, during which time on what was considered a 'suicidal mission' he shot down an observation balloon, and later with another pilot attacked seven enemy aircraft, before being shot down in No Man's Land with a bullet through both lungs.

Sir Norman's many aerial adventures and later prominent role in military pilot training, saw him awarded a Military Cross, a Distinguished Service Order, and the Air Force Cross.

As you will hear in this first of a two-part series – and even more so in the second part to follow – Sir Norman Brearley was a fighter, both in the air and later in establishing his airline.