100th anniversary of Jean Batten's birth marked

  • Breaking
  • 15/09/2009

By Tristram Clayton

One hundred years ago today one of New Zealand's most famous adventurers was born in Rotorua.

This was a woman who at the peak of her fame in 1936, was known around the world by her first name alone. But Jean Batten's name is not so well-known these days.

A trip to Auckland's Museum of Transport and Technology is all about looking and learning, but for the students of Jean Batten Primary School in South Auckland, this was one lesson where they already knew all the answers.

"She was the first lady to make a solo flight from England to New Zealand," says Krystal Malafu.

"She was brave enough to fly all by herself with just a map and a compass and a watch and nothing else, just food just to survive all those days," says Caitlin Ta'Eleifi.

And she's not the only one to have been dazzled by the accomplishments of the great aviator.

"Jean was a megastar," says Batten researcher Caroline MacKersey. "I mean you just had to put the name 'Jean' across the top of a banner in the newspaper and the whole of the English-speaking world and a lot of the other countries in the Western world knew exactly who you were talking about."

Batten became an international celebrity when she smashed the women's record for a solo flight from England to Australia in 1934.

Two years later at the age of 27 she broke the solo record, for either sex, for a flight from England to New Zealand.

But her heroine status wasn't to last, and shortly after 1937 she disappeared into obscurity.

There's nowhere better to illustrate that rapid fall from grace than Jean Batten Pl in downtown Auckland. It is only a block to the bright lights of Queen St, but this street is possibly the loneliest place in town.

For many than 30 years Batten moved from country to country, never returning to New Zealand. When at last she did in 1969, it was too late for her fame to be rekindled.

"She was beautiful, she was brave but she was also ruthless and she was quite self-centred," says MacKersey. "She did what it took to get the funding and the support that she needed to fly."

Batten, one of the world's greatest aviators, died from an infection after being bitten by a dog on the Spanish island of Mallorca, in 1982.

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