Like a Miles Franklin heroine, however, Jessie dreamed of a brilliant career. She came a little closer to realising that dream in 1917 when the family moved to Melbourne. There she met George Keith Miller, a journalist with a name similar to that of a certain legendary Australian test cricketer. (Confusingly, Jessie was widely known during her public career as Mrs Keith Miller.) At the age of eighteen, Jessie married the twenty-two-year-old Miller. After several failed pregnancies, and having experienced a growing sense of frustration within her marriage, Jessie left Australia and travelled to England for a six-month holiday. Although she would return to Australia, Jessie had effectively left behind her life there forever.

At a party in London,  Jessie met Bill Lancaster, an Anglo-Australian pilot who wanted to be the first to make the flight from England to Australia in a light aircraft. Despite the fact that she had never flown before, Jessie agreed to help Lancaster organise the trip, provided that he took her along as his passenger. The fact that a woman would be joining the record-breaking flight attempting to fly halfway around the world helped attract sponsorship and publicity to a project that hitherto had struggled, as it were, to get off the ground.

Jessie turned out to be a natural at PR, declaring to a reporter: ‘I am an Australian and have always wished to be the first woman to fly from London to Australia.’ The duo departed in October 1927 on their epic journey with some fanfare, though without being able to get any insurance for themselves or their equipment. Their two-seat single-engine Avro Avian biplane, dubbed the Red Rose, was made of wood and linen, featured separate open cockpits and rudimentary instruments that were not lit. While airborne, Jessie would take over the controls while Lancaster peered at maps, and that was how she began to learn to fly.

The journey was replete with incredible risk and misadventure. A constant series of engine problems was punctuated by mishaps, including a crash, a forced landing, and the discovery of a venomous snake that had found its way into Jessie’s cockpit. They encountered fog, sandstorms, and torrential rain; their maps and money were stolen. They were easily beaten to the record by Bert Hinkler flying solo in the same type of aeroplane, and there was no crowd to greet them when they landed in Darwin after a journey that took them more than three months to complete.

A 100,000-strong crowd at the Australian Air Derby at Mascot on the day of the Red Rose's arrival (photograph from book under review)

Although their arrival in Australia was anti-climactic, Jessie and Bill had gained international fame with their exploits. Like characters in a Howard Hawks movie, through their shared adventure they had also found each other. Indeed, the two of them were soon on their way to Hollywood to pursue the prospect of a feature film about their exploits. (The movie was never made, though decades later in the 1980s a television miniseries called The Lancaster Miller Affair was produced in Australia.) Now settled in America, Jessie, who had obtained her pilot’s licence, began competing in the female-only transcontinental air-racing circuit known officially as the Women’s Air Derby and referred to patronisingly by the popular comic Will Rogers as the Powder Puff Derby.

Jessie 'Chubbie' at the National Air Races, 1929 (photograph from book)The couple’s fortunes declined with the onset of the Great Depression, though there was to be an unwelcome second act in their lives as celebrities. It began when Jessie employed a ghost writer named Haden Clarke to help her produce an autobiography. The two embarked on an affair that ended when Clarke was found dead with a gunshot wound to the head. Lancaster was charged with murder but subsequently acquitted, despite the fact that two suicide notes supposedly left by Clarke were found to be forgeries.

Notwithstanding his acquittal at the end of a trial that caused a media sensation, both Lancaster and Jessie were told to leave the United States. Lancaster disappeared in 1932 while flying solo over the Sahara in an attempt to break the England to Cape Town flight speed record. Jessie subsequently married an air hire company owner in England and retired from flying altogether. She only reappeared in public when Lancaster’s remains were finally discovered in 1962. Like Burke and Wills, Lancaster had died of thirst isolated in the desert, keeping a diary until the end.