Jean Batten arrives at the Māngere aerodrome in 1936. Photo / NZ Herald archive
OPINION:
"I can say without a doubt this is the very greatest moment of my life."
Those were Jean Batten's words to a crowd of 6000 who gathered Auckland's Māngere Aerodrome on this day in 1936 to see her complete her epic, world-first direct flight from England to New Zealand.
The 27-year-old had flown alone in her tiny Percival Gull monoplane for 10.5 hours from Sydney, the perilous last leg of her journey through rainstorms and with a leaking fuel tank.
Some had tried to persuade her not to leave Australia but she was determined. Among her final words before she took off were an instruction not to search for her if she did not make it.
"If I go down in the sea no one must fly out to look for me. I have chosen to make this flight and I am confident I can make it. But I have no wish to imperil the lives of others or cause trouble or expense."
In total, her record-setting journey from England took just over 11 days.
The aviatrix would set two more records the following year: The solo record from Australia to England, and the first person to hold that record in both directions simultaneously - she had set the other on the way to New Zealand.
I have a vivid memory of learning about Batten's heroic journeys for the first time during a trip to Auckland Airport when I was a girl in the 1990s.
Her Gull was - and I hope still is - suspended from the ceiling in the airport, and I remember the sense of wonder and empowerment I felt when I looked at it, and the boards bearing her photograph and story.
I had never been prouder to have Jean as my middle name, or to be growing up in Rotorua, as she did.
I still feel a little flutter of that feeling when I turn off Jean Batten Drive for Tauranga Airport - right before the flying nerves set in and remind me I have little appetite for risking life and limb.
It was only in researching this piece that I learned about Batten's life on land, including that she died what is often chronicled as a "needless" death in 1982, aged 73.
She was bitten by a dog but refused treatment when it got infected, dying from a pulmonary abscess in her serviced apartment on the Spanish Island of Majorca.
After her body lay unclaimed in a mortuary for two months, Jean Gardner Batten - Daughter of the Sky, Hine-o-te-Rangi, the title Te Arawa gave her after one of her record-breaking feats - was buried in a mass grave for paupers.
The manner of her burial is such that to retrieve her remains, others would have to be disturbed, so there she stays.
For such a great woman, I would call that a bad death, a tragic end.
Some people might argue that all deaths are bad deaths, but as kicking the bucket is an unavoidable eventuality in life, I think it's OK to believe that there are good and bad ways to go.
What constitutes good and bad in that context is a matter of personal choice.
To me, a good death might look something like the bittersweet passing of Kevin and Maureen Gallagher in Tauranga this week.
After 66 loving years together, in which they raised eight children, they died within 20 minutes of each other surrounded by loved ones in the home they built together for their retirement.
Their sweet story is a strange sort of tonic in a year filled with so much bad death.
In December, the Whakaari eruption took 21 lives.
Soon after, the first known deaths from Covid-19 occurred, a toll that has now surpassed one million people including 25 in New Zealand.
There have been a host of other tragedies and mass deaths around the world in these past 12 months that I won't list.
I don't know, or care, if the cumulative total is more or less than other years, but the mental weight of it all seems greater.
Perhaps other people also feel a sense of that, to varying extents.
I experience it as a bit of an existential funk, but I still feel positive about the future. Good things are yet to come.
More than ever, we need stories of greatness and achievement to inspire and bring us together.
We need people with determination who are willing to stick their heads above the parapet, shake off the risk-averse nay-sayers and try something extraordinary.
The word "innovate" has become so overused it has almost lost all meaning, but those who do it have the ability to see the world not as it is but as it could be better - and the path to get there.
But we can't always expect perfection of character from our pioneers and heroes.
In New Zealand, we have trouble with this. In our society, which values self-depreciation and modesty, we're known we cutting our "tall poppies" down.
I think Jean Batten is a good example.
By many accounts, she was an ambitious, difficult and rather lonely person in spite of her lauded achievements.
She had a complex relationship to both her family - especially her mother, described as domineering - and to fame, which she seemed to revel in and hide away from at different times in her life, much of which was spent in self-imposed secretive seclusion with her mother.
Batten was human and flawed, and parts of her life were tragic.
But this does not lessen the bravery, fearlessness and single-minded determination of this extraordinary woman.
She epitomised a never-give-up attitude and did not let her failures stop her from completing her ultimate goals.
That's a spirit still worth aspiring to.
Hint: They are more likely to degrade waterways than mutate into a crime-fighting team.