On 21 March 1931, the airliner Southern Cloud vanished while en route from Sydney to Melbourne, and the nation held its breath as an exhaustive search was conducted throughout south-eastern Australia. No trace was found of the missing aircraft or its eight occupants, and the mystry of Australia's first major airline disaster became folklore.

The enigma was finally resolved 27 years later, when a Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme worker stumbled across the skeletal remains of the aircraft in the rugged Toolong Range in southern New South Wales.