A Dutch couple on a world holiday made the donation at the weekend after being drawn to the city due to the famous aviation story.

“The Uiver story is very famous in the Netherlands, more than 100,000 people turned out to greet it when it returned,” aviation enthusiast Roel van Beurden said.

“And the landing at Albury was an incredible event so we had to come here and see the place for ourselves.”

The Uiver was hopelessly lost in a thunderstorm and ended up over Albury, where a postal clerk signalled “Albury” to the plane by turning the town lights on and off and a radio host appealed for cars to line up on the racecourse to light up a runway for the plane.

The plane landed, and next morning was pulled out of the mud by locals to fly on and win the handicap section of the the 1934 London to Melbourne Air Race.

The van Buerdens brought with them a life-size copy of the navigator’s logbook from the flight (the whereabouts of the original logbook is unknown), which includes a section on the moments that led to the dramatic landing where Albury townsfolk lit up a runway.

The navigator lurches from English to Dutch in his descriptions of the frantic final moments leading to the safe landing.

The text is intermingled with technical descriptions as well as emotive observations of the gathering storms and “big clouds” and the struggles with radio communication.

“He’s used English for all the technical stuff and then he’s gone back to Dutch for the emotive descriptions,” Mr van Beurden said.

An aviation and Uiver enthusiast, Albury councillor Neville Hull, was on hand to accept the impromptu donation.

“This is history, it all adds to the big picture of the Uiver story,” Cr Hull said.

“It’s a wonderful donation.”

The pieces are likely to be added to the Uiver Remembered exhibition at the Albury Library Museum.

Editorial — page 12