Authors: Ben Ruhe
Date Submitted: August 31, 2005
Article Type: Journal

At age 83, Helen Bushell, of Melbourne, likes nothing better than to recall her 40 plus years of involvement with kiting, a sport she loves.

She took up kiteflying when she and husband and five children, plus friends, went to the beach. The men and boys sailed, the women and girls were relegated to the sand. Buying a little Delta that had just come on the market, Helen adopted kites as an amusement for herself and the kids. When she saw two seemingly identical kites perform very differently, she became fascinated by the aerodynamics involved.

This got her making her own kites and soon when an Australian kite association was formed she became a principal official, dealing with the public, organizing festivals, writing publications. Among them was a volume Make Mine Fly which was a kind of extended bulletin. She kept expanding and reissusing it. There are a total of seven editions, each larger than the last. Helen also wrote and circulated a newsletter. This led to extensive correspondence with top kite people globally, all of which she carefully archived in her usual orderly fashion.

From l974 on, she sold kites from her comfortable art-filled house with outbuilding for large kites in the Melbourne suburb of Kew. The property is complete with backyard swing she herself loves to use. “Boys who flew hang gliders came to my door in a steady stream,” she recalls. “I never advertised. People of all sorts just kept coming. I sold more than $5,000 worth of kites a year for 20 years, until l994 when the market changed. Stunt kites took over. No one wanted to fly single line kites anymore.”

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