Less than a decade after the Wright brothers made history with the world's first powered flight, Jimmy Melrose arrived in the world, and was almost destined for the skies.
Aviation was in his family, with his uncle founding the company that would become known as Supermarine — the manufacturer of the celebrated Spitfire.
It was clear from a young age that Melrose, who was born in Adelaide's eastern suburbs in 1913, would choose to pursue no other path in life than that of a pilot.
"When he was four years old, he made cardboard wings for his cat and tried to make it fly," Gill Rogers, from the Glenelg Historical Society, said.
"His parents gave him a very expensive toy car and when they came home, he'd taken it apart and made it into a toy plane.
"His father was horrified, his mother delighted at his creativity."
Melrose's birthplace, in Burnside, was more than 15,000 kilometres from where Orville and Wilbur Wright created aviation history.
But Melrose, who grew up at beachside Glenelg on the other side of Adelaide, would soon be writing his own name into the history books, by getting behind the controls of his own aeroplane.
"When he was seven years of age, he wrote in his diary that he wanted to do something no-one had ever done before, so I think he was just always interested in planes," Ms Rogers said.
Growing up in a wealthy family of pastoralists, he was able to obtain his pilot license at 19, and then set his sights on exploring Australia and the world.
In 1934, Melrose purchased a de Havilland Puss Moth — one of the high-performance monoplanes of its era — which he flew around the continent in record time.
His flight circumnavigating the continent took five days, 10 hours and 57 minutes, shaving nearly two days off the previous record.
"He didn't just break records by half an hour or an hour — he broke them by 45 hours … he was a daredevil and he excelled at everything he did," Ms Rogers said.
Melrose 'achieved everything'
Not content with holding just one record, Melrose took off from Parafield Airport on the day he turned 21, destined for the UK.
It was there that he would join the Melbourne Centenary Air Race, a competition for pilots to fly from London to Melbourne to celebrate the Victorian capital's 100th birthday.
The South Australian was the youngest pilot to enter the race and the only solo pilot to finish, which he did in third place with a handicap, despite an emergency landing in Darwin.
It was on another flight from England to Australia that Melrose was involved in the search for one of the country's most famous aviators, Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith.
Kingsford-Smith was flying off the coast of Burma when, it is presumed, he crashed into the sea at night.
Melrose was taking part in a trans-continental race at the time and was in Singapore when Kingsford-Smith — whose remains were never found — disappeared.
"Jimmy Melrose heard that [Kingsford-Smith] was missing, so he cut off from the race and searched … the Bay of Bengal," Ms Rogers said.
Tragically, Melrose was months away from his own fatal aerial disaster.
On a trip from Melbourne to Darwin, his plane broke up mid-flight, and Melrose was killed at the age of 22.
His life was celebrated by more than 100,000 people on the streets of Adelaide and to this day suburbs and parks carry his name.
But Ms Rogers believes that, almost 90 years after his death, Melrose remains less renowned than he deserves — something organisers of the South Australian History Festival have been trying to change through exhibitions.
"It's partly why we're doing [the exhibitions], because if you live in Glenelg you should know about him — he's amazing," she said.
"He achieved everything over and above what young people could achieve."
