The First TAA Livery
On the morning of 9 September 1946, a silver Douglas DC-3 lifted off from Laverton, bound for Sydney with 21 passengers aboard. She was VH-AES — Hawdon — and she carried Trans-Australia Airlines into existence.
There was nothing flamboyant about that first livery. TAA was a new government airline still finding its feet, and the Douglas DC-3's polished aluminium skin was left largely bare, dressed only with a simple fuselage cheatline, the aircraft's registration, and a small tail flag marking her as TAA's own. It was a livery built for function, not fanfare — but it's the one every TAA livery since has traced its lineage back to.
Hawdon went on to a long working life with the airline, including service in Papua New Guinea, before being repainted back into this very scheme in 1971 to mark TAA's 25th anniversary. It's fitting that the aircraft which opened TAA's story also came home, one more time, wearing the look she started in.
A More Refined Identity
By the late 1940s, TAA had outgrown the wartime simplicity of its first DC-3 scheme. The airline's engineering manager, John Watkins, had spent 1946 scouring the American market for the next step forward, and settled on the Consolidated Vultee Convair 240 — a modern, pressurised airliner that would let TAA leapfrog the competition on comfort and speed.
The livery grew up to match the aircraft. Gone was the bare-metal austerity of 1946; in its place came flowing script lettering, a red, white, and blue cheatline sweeping the length of the fuselage, and colour carried through onto the tail. It was TAA's first real statement of visual identity — confident, modern, and unmistakably its own.
When the Convair entered service in September 1948, it made TAA the first airline outside Europe to bring a pressurised airliner into domestic operation, and this bolder new livery announced that ambition to every tarmac it touched.
A DISTINCTIVE CORPORATE IDENTITY
This is VH-TLA on her pre-delivery test flight — one of the Lockheed L-188 Electras TAA brought into service in 1959, and the aircraft that pushed the airline firmly into the turboprop age. Faster and smoother than anything in the fleet before it, the Electra let TAA cut hours off its trunk routes and gave passengers a genuinely modern flying experience.
The livery had to keep pace with the aircraft. The scheme carried through TAA's now-familiar speed lines and defined lettering, but on the Electra's sleek, low-slung fuselage the whole identity read as noticeably more contemporary — a design built for an airline moving into the jet era, even before the jets themselves arrived.
It's fitting that a test flight photo is the one that survives so well — VH-TLA still fresh off the production line, wearing the colours that would carry TAA through one of its most important fleet transitions.
A BOLD STEP IN AVIATION SAFETY
TAA was the first airline in Australia to introduce a variation to the standard livery of its aircraft, when it painted the tails of aircraft in the late 1950s with a bright orange 'Dayglow'.
The Dayglow colour was used because it was thought to make a plane easily visible against the Australian background. The Dayglow orange was much easier to spot than polished aluminium, which tends to mirror the colour of its surroundings, thus making it less obvious.
One point about the use of Dayglow that is not widely known is that in the late 1950s, the United States FAA proposed that all civilian aircraft were to have 25% of their surface painted Dayglow orange. TAA were therefore ahead of the possible requirement, which did not eventuate here or in the US.
Introduced as a safety factor, the Dayglow livery only lasted 3 years before the airline reverted to the standard company livery, as the Dayglow paintwork was subject to fading, weathering and peeling.
A MODERN IDENTITY TAKES FLIGHT
VH-TJC sits on the tarmac at Essendon, and she marks one of the biggest leaps TAA ever took. The Boeing 727-100 — nicknamed the "T-Jet" by TAA — arrived in 1964 and put the airline into the jet age alongside the rest of the world's major carriers, cutting flight times dramatically and giving passengers a smoothness the old piston and turboprop fleet simply couldn't match.
The livery changed to suit the moment. Out went the busy speed-line schemes of the 1950s; in came a cleaner, more confident design — white over the fuselage top, a single blue stripe running its length, and the airline's initials rendered boldly in red. But the real signature was on the tail: a giant blue "T", unmissable from the terminal, that gave the T-Jet its nickname and gave TAA a piece of branding as distinctive as anything flying in Australian skies.
It was a look built for the era it announced — TAA no longer catching up to the future, but flying squarely into it.
A BOLD NEW LOOK FOR A NEW DECADE
By the time the 1970s rolled around, the blue tail "T" had already earned its place as TAA's signature — but the rest of the livery was due for a refresh. The scheme was inverted and reworked: the tail's "T" flipped to white on solid blue, the fuselage stripe stayed, and the airline's lettering shifted from red to a warmer golden brown, giving the whole aircraft a softer, more contemporary feel in keeping with the design language of the decade.
It was a subtle change rather than a wholesale reinvention — TAA had learned, by now, that the T-tail was too recognisable an asset to throw away. Instead, the 1970s look sharpened what already worked, carrying the T-Jet fleet into a new decade without losing the identity passengers had come to know at a glance.
AUSTRALIA PAINTED ACROSS THE SKIES
In 1979 TAA decided that it would depict and promote the most popular destinations in Australia by using images painted on the aircraft.
Obviously the Red Centre of Australia and Uluru (Ayers Rock) were world-recognisable places, and so was the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland.
Tasmania and its convict colonial history, and the Queensland Gold Coast and Surfers Paradise were other nominations. So when the next major overhaul was programmed, four aircraft were destined to become a part of aviation history. In fact only 2 aircraft ever got painted in this manner — the Coral Islander, and the Central Australian.
The proposed Gold Coast tail design is shown above, and below is how the whole 727 was to look in its new Gold Coast livery.
THE RED CENTRE TAKES FLIGHT
The second aircraft was the Boeing 727-276 "Central Australian", which operated across Australia promoting the Red Centre.
An economic downturn in the early 1980s would see the destination livery program being abandoned. The original two destination-painted aircraft would continue to retain these special liveries until they required a major overhaul.
A FRESH CORPORATE IDENTITY TAKES SHAPE
The new 1980s livery replaced the destination-themed aircraft with a fresh corporate identity for TAA.
The aircraft which were scheduled for the promotional livery would now be painted in the standard new livery.
TAA changed the livery of VH-TAA when it leased this aircraft to Air Niugini in 1984, painting the Bird of Paradise image on the sides of the aircraft. Airbus A300 VH-TAA 'James Cook' with a new coat of paint, leased to Air Niugini.
A NEW NAME FOR A NEW ERA
The last livery change occurred when TAA became Australian Airlines in August 1986, and the airline that had served the nation as "TAA the Friendly Way" converted to a new corporate image.
There was another noticeable change with the introduction of a new advertising campaign, a new slogan, and an image of an airline heading towards the year 2000.
The scene was now set for the Government to implement the next phase of its plan — amalgamating the two government-owned airlines (Qantas and Australian), and offering these as a going concern to the world market. During these changing times, as Australian was merged into Qantas, a temporary logo was introduced to maintain the link between Australian Airlines (previously TAA).
Another quirk of the merger was the introduction of the slogan "The Australian Airline", which began to appear on Qantas aircraft. To some old-timers this was seen as the return of TAA on the aircraft — taking the first letter of the slogan.
