Australian Dictionary of Biography

Roger Woods

Australian Gliding, Mar-Apr 1998

Roger Alastair Woods (1934–1998), poultry farmer, gliding champion, and sports administrator, was born at Croydon, Surrey, England, on 19 June 1934, son of Draycot Birkett Woods, insurance official, and his wife Margaret Frere, née Macfarlane. Having boarded at St John’s School, Surrey, from a young age, at sixteen Roger joined the Esso Petroleum Company as a junior in the legal department. After one year, he left Esso to migrate to Australia as part of Sir Richard Linton’s Big Brother Movement.

Woods arrived in Sydney in April 1952 aboard the SS Asturias and was sent to the War Memorial Training Farm at Bossley Park in Sydney’s south-west. Established as a training property after World War II, the farm was the first stop for most of the boys before they transferred to work on rural properties.

From May 1952 Woods worked on sheep properties at Young and then Condobolin, before relocating to Badgerys Creek in Sydney’s west in August 1953 to work on a poultry farm owned by Rudolf (Ralph) Weiner, an Austrian refugee. In 1955, at the end of his placement, Woods became a partner with Weiner in the farm. They developed a strong business relationship and friendship. A change to egg industry regulation in 1971 enabled them to expand the business to comprise twelve to fourteen-thousand chickens. On 24 August 1963 at St Paul’s Anglican Church, Cobbitty, New South Wales, Woods married Heather Bottomley, a New South Wales-born probationary teacher. They divorced in 1971 and on 28 October 1978 he married New South Wales-born nurse Brenda Mary Bentley at Badgerys Creek.

Woods’s experience in the poultry industry was recognised in November 1984 when he was elected as a producers’ representative for a three-year term to the New South Wales Egg Corporation, established in 1983 to oversee the marketing, distribution, and quality of eggs and egg products. In 1986 the Federal government announced its intention to build a second Sydney airport at Badgerys Creek and over several years acquired land there, including the farm run by Woods and Weiner. Woods organised affected landowners to negotiate collectively with the government over the prices offered for their land. Weiner died in 1990, with Woods the sole beneficiary of his estate. He leased the land back from the Federal Airports Commission before retiring from the industry in 1995.

The egg and poultry trade was Woods’s business, but gliding was his passion. He had taken up the sport in 1959, joining the Southern Cross Gliding Club at Camden. Encouraging the growth of the club, he established a gliding journal in 1960 and served two terms as club president (1963–67 and 1974–77). For over thirty years he was an instructor at the club, including as chief flying instructor (1971–73).

He was president of the New South Wales Gliding Association twice (1971–80 and 1986–89) and held positions with the Gliding Federation of Australia (GFA), including council member (1966–89), president (1983–86), executive officer (1993–97), and Australia’s delegate to the International Gliding Commission (IGC; 1981–83, 1988, 1991–97).

Woods contested multiple State and national championships and acted as contest director at both levels. Though he was the New South Wales gliding champion in 1973, it was as an administrator that he made his most telling contribution. He worked hard to establish a sporting arm within the federation that added a competitive element alongside its traditional roles in providing training and promoting airworthiness, and introduced a ‘club class’ as a new competitive category for World Gliding Championships. This allowed, for the first time, a handicap class for older, smaller gliders which would not otherwise have been competitive in one-class racing. He prepared the GFA’s ultimately successful bid to the IGC to host the World Club Class Championships in Australia for the first time. They were held at Gawler, South Australia, in January 2001, two years after his death.

For his service as an administrator and advocate for gliding, Woods was appointed MBE in 1978, and in 1984 received the W. P. Iggulden medallion, the GFA’s highest honour for outstanding service in administration of the sport. In 1988 he was awarded the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (World Air Sports Federation) Paul Tissandier diploma for his devotion to promoting sporting aviation.

Woods died of pancreatic cancer at Cobbitty on 15 March 1998, without having assumed the IGC presidency to which he had been elected the previous year, and was cremated. He was survived by his wife and their children, Frere and Ellena. Two children from his first marriage, Belinda and Justin, had died in infancy. A natural storyteller and prankster, he is also remembered in the gliding fraternity as ‘the ultimate diplomat’ (Gliding Australia 2024, 9) and a bulldozer for getting things done, and is respected both in Australia and internationally for his contribution to the sport of gliding. Gliding Australia awards the Roger Woods Trophy to the best placed Australian pilot at world championships.