How it started
History
Q.A.N.T.A.S.
Qantas was founded in Winton, Queensland on 16 November 1920 by Hudson Fysh, Paul McGinness and Fergus McMaster as Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Limited (Q.A.N.T.A.S.), beginning its operations with the Avro 504K, the airline's first aircraft. Q.A.N.T.A.S. eventually moved its headquarters to Longreach, Queensland in 1921, then to Brisbane, Queensland in 1930.
QEA era
In 1934, QANTAS and Britain's Imperial Airways, a forerunner of British Airways, formed a new company, Qantas Empire Airways Limited (QEA). In December 1934, the new airline began operations, flying between Brisbane and Darwin. QEA flew internationally from May 1935, when the service from Darwin was extended to Singapore. Imperial Airways operated the rest of the service through to London. When World War II began, enemy action and accidents destroyed half of the fleet of ten. Most of the fleet was taken over by the Australian government for war service.
In 1943, flying boat services resumed, with flights between the Swan River at Crawley in Perth, Western Australia and Koggala Lake in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. This linked up with the British Overseas Airways Corporation, BOAC, the successor airline to Imperial Airways, service to London. Qantas' kangaroo logo was first used on the "Kangaroo Route", commencing in 1944, from Sydney to Karachi, where BOAC crews took over for the rest of the journey to the UK.
From Wikipedia’s article on Qantas Airways, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2