During the late 1950s and early 1960s several Australian companies made attempts to launch light aircraft production in Australia.

In 1957 Toowoomba Foundries set up a new division, Southern Cross Aviation Limited, with the intention of designing and constructing a new 4-place training and touring plane.

Hodgekiss had worked at the UK firm Handley Page for seven years, during which he had been a member of the design team for the Victor B.1 bomber.

In later test flights the undercarriage was retracted (using a manual system), and the prototype was felt to be very pleasant to fly.

In fact the undercarriage used on the SC1 outlasted it by many years, as the same trailing link rubber sprung units were installed on the Transavia PL-12 Airtruk agricultural aircraft.

The prototype's good performance was partly due to its small frontal area, a feature which would have been sacrificed on production aircraft, as the cockpit was found to be too narrow for practical purposes and would need to be widened to gain useful elbow room.

Powered by a 180 hp Lycoming O-360-AIA four cylinder engine, the SC1 cruised at 160 mph and had a range of 740 miles fully loaded.

Eventually it was shipped to the Museum of Australian Army Flying at Oakey, Queensland for restoration to its original state.