The success of Sir Ross Smith's Flight can be attributed to Hurley's entrepreneurial brilliance in linking the powerful new technologies of flight, cinema and aerial photography with popular patriotic sentiments about nation and empire. In his synchronized lecture entertainment, Sydney audiences had seen with their own eyes how new technologies vanquished distance and difference, connecting them instantly to the wider spaces of colonial modernity. In the 1920s, Hurley would turn these new technologies northward upon Australia's own colonial territory in Papua in what would be his single greatest stunt, resulting in his most successful and most original synchronized lecture entertainment, Pearls and Savages.

Hurley's plans for the new travelogue began as a collaboration between his own company and the Lowell Thomas Travelogues, and the two adventurers arranged to meet on location in Papua. Thomas was in Australia at the time of Sir Ross Smith's Flight with his own show, With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia. Exactly when or how they met is not known, but it seems that they discussed a scheme in which Hurley would produce a new Pacific travelogue and tour it in Australia, while Thomas would handle the international distribution. Some such collaborative venture is foreshadowed on the handbill for the London screening of Sir Ross Smith's Flight, which implies that Hurley was working for Thomas' company: