Description
Author: Len Beadell, Hardbound, 163 Pages, ISBN: 9780709121398, First Edition, 1971 -**Very rare book in excellent unread condition !**
BUSH BASHERS continues the story of Len Beadell and his "Gunbarrel Road Construction Party" who made a network of 4,000 miles of the loneliest roads in the world. They were built to open up three quarters of a million square miles of almost unknown wilderness to an Australia-wide survey.
In this book, he tells the story of the second 1,000-mile road across Australia; which was driven through the Victoria Desert, and of the survey and construction of the only road which runs diagonally across north-western South Australia. The work went on for years, through almost impenetrable mulga scrub and over sand ridges which had stopped everything but camels until the bulldozers came.
The construction team worked in all weathers from below freezing point to above century heat, and for much of the time relied for their lives upon Len Beadell's skill in carrying out astronomical observations—the only means of finding their way through the desert.
For five months, the youngest member of the party was the author's five-month-old daughter, during the period in which she and his wife camped with him in the desert. She was the only white baby who ever lived in this inhospitable territory, and her stay there is commemorated by the "Connie Sue Highway"; a 400-mile stretch of road from the Warburton Ranges to Rawlinna on the Nullarbor, built by the "Bush Bashers" during that period.
Despite all the hardships and difficulties, there was still a lighter side to the projects. In the same style which made his first two books so successful, Len Beadell covers all the human and humorous aspects of a memorable endeavour.
LEN BEADELL, who has been called "The last of the true Australian explorers," was born in 1923 on a farm at West Pennant Hills, New South Wales.
His interest in surveying began early. He took it up as a hobby at the age of twelve, and on leaving school began work as a surveyor's assistant on the military mapping programme of Northern New South Wales. A year later he joined the Army Survey Corps, and served in New Guinea until 1945.
While still in the Army he accompanied the first combined expedition with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization into the Alligator River country of Arnhem Land, to make the astronomical observations for the mapping involved. His next Army appointment was the initial surveys for the rocket range later named.Woomera.
Two years later he returned to civil life, but continued to work for the Woomera project with the Weapons Research Establishment. His work during the next twenty years of camping, exploring, surveying, and roadmaking in the almost unknown deserts of Central and Western Australia is the subject of this book and its two predecessors,
Too Long in the Bush and Blast the Bush. also published by Rigbys. Mr Beadell, who is married with three children, was awarded the British Empire Medal in 1958 for his work in backing the Gunbarrel Highway; the first road of abliost 1,000 miles east to west ever to be made across Central Australia.
He now lives in Salisbury. South Australia, and works at the headquarters of the Weapons Research Establishment which is situated there.
