Around the World in Eighty Delays.

This is not, strictly speaking, a book about four wheel driving nor one about Australia. It is the story of the round the world trip that Len Beadell, builder of the "bomb roads" in central Australia, made in 1959 primarily to visit the British scientists and military personnel upon whom he had left an indelible impression during their stays in the outback! Len Beadell is often called the last of the great Australian explorers, building a network of bush "roads" for the UK atomic bomb tests and for the Woomera rocket range. This he did, spending months at a time in the outback with a small crew, a bull-dozer, a grader and his trusty Land-Rover. Their original purpose over, roads such as the Gunbarrel Highway have now become standard four wheel drive adventures.

Len Beadell was also a great story teller with a laconic sense of humour in the best Australian tradition and brought his outback adventures to a wide audience in a series of much loved books. He already had the gift of the Blarney long before he kissed the stone (chapter 9).

So, Around the World in Eighty Delays is an amused and amusing look at the world by a lad from the bush who was nowhere near as naive as he painted himself. Written in 1968 it suggests Crocodile Dundee long before that character was a gleam in Paul Hogan's eye. In the introduction Anne Beadell, who married Len in 1960, writes that the book was not published in his life-time as it was seen to be too different from his bush books. However, Corkwood Press have now published it, complete with the photographs that he took and the drawings that he made during the trip, for Len's sketches are well known.

Back then, international air travel was not so common as it is now. We get an idea of what this trip will be like early on at the first stop in Hawaii where dressed in desert boots, khaki shorts, shirt, hat and belt with knife and watch pouch, he leaves his Gladstone bag in a left-luggage locker at the airport taking his [only] spare shirt to the hotel where he manages to fill his room with feathers and to reduce the staff to tears (of mirth). Oblique views of tourist spots continue through the US to England where he drops in on his old mates such as Sir William Penney, director of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, Aldermaston. Favourite portraits are of the decaying hotel in Florence where nothing works (a sort of Italian Fawlty Towers) and of its apologetic manager.

A must for fans of Len Beadell, Around the World in Eighty Delays is available from Corkwood Press [email] in hard-back at $24.95 or from bookstores in paperback at $19.95.

- Larry Stanley
- 4wd.sofcom.com/4WD.html

Len Beadell (1923-1995), Around the World in Eighty Delays, 208 pages, 1st published by Corkwood Press 1997, isbn 1 876 247 010 (hb), 1 876 247 029 (pb).

See the book list, Gunbarrel Highway and Land Rover pages