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Review:
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Lifetime in the Bush is Mark Shephard's biography of Australian legend Len Beadell. Mark became hooked on his subject after attending one his lectures in 1988 and then participating in a four wheel drive safari to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the completion of the Gunbarrel Highway. In fact everyone who ever met Len Beadell seems to have become hooked, evidenced by the number of fond reminiscences reproduced in the book.
This is a biography so it does not reproduce the contents of the books for which Len Beadell himself is so well known. The events in the construction of the outback roads that those books are based around are chronicled in note form in Chapter 5. What we get is the context, the brackets around those events, starting with his grand-parents, school, scouting sowing the seeds of the surveying bug, the war, and the story behind the bomb roads (which Beadell wrote less about), four wheel drive touring, his legacy, and the man, family and friends. The appendix will be invaluable to a historically minded traveller and contains the dates and positions of Beadell's sign-posts, the dates of construction of each road, road distances, and positions for the Woomera rocket range.
A Life in the Bush:
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A rough count reveals over 110 illustrations - photographs, drawings, painting and maps. Many are in colour. The drawings and paintings are welcome because Len Beadell was a gifted cartoonist cum caricaturist. The quality of reproduction is very high, even down to a separate dust-jacket (above right) for the paperback edition.
The bad news is that if you are a student of Len Beadell's roads or recent Australian outback history, you are going to have to buy it.
- Larry Stanley - 4wd.sofcom.com/4WD.html
Go to
Len Beadell's books,
other 4WD books
and
Australian
pages
