Too Long In The Bush
This is the story of how, from 1956 to 1958, Len Beadell and his team made the first road to cross Central Australia from east to west, 1500 kilometres from the Alice Springs road to Carnegie homestead 650 kilometres north of Kalgoorlie. On the way he surveyed and built the Giles Meteorological Station and aerodrome before moving on to skirt the edge of the infamous Gibson Desert.
Len's happy nature keeps the tale bubbling along with humorous touches that make this remarkable journey one that every armchair traveller will enjoy.
Price (including GST):
Soft-cover
AU$16.95 plus postage and packaging
Blast the Bush
With the road building exploits described In Too Long In The Bush behind him. Len Beadell was the perfect choice for the task of selecting and preparing the location for the weapons testing trials.
With his characteristic humour and embellished with his own cartoons, Len tells the story of the people who worked on the project - in some cases it was as much a trial of them as it was of any weapon - and he recounts the sequence of events that led up to the gigantic explosion that was to BLAST THE BUSH.
Price (including GST):
Soft-cover
AU$16.95 plus postage and packaging
Bush Bashers
In this book, Len Beadell tells the story of his second road across Australia which was driven 1800 kilometres from east to west, from South Australia to West Australia through the heart of the Great Victoria Desert.
Construction took years, as the road was driven through the almost impenetrable mulga scrub and over sand ridges which until Len's bulldozer came along had stopped everything but camels. For five months the author's wife and infant daughter camped with him in the desert.
The stay of this youngest member of the team is commemorated by the Connie Sue Highway, a 650 kilometre stretch of road which extends from the Warburton Ranges to Rawlinna on the Nullarbor.
Price (including GST):
Soft-cover
AU$16.95 plus postage and packaging
Still In The Bush
Laden with trig poles, theodolites - and porridge - Len Beadell and his team built roads, laid out town sites and undertook an enormous survey programme in order to prepare a test launching area in one of the most isolated parts of the world. The problems ranged from taking astro-fixes in a cloudy sky and becoming surrounded by a sea of red mud, to patching a bald spot on a pet joey.
All were solved by using those two most necessary ingredients of life in the bush - ingenuity and imagination. Len's descriptions of the countryside, the adventures the team experienced, and the Australian bush characters they encountered are by turns illuminating and hilarious.
His high-spirited account of the work that had to be done "before they called it Woomera" makes vivid and entertaining reading.
Price (including GST):
Soft-cover
AU$16.95 plus postage and packaging
Beating About The Bush
When a grader directed by Len Beadell broke down in the middle of the desert, that meant a journey of 800 kilometres at three kilometres an hour - the longest towing operation ever in the history of Central Australia. The party hitched up their "train" and set off back along the road they had just built.
But while they were all set for a long and arduous journey, the last thing they expected was for their ration truck to melt. This had its disadvantages; but as Frank Quinn remarked, it was the best entertainment they'd had for a year.
It was just the start of a series of incidents which were to mark this journey out as one of the most eventful episodes in the team's experience.
Price (including GST):
Soft-cover
AU$16.95 plus postage and packaging
End Of An Era
The Gary Highway was to head north for 350 kilometres from the Gunbarrel Highway to Gary Junction. Then a second highway of 650 kilometres was planned to join up with the West Australian road system near Marble Bar. A third would connect the road system near Ethel Creek to a point halfway along the Gary Highway, another 470 kilometres. And all this in one year's work!
Len Beadell's team had to contend with flat tyres and broken gearboxes as well as all the natural difficulties of the outback country of seemingly never-ending sandhills and limitless spinifex plains, in searing heat, bitter cold and violent wind storms.
But regardless of these conditions, the team maintained a much needed sense of humour and an awareness of taking part in an exciting venture.
Price (including GST):
Soft-cover
AU$16.95 plus postage and packaging
Outback Highways
Len Beadell's experiences as he explored and surveyed Australia's vast Outback were the source of hundreds of fascinating stories which have all contributed to the colourful fabric which goes to make up the Australian character.
Len Beadell will be remembered by history, amongst other things, for his fine sense of story-telling, his acute sense of timing, and his prodigious memory.
Drawn from Len's best-selling books, these stories sparkle with his trademark humour and paint a fascinating picture of the hard work, the bush characters and the rollicking adventure that were all part of Len's rich experience.
Price (including GST):
Soft-cover
AU$24.95 plus postage and packaging
A Lifetime In The Bush
A biography of Len Beadell by Mark Shephard with a foreword by Dick Smith, this quality publication has over 250 pages, many of which feature colour photographs taken by Len and not previously published.
Meticulously researched this biography was commenced before Len's death in 1995 and first published in 1998.
A great gift for any Lennie Fan.
Published by Corkwood Press.
262 pages.Price (including GST):
AU$32.95 plus postage and packaging
Around The World In 80 Delays
A Traveller's TaleLen Beadell's hilarious recollections of his world tour in 1959 after 20 years in the bush. Penned in 1967 and published after his death, it contains his original drawings and full colour plates.
This is Vintage Lennie.
Published by Corkwood Press.
208 pages.Price (including GST):
Hard-cover
AUS $25.00 plus postage and packaging
