This story was written by Beryl Dowsett
LEN BEADELL – 1923-1995
Len Beadell, who has been called the last of the true Australian Explorers, was born on a farm at West Pennant Hills, NSW in 1923. From the age of twelve, under the guidance of his surveyor scout master, he showed an interest in surveying
He began his career on a military mapping project in northern NSW in the early stages of World War II. A year later he enlisted in the Army Survey Corps serving in New Guinea until 1945. While still in the army after the war, he accompanied the first combined scientific expedition into the Alligator River country of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, for the CSIRO, fixing the location of discoveries by astronomical observations. Later, after waiving his army discharge for a further term, he agreed to carry out the initial surveys needed to establish the Woomera Rocket Range (South Australia).
It was this decision that was to lead to a lifetime of camping, surveying, exploring and road making in the vast, empty areas of Central Australia, opening up for the first time more than 2 -3 million square kilometres of the Great Sandy, Gibson and Great Victoria Deserts. He chose the sites for the first atomic bomb trials at Emu and for the later tests at Maralinga. As a surveyor and road builder, he worked all over the Australian Outback from Arnhem Land to the Gibson Desert, and his three children all have features of Outback Australia named after them.
He is the author of six best selling books and writes magnificently of the near desert country, cruel and inhospitable, gibber covered soil which turns to dust when disturbed. He made contact with Aborigines living in a primordial manner, including one tribe unknown until he met them. For him it was just amazing adventure, tough and at times distressing, but always recorded with meticulous care.
In 1958 he was awarded The British Empire Medal for his work in building the Gunbarrel Highway which stretches 1600 kilometres and is still our only highway across Central Australia.
In 1987 he was made a fellow of The Institute of Engineering and Mining Surveyors (Aust) and the following year was awarded the medal of The Order of Australia. The astronomers at Mount Palomar Observatory in California honoured him by naming a newly discovered asteroid planet after him in honour of the road network he created which made access possible to the meteorite impact craters they were studying. His pioneering was done with theodolites and cameras carried in motor vehicles and road machinery, but it was pioneering in as real a sense as that of our ancestors. He said he was constantly grateful for the incredible good fortune which steered him to that moment in Melbourne when he was asked to go over and start ‘Some Sort of Rocket Range or Something’.
Written by: Beryl Dowsett
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