Grit: An Epic Journey Aross the World

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Secondhand adventures

Grit – An Epic Journey Across the World “Perhaps the most astonishing motoring adventure in history.”

An obsessive overlander and documentary maker reclaims his place in Australian folklore. Roderick Eime pays homage.

STORY Roderick Eime Images Courtesy the National Library of Australia

Most of us think Australia’s heroes are well known. They are the men and women we read about in newspapers, history books and sports reports. At school we learn about Mawson, Simpson, Kingsford-Smith and Chisholm, but our unknown achievers and record-breakers are still creeping out of the cracks.

In a past issue of Outer Edge, we featured Adelaide-born Sir Hubert Wilkins, who is now remembered as the first man to fly across the Arctic and take a submarine beneath the polar ice pack. Now we look at another man, Francis Edwin Birtles, who has almost disappeared into history despite a similarly illustrious career in what was then known as ‘overlander’.

Born in Melbourne in 1881, the young Birtles was just 15 when he set off for a life of adventure.

First it was the merchant navy, but the young man was not ready for a life at sea and he jumped ship in Cape Town to set off after the Australian militia then serving in the Boer War. Unsuccessful in that initial attempt, he was sent into the field as a forward scout and spy. One could be forgiven for thinking his superiors never expected him to last more than a few missions, but Birtles prevailed and even added some early literary flair to his reports: “… vultures, gorged to capacity, flop-flopped and rose heavily on lazily beating wings against the yellow dawn. The air that we breathed as we rode on, mile after mile, was polluted with the odour of week-old, jackal-torn carcasses of horses which had met with cruel lingering deaths in a disastrous running skirmish of several days before. Some of the former veldt riders were now sleeping peacefully beneath scattered earth mounds.”

On returning briefly to Australia at the end of the war, he returned to the Transvaal as a policeman, but used this opportunity to make several journeys by bicycle, taking a camera to record his adventures.

By the time he came back to Australia in December 1905, Birtles was a crazy cyclist bent on breaking records. Like some Forrest Gump on wheels, he set off immediately from Fremantle to ride to Melbourne, a feat that gained him considerable public attention.

Perhaps spurred on by that attention, he didn’t stop for seven years. In 1907-08 he went on to cycle to Sydney and then, via Brisbane, Normanton, Darwin, Alice Springs and Adelaide, he returned to Sydney to make it his base. The following year he set a new record for Fremantle to Sydney, 31 days, then promptly set off again to ride around the continent. His first

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book Lonely Lands was published, containing many of his own photographs. He wrote articles with such evocative titles as ‘Through the Unknown Territory’, and ‘Across Australia by Camel Pad and Cattle Track’.

The giant Gaumont film company produced the hugely successful film With Birtles Across

birtles continued to set records driving around Australia and in 1928 (the same year Wilkins flew the Arctic) he completed a ninemonth journey from London to Melbourne, becoming the first person to do so.

Australia, shot by Richard Primmer and by 1912 he’d cycled around Australia twice and crossed the continent seven times.

While his marathon exploits on the bicycle

alone are worthy of note, his feats of endurance in the automobile are perhaps his most remarkable. For these seemingly impossible journeys, he has attracted the attention of modern motoring authors and TV personalities, Peter Luck and Peter Wherret, the latter publishing the book simply titled, Grit, in 2005.

He would go on to complete around 70 self-funded and part-sponsored motoring expeditions starting in 1912, with the first west-to-east crossing of the continent with Syd Ferguson and a dog. The car was a single cylinder Brush. Later with Frank Hurley and his brother Clive, he began filming his journeys, creating films such as Into Australia’s Unknown (1915), Across Australia: On the Track of Burke and Wills (1915) and in 1919, Through Australian Wilds, following the track of Sir Ross Smith.

Many of his treks during the early to mid1920s were government supported and it was during one of these that his car caught fire near Elsey station while he was employed by the Prime Minister’s Department on a survey mission for the proposed Ghan railway to Alice Springs.

Birtles and his then co-driver, Roy Fry, were both badly injured.

On witnessing his arrival, one contemporary journalist described Birtles’ unusual outfit thus: The car and its contents presented a strange appearance on the road. The body of the vehicle was almost hidden under nearly half a ton of outfit, including tent, sandmats, shovels, food-boxes, waterbags, guns, a cinematograph camera, and Birtles’ bicycle.

Despite his apparent confidence in the emerging ‘internal combustion’ technology, Birtles continued to carry his trusty ‘Universal’ bicycle as ‘a lifeboat’.

He continued to set records driving around Australia and in 1928 (the same year Wilkins flew to the Arctic) he completed a nine-month journey from London to Melbourne, becoming the first person to do so.

Championed by political cartoonist and former host of Aussie Top Gear, Warren Brown, Birtles has enthralled many for these feats of mechanical and human endurance. Brown has even restored a 1925 Bean and intends to retrace Birtles’s route from London.

“Eighty years ago he was a household name across Australia, part action man, part bushman, part madman,” Brown reminds us.

Birtles’ first attempt at the drive in the prototype Bean Imperial Six was a disaster.

The car broke down in India and so did they.

Undaunted, Birtles vowed another attempt, this time in his own car, the trusty Bean 14, nicknamed “Sundowner”. Wherrett drove the famous car after it was restored in 1977 and awaiting placement in the National Museum of Australia, where it resides today. He described the car in his book: The driver’s seat was decidedly cramped and uncomfortable, the clutch was heavy and the fourspeed gearbox truck-like; I wondered further at the strength and tenacity of the man who drove it, firstly flat out from Darwin to Melbourne and then halfway across the world.

This nine-month odyssey, Brown asserts, is perhaps the most astonishing motoring adventure in history. Across searing deserts, through blinding snowstorms and steaming jungles, Birtles quite often made his own roads as he went. Supported by Shell and Dunlop, the journey received regular coverage on the radio and in the press thanks to cables and telegrams and was avidly followed by the Australian public. In Baghdad, Birtles enlightened his audience with a colourful observation of the crowd that milled around his car.

A swarm of guides and mendicants surrounded the car. I recognised them as the descendants of the Forty Thieves, but they had multiplied exceedingly!

In the depression-ridden 1930s, Birtles went outback again to prospect for gold, looking for the notorious Lewis Lassiter in the meantime. He found gold and lived his final years in comfort after selling the shares in his stake, but the extreme pace of his life had taken its toll and Birtles died of heart disease in Sydney in 1941 and is buried in Waverley Cemetery. He was 60 years old.

Relics of Birtles and his adventures are hard to find and only one print remains of his five films.

Copies of his two books, Battle Fronts of Outback (1935) and Lonely Lands (1909) are both rare and vaulable. But, his most significant legacy is the original Bean motor car on display at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, donated by Birtles and Bean Cars Ltd in 1929 for the express purpose.

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