THE BEADELL ROADS

THE BEADELL ROADS FORM A LATTICE WORK OF TRACKS THAT CRISS-CROSS THE WESTERN DESERTS OF AUSTRALIA. TODAY THEY ATTRACT AN EVER-GROWING NUMBER OF ADVENTUROUS FOUR-WHEEL DRIVERS LOOKING FOR REMOTE AND ENJOYABLE DESERT JOURNEYS. RON AND VIV MOON GIVE YOU THE LATEST RUN DOWN ON THESE ISOLATED TRACKS.

- RON AND VIV MOON

I thumbed the controller joystick and the drone responded, climbing higher, but the view didn’t change all that much as all I could see was a vast expanse of water where none was supposed to be.

We were on the Tallawana Track in the northern part of the Little Sandy Desert, about 10km west of Windy Corner, where water — any water — was a darn-sight rarity. Our little convoy of keen desert travellers had ground to a halt on what was, as it turned out, the edge of an enormous inland lake.

The moral of this little snippet? Be prepared for anything, including turning back and finding another way ... which was what we did!

Viv and I had first travelled these far-flung roads, known as the ‘Bomb Roads’ or the ‘Beadell Roads’, in 1984 and ’85, on two separate trips that took in all of the roads constructed by the legendary Len Beadell and his Gunbarrel Road Construction Party (GRCP).

These ‘Beadell Roads’ cover the vast desert country of western South Australia and adjoining Western Australia, north of the Indian-Pacific railway line and south of the Kimberley. They were constructed in the 1950s and ’60s to provide a road network and access for the Woomera rocket tests and the atomic bomb trials carried out at what we know as Emu and Maralinga.

Len Beadell had chosen the site of Woomera and its rocket range after WW2 when Britain wanted to test its long-range rocket capability and its A-bomb-making and detonation competence. The Woomera rocket range once covered 270,000sqkm and stretched from Woomera to the Indian Ocean north of Port Hedland. Today, managed by the RAAF, it’s still testing missiles and drones but only covers 122,000sqkm, though it is still the largest land-based missile testing range in the western world.