The Redex Trials of the mid-1950s are remarkable to contemplate. "The Lap" is not an enterprise without some risk today, never mind seventy years ago. The modern world is bound together by the gossamer threads of network coverage: patchy blackspots aside, the vast majority of us would have to make a serious effort to be truly out of contact with the rest of the world. For those who like to be safe but still have a need to explore the Red Centre, there's always the Personal Locator Beacon, or even satellite phones if you have the money. It might take a while, but if the worst does happen, help will absolutely be on its way.
In the 1950s, things were very different. When the second Redex Trial was flagged away in July 1954, the first artificial satellite – never mind a satellite phone – was three years in the future. It'd be two years before Bruce Gyngell would be telling us, "Good evening, and welcome to television." And of course, in 1954 it was all but impossible to buy a motor vehicle in any configuration but two-wheel drive – 4WD was restricted to military hardware like the original Land Rovers, vehicles that were in no way considered passenger cars. And the countryside itself, lest we forget, hadn't meaningfully changed since Burke and Wills died trying to cross it in 1861.
This was the savage equation under which the organisers of the Redex Trials hatched the idea of a complete circumnavigation of the wide brown land, in late 1953.
A Quick Note Before We Begin...
Just to lay out all my cards face-up: A good bit of what follows has been cribbed from Gelignite Jack Murray: An Aussie Larrikin Legend, written by the man's own son, Phil Murray. If you have any interest in this stuff at all, then this book is a must-buy, even if you're not that bothered about motor racing. I've read a lot of biographies, and this is one of the most fun. No-one's paying me to say this (if you want to, hey, get in touch!), I'm just saying it anyway: buy the book.
Secondly, most of the Jack quotes you're familiar with come from an interview with Neil Bennetts in 1976, and although the full text of that interview doesn't seem to be online, a good chunk of it was reprinted in Phil's book. Because I'm lazy, quotes from that section are simply labelled, "Bennetts interview", even though it's technically all from the same source.
Onward.
The Redex Trials
The concept of open-road racing had been discredited half a century before, by the infamous Paris-Madrid race of 1903. Eight people had died – three spectators, five racers – and around a hundred had been injured in one of the worst debacles motor racing had ever suffered. After that, most series had migrated across to closed loops of public road instead, which gradually evolved into the billion-dollar permanent circuits we know today. A few organising bodies, however, preferred a different tack – use the public roads anyway, and just pretend they weren't racing. One such group was the Australian Sporting Car Club, or ASCC, who organised the first Redex Trials in 1952 and early '53.
The money came from British-based oil additive company Redex, whose agent in Australia was English immigrant Reg Shepheard. Redex's signature product, an "upper cylinder lubricant", was apparently just a mix of penetrating fluid and red diesel (I.e. the stuff you used to loosen rusty bolts, mixed with a grade of diesel restricted to farming and mining machinery – use cases away from public roads, basically. Extra tax rebates made it cheaper than commercial diesel). The question of whether oil additives actually do anything is still a contentious topic, but in the 1950s the signature Redex applicator was a staple in every garage, and some grease monkeys swore by it. A quick squirt into the carb would sort out many an issue, or so they said...
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The first Redex Trials, in 1952 and February '53, didn't attract much attention. The third event, and the second of 1953, took place over 2 and 3 May, and was billed as a back-breaking 1,000-miler. The route started in Sydney and took competitors through the Blue Mountains, Mittagong, the back roads behind the Jenolan Caves to Harden, Cootamundra, Forbes, Orange, Coolah, Mudgee and finally back through the mountains to the finish line back in Sydney. The winner had been D.H. "Peter" Antill in a Ford Consul, with 2nd place going to a certain John Eric "Jack" Murray in a Ford Customline.
It was Reg Shepheard who pushed for the ASCC to organise a much longer trial to take place over multiple weeks and many thousands of miles, stumping up a cool £1,000 prize money for the winner (nearly $43,000 in 2023 money). This created the first round-Australia Redex Trial, which kicked off on 30 August 1953. This was not a true round-Australia, however, cutting straight from Darwin south to Adelaide via Tennant Creek, Alice Springs and Kingoonya, resulting in a distance of "only" 6,500 miles. Strict rules ensured all vehicles entered were available to the public, with modification and even replacement of parts very limited.
Officially this was not a race, and neither was it technically a rally. In a rally, the winner was whoever set the fastest time over a given stage, with the result measured to the nearest second (or today, the nearest tenth). By contrast, the Redex events were dubbed "reliability trials", with competitors required to maintain a specified average speed over a given section of road, with penalty points handed out for arriving too late OR too early. More than five minutes either side of your scheduled arrival time would incur a penalty, with one penalty point awarded for each minute either side of the target after that. Whoever finished the trial with the fewest penalty points would win.
Being petrolheads of course, standard practice was to ignore the specified speed and blast along as fast as possible, then pull over near the finish to wait for the clock to catch up and, perhaps, make any necessary repairs. They were necessary more often than not, as the roughness of the roads would shake most cars to bits regardless of whether or not they were kept to the speed limit. To combat this, the ASCC had warned they would set up secret control points mid-stage, with the same object as mobile speed cameras today – to put the fear of God into anyone thinking of putting their foot down. These allowed a three-minute margin of error to compensate for the odd faulty speedo, or any discrepancy between officials' and competitors' watches, but they would nevertheless result in big controversy.
The Man Himself
In the annals of the Redex Trials, navigator Bill Murray is doomed to always be listed with a pair of brackets and the legend, "No Relation". But he deserves more – much more. His day job was driving bulldozers on dam construction projects (so he was already experienced with gelignite, hem hem...), but he is, if anything, a more significant motorsport presence than Jack. After all, the Redex would be Jack's only significant motorsport trophy, whereas Bill would end his career with three. He'd already taken the 1947 Australian Grand Prix (a handicap Formula Libre event at Mount Panorama, driving an MG TC), and he was about to co-win the Redex. And in the years to come, he'd sign off with a class win in the inaugural Armstrong 500 at Phillip Island (a Class B Simca Aronde).
But even with no silverware at all, his motorsport immortality would still be assured, because he is in fact the namesake of Murray's Corner, the 90-degree left-hander that finishes the lap of Mount Panorama. The year before his 1947 triumph, Bill had been part of a swarm of cars rushing down Conrod on the first lap of the NSW Grand Prix. All had braked heavily for what was then called Pit Corner – but Murray's Terraplant had carried on, and crashed into the sandbags. Later that night, under cover of darkness and well after most had departed, race winner Alf Najar had used a piece of charcoal to scratch, "Murray's Corner" onto the timber pit fence. The joke was on him, however, because the name stuck, and despite sponsorship taking over corner names in later decades, to purists it will always remain Murray's Corner.
And of his driver, Jack Murray, what can be said? Somewhere between Crocodile Dundee and Forrest Gump, with a side of Tarzan's physique. A daredevil, a prankster, and on occasion the proprietor of a garage on Curlewis Street, Bondi. A figure who breaks the modern practice of history, claiming outlandish things like having taught Werner von Braun to water-ski, your typical barside bullshit-artist fare... until he produced the receipts (seriously: read the book). During the war he'd been a contracted civilian working for U.S. Small Ships, spending twelve months in 1944 and '45 doing repair and maintenance work aboard the ex-Liberty Ship Half Rufus, anchored in Finschhafen, New Guinea. Before the war however he'd been an enthusiastic amateur racer, and he returned to his passions once peace broke out, although most of his exploits in cobbled-together machinery belong more to the open-wheel experts. The exceptions were the Redex Trials of the mid-1950s.
Jack and Bill had run well in the early stages of the '53 trial, but it all went wrong on the run from Cloncurry to Mount Isa, where Jack rolled his brand-new '52 Chrysler Plymouth (a Plymouth Cranbrook by another name) over twice and wrote it off. Since the car would never move again without a flatbed, there was nothing to do but relax at the side of the road and reassure the other competitors that yes, they were alright. What came next was of the more famous Jack anecdotes, the one with which Evan Green opened his 1966 book, Journeys with Gelignite Jack:
As another concerned competitor slowed to a stop next to the overturned wrecked Plymouth in '53, the ever-present dust cloud drifted on by. A voice yelled out:
"What happened? You all right?"
"Got a ring spanner?" Jack yelled back. "Nine-sixteenths SAE?"
Thinking … followed by a puzzled query: "A ring spanner. What the hell do you want that for?"
"I thought I'd do the brakes while the wheels were up like this."
Silence … then everyone started to laugh.
The first Redex round-Australia Trial was eventually won by Ken Tubman and John Marshall in a Peugeot 203, but Jack had learned his lesson. Next year, he decided, he'd revert to a Ford.
The Grey Ghost
The car Jack Murray chose for his 1954 Redex challenge was a Canadian-built 1948 Ford Super Deluxe with a V8 engine. The car had already done 120,000km as a taxi when Jack acquired it, for a very reasonable £700 (just under $30,000). Outwardly, there was nothing all that special about it, which is exactly what made it so special.
I was keen on a Ford. It was a V8 and it had a lot of punch in it and it had the right springing, transverse springing; the front spring and the back spring transversed, and up very high. There's a lot of clearance under a Ford, and they had a very strong chassis on 'em. … – Bennetts interview
Speaking another time, Jack elaborated on the importance of that clearance:
One of the main things on a car was the clearance. How far can you get off the ground? You'd even go to oversized tyres, just to get another quarter of an inch or so. Put the springs up and the muffler, everything that was just hanging down. You looked at it, you lay under the car, and you'd say, "There, there." The fuel lines under the chassis, you'd split rubber tubing down and slip it over the pipes. You wouldn't miss anything that was hanging down, because they'd be knocked off the car. You'd practically rebuild the car. You had to do this all the time. When you'd pull in to get a service, you'd go underneath it, get a spanner and start checking things – because the roads would undo anything at all. – Jack Murray, Gelignite Jack Murray: An Aussie Larrikin Legend
So transverse leaves creating a nice open cavern under the floor was nice, but the real secret weapon on this car was particular to its Canadian origins – an unusual (but very effective) kind of shock absorber.
The one we had was a Canadian one, built in Canada and exported here. They didn't bring a lot of them. Why we picked that, they had [special] shock absorbers.
In those trials, I've seen the shock absorber at night, on a rough road, glowing under the mudguard. Now, that sounds crazy. Burning the paint off them, going like that all the time, they generate heat. You know when you blow a bike tyre up – ever felt the heat in the pump? Well, the shock absorber is just going like that all the time on a rough road, and it will burn the enamel off the shock absorber, I've seen them glow of a night time. You'll never tell anybody this; they think you're telling lies – but that's a fact. Many times I've seen it.
Well, these had a type of shock called a Houdaille. It's a hydraulic shock and it's a circular arrangement. It's different altogether to a tubular shock: it's circular and has an arm out the side and goes down on to the axle. It has a different type of action. All the action is in this circular housing; it's like a water pump to look at. They are French designed, beautiful shocks. We never ever touched it from the word go. On an ordinary Ford, you're doing six or seven shocks in, you keep doing them all the time. There's no shock absorber that would last you round Australia; they hadn't made any good enough yet. That's why we picked this particular Ford with the Houdaille French designed shocks on, the Canadian Ford. The body was better than ours, the ones they make here and had little bits and pieces on them – but the shocks were the main thing. … – Bennetts interview
The 3.9-litre flathead V8 engine, as advertised on the doors, was reconditioned by Kirby, Doutty and Wicks.
Anyhow … this beautiful Ford. It was immaculate. We got it into The Garage and took the engine out, and I took it to bits and gave it to Eric Webster, a friend of mine working at de Havilland in the propeller section, and he had it all magnafluxed, all the crankshaft, the con rods, pistons and diffs, had all the engine done, we fitted rings to it and imported bearings. Everything was imported from the States. We done the motor, then I took the wheels off, had the brakes done, Ferodo supplied the lining. Then we had a radio fitted to it supplied by – what's the Australian radio, can't think of it now, they supplied the radio [a Ferris short-wave car radio]. We got plenty of support from the motor trade. We took every bit of it to pieces – everything. Then we went to work on the lights; we got good lights, beautiful lights. The door handles, we took those off. We took everything off. Then everything was "locktited" [a thread locking adhesive], bitumen inside the doors and then I used the car for rallies for about five months, 'til you could just drive it and when you came home just put it away and there was nothing wrong with it.
When the trial started, it was as good as you could ever buy or get a motor car in the condition. Everything was protected, the sump and bits and pieces we'd put on underneath, you know. You'd find it out in the trial and come back and alter it. It paid off. We didn't have to do anything to it. – Bennetts interview
By the time the '54 Redex Trial was ready to begin, the hard work had already been done. All Jack had to do was apply his personalised JM 456 number plates, and cover it in grey primer, giving the car its enduring nickname – the Grey Ghost.
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| The Grey Ghost, in all its glory. |
The Trial Begins
There were 263 entries for the 1954 Redex Trial, which was pruned down to 246 serious entries representing thirty marques. Among them were names you'd probably recognise. Harry Firth was there at the behest of the Standard Motor Company, ready to wrestle a Vanguard Phase II around a country its designers could scarcely even imagine. Evan Green, later the doyen of Australian motoring journalists, was at the wheel of a similar Vanguard on behalf of Marshall Motors. Fresh off a stint at the Mount Druitt 24 Hour, Sydney journalist and prestige car dealer David McKay was taking his chances in an Austin A70 Hereford (brave). Ford's chances were lifted when one of the best, "Wild Bill" McLachlan, chose a Ford Zephyr Six as his mount, while Martin Arentz took a more "heavy metal" approach with a 1953 Customline.
Naturally, there was no shortage of Holdens either, most of them FJs. At their head was a serious three-car team representing the Dandenong-based Preston Motors, with an FJ each for Monte Carlo Rally partners Stan Jones and Lex Davison (#162), plus Reg Nutt. And if you knew where to look, there was even a young speedway racer by the name of John Arthur "Jack" Brabham, there to drive the #241 Holden FJ entered by the Savell Bros GM dealership. He was in the midst of making the switch to road racing with a secondhand Cooper-Bristol named after its sponsor, the Redex Special, so his presence was more or less inevitable.
The trial proper was due to begin on 3 July, but competitors actually came under official control a week before the start to give ASCC scrutineers time to check all cars were on the level. A number of modifications were rejected for departing from standard spec, and many teams were ordered to fix it and come back for another check with the requisite amount of fuel, water, emergency equipment and a week's worth of tinned rations.
The rules required that certain parts of the car go the whole distance without being changed. Replacing essential parts (ones whose failure would immobilise a car) would incur a 500-point penalty, while 250 points would be handed out for replacing any part which, although not essential, would affect the general efficiency of the car (such as a spring or shock absorber). This was enforced by spraying these parts with a special paint that changed colour under the light of a mercury vapour lamp. Stick a pin in that...
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| Newsreel footage of an official applying that special paint. |
The final briefing was held on Wednesday, 30 June, where the crews were informed that the Shell survey map of the route had been adopted by the club, but contestants were allowed to use the Vacuum map if they preferred: any discrepancies would be taken into account by control officials. There was immediate grumbling among the crews that this would cause trouble, and they were not wrong!
At last, on Saturday, 3 July, the 246 starters gathered at Sydney Showground and lined up to be individually flagged away. The starter was Donald Peers, an English singer whose big hit at the time was, Yes, I’ve Told Them All About You. The event started at midday, with the cars departing at two-minute intervals after that. Gordon Marshall, a motor trader at Windsor, was first away in Car #1, a grey Standard Eight. It took more than eight hours to flag the whole field away, a fact that bothered the six-thousand patrons who'd each paid 2/- ($4) for a grandstand seat not at all. Since the Grey Ghost was car #256, it was well after dark before Jack and Bill Murray set off on their event, Jack clad in his customary gorilla mask and Bill wearing a mask of... something? Commentators had humorously grouped the competitors into Amateurs, Professionals and Eccentrics: Only one crew was said to have straddled two of those categories...
Sydney to Townsville
The trial started on Jack and his wife Ena's twelfth wedding anniversary (silk and linen) and, as far as Townsville, followed the same route the couple had taken on their honeymoon to Cairns. "I felt he just couldn't fail with a start like that," she told Brisbane's Courier Mail, but that didn't mean it was all plain sailing.
After stern words from the constabulary the previous year, the Club had over-compensated for 1954 and set average speeds that were far too low. A table in Phil's book shows that the first leg from Sydney to Newcastle, a distance of 179km over good, properly-sealed tarmac roads, was allocated five whole hours to complete – an average speed of just 35km/h. Even so, half a dozen contestants misjudged the run and lost points at the first control in Newcastle – mostly, one suspects, out of sheer boredom.
Then there was the debacle of the first secret control at Bulahdelah. Despite having promised that the Vacuum map would be acceptable for the Trial, the officials stuck rigidly to the Shell version and refused to accept the timing of the Vacuum users. Since the maps used different starting points for their surveys, there was a discrepancy of around 4km over the 100km distance. With an average speed of 50km/h for the Newcastle-Taree section, the 3 minute leeway allowed in the rules wasn't sufficient to save those who navigated by the Vacuum map, and about forty cars found themselves being unfairly penalised. This triggered an uproar among the competitors, with everyone lodging protests and not a few snarling that these secret controls were going to, "ruin the trial".
The rest of the run to Taree was uneventful, but once rain began to fall many unsealed sections of road (which was most of them in those days) became quagmires, most notoriously a 360-metre section of bog located 13 kilometres outside Wauchope. Poorly-marked roads were another hassle, particularly around Telegraph Point: Many drivers took a wrong turn and disappeared up the garden path for anything up to half an hour before realising their mistake (not helped by locals allegedly turning signposts around as a prank...). Even so, it wasn't until Surfers Paradise that they got the first serious incident of the trial, when a short-circuit ignited petrol in the carburettor of New Zealander Bill Culver's Jaguar. Culver beat out the flames with his bare hands (giving himself nasty burns in the process), then re-started his Jag and still made it to Brisbane on time.
After a twelve-hour rest, the trial departed Brisbane Exhibition Ground in the early hours of Monday morning, and the contestants enjoyed a leisurely run through fields of pineapple and sugarcane – until they ran into another secret control south of Nambour, which caused an even bigger uproar than the first one. Warned of discrepancies between the two permitted maps, control officials tried to sidestep the problem by checking speedometer readings instead [Sic: I think they mean odometer.]. Among the 46 drivers who fell foul of this method were 1953 winner Ken Tubman, elite drivers Peter Antill and Possum Kipling, and Queensland senator Roy Kendall. All swore they would protest.
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| The man with the lantern was far from popular. |
After passing through Maryborough and Bundaberg, crews were allocated another 12 hours' rest in Rockhampton, but many spent their time arguing with the officials over the injustice of the secret controls instead. The task of keeping their cars to set average speeds, correct to within a fraction of a mile-per-hour, was reducing many navigators to nervous wrecks. It was just as well, then, that the run from Rockhampton to Mackay and then on to Townsville was the least eventful stretch of the entire trial. Drivers kept their machines down to the required 50km/h (much slower than the normal traffic roaring past them), eyes searching the roadsides nervously for more flag-waving officials signalling them in for yet another secret control – unaware that the organisers had declined to station two more on this run as they'd originally planned, simply to avoid any more chaos.
So a couple of steep creek crossings were the only real challenges of this leg, although the steadily-growing heat and humidity of the tropics was ready to bite anyone with sub-standard cooling (and many cars in the trial were British, remember). Upon reaching Townsville, competitors received the welcome news that the ASCC had recognised its mistakes and upheld most of the protests about irregularities at secret controls, wiping the slate clean for many contestants. As a result – and perhaps unsurprisingly, given the absurdly low average speeds – 240 of the 246 starters found themselves "clean-sheeting" the Pacific coast segment of the trial, arriving with no penalties at all.
This would not last.
Townsville to Mount Isa
It was while in Townsville that Jack truly earned the epithet, "Gelignite".
Gelignite is an explosive, invented in 1875 by Alfred Nobel, the creator of dynamite and therefore later the Nobel Peace Prizes. It's made by dissolving guncotton in nitroglycerine and then mixing the whole lot with wood pulp to give it that moldable, jelly-like texture. Unlike some explosives it's safe to handle with bare hands, safe to store (since it can't be set off without a detonator), and is also less prone to "sweating" out its nitroglycerine than dynamite, making it less likely that knocking over an old crate left forgotten in the back of the shed is going to blow you to kingdom come. Its forgiving nature has made it a stalwart in contexts where true high explosives aren't necessary, like agriculture and mining¹. Jack and Bill had brought a crate or two along on the Redex Trial in case they needed to clear a path around road obstructions, although Jack admitted, "We never did ever use it in the trial to get us out of strife." Instead, they ended up using it, shall we say, recreationally.
I'll tell you the name of this place was: it was Townsville. Do you know where the big rock is in Townsville? The great big rock? Okay. Well, for the acoustics you've got to have the jelly somewhere in a valley because it really travels 'round. So we were parked in the showground. There would be about 8,000 people, everybody that lived in Cairns and everywhere were all down at Townsville, and it was a beautiful summer's night [sic], nine o'clock the first car was out. So we found it was always good when you were letting the jelly off to go and find a policeman, put it on a long fuse, put it where you wanted it and then go and find a policeman, know where he is and go and talk to him, so when it goes off, it's not you, it's somebody else. How the hell could you let it off?
So, we got there, we find this policeman, okay, and there was this outhouse, so we got three sticks of jelly and just threw it up against the tin and went up the street to the policeman. Next thing up went the jelly, and you could hear everybody saying, "Christ, what was that?" and they turned 'round, and here's this old guy with his braces hanging down – do you know those policeman's braces, they've got "policeman" or "fireman" on them – and he came out, looked up at the sky, and just turned around and walked back inside again.
That was one of the best jokes we ever played with the jelly. The copper said, "Christ, what was that?" I said, "I wouldn't know." He said, "I bet it's those blokes, the two Murrays." I said, "It's not us – I'm Murray," and the bloke said, "You're not, are you?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Oh well, you're out of it." I said, "Yes, of course we are." So away we went. I'll never forget that one. – Jack Murray, Gelignite Jack Murray: An Aussie Larrikin Legend
The "too easy to be fun" phase ended after Townsville, however, as the crews turned inland toward Mount Isa and the toughest stretch of road of the entire trial. The road soon deteriorated to little more than a cleared strip through the bush, with sharp rocks, tree stumps and massive potholes exacting a horrific toll on the competitors. There were a number of crashes, including a collision with a cow, and a couple of cars overturned. At least thirty cars got bogged at the difficult Pentland Creek crossing, 240km out, and had to be pushed out with the help of the locals.
But all this was nothing compared to the hazards that faced drivers after Cloncurry – a stage which, of course, would prove crucial to Jack's eventual victory.
The roads were murder. The road from Cloncurry to Mt Isa was 80 miles. That was where we actually won the trial. You see, it all goes on loss of points. Every minute you're late, that is another point. – Jack Murray, Gelignite Jack Murray: An Aussie Larrikin Legend
This section – also known as Calamity Road – had eliminated many during the 1953 Redex Trial, most famously Jack himself. Big rains in February had only seen its condition deteriorate further since then. Three hours had been allocated for the 135km distance from Cloncurry to Mount Isa, of which the first 30km or so was on fairly good gravel road, as were the final ten kays or so; but in between was a 90km horror section winding through the scrub. Realising it would be difficult to average 45km/h over the whole stage, most drivers decided to bank some time by speeding through the first section – and promptly got caught by a secret control, waiting for them at the 45-kilometre mark. Car after car was pulled over by the officials who demanded route cards and mercilessly piled on penalty points in the face of arguments, bribes, death threats and tears. All the other drivers who otherwise would've clean-sheeted the trial lost points here.
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| The secret control on Calamity Road. |
But Jack? He of course got through clean as a whistle, and all thanks to our old friends, Stan Jones and Lex Davison. Roaring along in his Holden, Lex got caught by the secret control and responded by driving a few kilometres further to a township (at a guess, Mary Kathleen?) to ring his teammate Stan Jones and warn him. Stan passed the warning on to the two Murrays, who grit their teeth and slowed right down to the designated average, letting car after car barrel past them (and then get caught and penalised). By now there was a certain, "us against the officials" camaraderie among the field, but why had Jones gone to the trouble of warning one of his main rivals? Chris McLachlan, son of "Wild Bill" McLachlan who was also competing that year, related a story that might give a clue.
Remember that "special paint" the ASCC officials had sprayed on certain parts to ensure they couldn't be changed during the event? Well, Bill McLachlan, so the story went, had taken a sample of the paint back to his laboratory and reverse-engineered it, allowing him to produce a small batch of counterfeit paint – some of which he gave to his old colleague, Jack Murray. Later in the trial, Stan Jones lost a part in the sand and was offered a replacement by Jack, which at first Stan refused because it didn't have the necessary paint. Lo and behold, Jack produced his tin of McLachlan's counterfeit paint, daubed Jonesy's replacement part with it and said with a wink, "You owe me." So when he received Lex's intel about the secret control, Stan was only too happy to pass it on to the Murrays. The irony is that neither the Murrays nor McLachlan ever needed to use the special paint, whereas Jonesy – who could've made use of it – lost time anyway thanks to misreading his map!
Anyway, once past the secret control it was back to business as usual, Jack overtaking 23 cars on one of the worst roads he'd ever seen – only one-and-a-half cars wide, forcing him onto rocky shoulders to get by. More damage was taken on this road than on the whole rest of the trial put together: shock absorbers broke off, springs snapped, gearboxes ground themselves down to the nub, fuel tanks were holed, and engines choked with dust. Flung stones shattered anything made of glass, and one crew arrived with a huge hole in the middle of their windscreen. Hit by a flying stone, the curved glass had turned white with tiny cracks, leaving its driver with no other option than to punch a hole in it so he could see!
More than twenty cars were forced out of the trial by battle damage, while many others reached Mount Isa barely able to move, with mudguards torn off or twisted, exhaust pipes dragging on the ground, headlights smashed to bits and all caked in dust. A few had simply given up and headed back to Townsville instead. By the Isa, the list of 240 clean-sheeters had been whittled down to just three – the #159 Ford Customline of Martin Arentz; the #251 Vanguard Spacemaster of Doug Whiteford; and of course, the #241 Ford Super Deluxe V8 of Jack Murray and Bill No-Relation.
Mount Isa to Darwin
By the Isa, the Trial runners were five days out from Sydney and had covered 3,650km – meaning there were "only" 12,000 or so to go. Thankfully, the run to Darwin via Renner Springs and Daly Waters was over the Barkly and Stuart Highways – good, sealed bitumen roads, built by the army during wartime. This allowed the ASCC to set a fairly brisk (by trial standards) average of 40mph, or 64km/h. That still meant covering 1,692km in 26 hours, and in cars still bruised by their treatment on Calamity Road.
Several cars had cracked sumps (or diffs, or gearboxes...) with the resultant oil leaks. Some suffered collisions with cattle or the ever-present kangaroos. Tyres that had taken a hammering from stones the day before blew out when the pressure inside built up over prolonged running on tarmac rendered baking hot by the Top End sun. Some crews took the time to stop every so often to kick the tyres and grease the suspension; others were too tired for this and carried on, only for the neglect to come back and bite them later. With the need to eke out extra time for repairs, speeding was a necessity for pretty much everyone, and another secret control could've torpedoed many a result – except that by now the ASCC was a tad gun-shy, so none had been set up.
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| Tubman removing his troublesome driveshift. |
1953 Trial winner Ken Tubman fell by the wayside on this section, pulling the tailshaft out of his Peugeot's wrecked differential only a few clicks out of Katherine. Unable to repair the car before the Darwin control closed, Tubman admitted defeat and wired that he was retiring from the event. Another who had mechanical trouble and lost time was one of the leaders, Martin Arentz, which ended his run as a clean-sheeter. That left just the Murrays and Doug Whiteford to battle for the lead.
Darwin to Broome
Dust and heat were the main enemies as the crews headed south out of Darwin. Drivers had been warned about the conditions after they passed back through Katherine, and many tried to make up time while the road was good – leading them to trip over yet another secret control set up 35km north of Katherine.
After Katherine, the trial left the highway behind and headed southwest to Top Springs, arriving some time after nightfall. Setting off before dawn the next morning, Ken and Ray Christie in their '52 Chevy Deluxe (car #233) had the misfortune to lay headlights on one of the worst crashes of the trial. The #149 Morris of E. Roberts and R. Gibson had left the road and hit a tree, stoving in its front and leaving both men injured, Gibson with concussion and Roberts with broken ribs. An ambulance had to be dispatched to take them to Darwin.
From Top Springs it was only a short hop to Wave Hill, where they ran into the worst bog of the trial so far. The dust was like talcum powder and nearly a foot deep, and sat upon a bed of loose sand that was apparently infinitely deep (no-one found the bottom, anyway). Forty-seven cars found themselves bogged at one time or another, and although some managed to claw their way out with winches and traction mats, others were stuck for hours and had to be pulled out by an enterprising station hand, who got out his tractor² and pulled competitors out for a £1 ($42) fee – during daylight hours, at least. After dark it rose to £2 ($84!). At least ten more cars dropped out and had to be towed back to Katherine.
The survivors ploughed on, raising towering columns of dust – which was a problem, as they were now deep into cattle country. Those gargantuan outback cattle stations you've heard about are a matter of simple economic necessity: it takes a lot of acres to support each beast, and herds need to be large to be profitable. Even outback cattle are too fussy to eat grass covered in dust, however, so the management of Vestey Group stations, the British company which occupied most of the area, asked the trial if they wouldn't mind detouring around their main grazing areas. Naturally, the detours were even worse than the main road and, unable to call in at station homesteads, crews had to make use of pre-established fuel dumps like the one at Halls Creek, where they had to hand-pump the fuel out of 44-gallon drums.
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| A station worker cranking the petrol, Halls Creek. |
That got the trial runners through the 1,195km run to Christmas Creek³. A dot on the map in the midst of vast desert, the crews surely felt as far from civilisation as anyone could get before they started coming back: it had been 1,560km since they left Darwin. Plagued by flies and with only cold rations to get them by, there was little to do but wait out their designated six-hour rest break. A further twenty-six cars withdrew there, leaving 180 to press on to Broome.
It was on this next stretch that another crash ruined the chances of Doug Whiteford, hitherto one of the clean-sheeters. Andy Spanner in the #228 Chevrolet jammed on his brakes unexpectedly and, unsighted in all the dust, Whiteford smashed straight into the back of him. As part of its package deal of front-end damage, the Spacemaster suffered a holed radiator, forcing Whiteford's crew to spend the next four hours repairing it and then risk it all by driving the rest of the way at a wild 100km/h. They still arrived 70 minutes late, losing them 70 valuable points.
And the Murrays? Well...
We ploughed through to Broome and it was on this stretch that the gods gave us a smile. Thirty miles out we stopped, dead out of gas. I said to Bill: "Just how many points do you reckon we're going to 'do' getting gas?" He grabbed a can and started walking, but had not gone 100 yards when he topped a rise and saw a Holden [Clem Smith] on the side of the road with its crew wearing a sort of despairing air. They had broken down and had no chance of moving without a tow.
I am a businessman, so I made a deal.
"We'll swap you a tow for your petrol," I said.
There was no argument so we syphoned their gas into the Grey Ghost, hooked on our towrope and towed them to Broome.
At the Broome control we were told we were alone in the lead.
We celebrated by letting off a plug of gelignite outside the Hotel Roebuck in Broome. – Jack Murray, Gelignite Jack Murray: An Aussie Larrikin Legend
Much to the chagrin of their rivals, who were trying to sleep!
It turned out that section from Christmas Creek to Broome was meant to include a quick jaunt over to Derby for fuel. That meant driving 45km out of one's way, and then 45km back to rejoin the main road to Broome. Jack had gambled that there would be no secret control in Derby (despite early programmes listing Derby as a checkpoint), and only put in enough fuel for a straight run in to Broome. This had run him short, which would've dropped him out of the trial entirely had it not, by sheer coincidence, happened virtually on top of Smith's broken-down Holden!
I had my fair share of luck, but then again, I've always had a lot of arse. – Jack Murray, interview with Modern Motor, 1981
At this, the halfway point in both time and distance, Jack and his navigator Bill Murray found themselves in an undisputed lead, bearing a clean score sheet with no penalties inscribed upon it. Bill Patterson was currently 2nd in his #29 Peugeot 203, with 8 points lost, while Queenslander A.A. "Duck" Anderson was 3rd in the #176 FJ Holden, with 14 points lost. But there was still an awful long way to go, and anything could happen before the cheering crowds welcomed them back into Sydney...
¹ I remember in my uni days, we were once watching Bowling For Columbine and got to the bit where Terry Nichols explains that sure, he had blasting caps, dynamite fuses and blackpowder, "but that's all normal farm stuff." Now, not to defend a nutjob like Nichols, but my friend was surprised when I confirmed that yes, all of that pretty much is indeed normal farm stuff. Yours Truly has been... present, shall we say, as licensed personnel have made responsible use of a few sticks of jelly. And I have to say, even if it is one of the slower explosives, I came away with a profound respect for the stuff.
² Some sources say bulldozer. I'm picturing one of those small, open-top Caterpillars, with or without a dozer blade attached.
³ If you've been following along on Google Maps, you might have noticed by now that we're into areas so remote Google has trouble locating the places you want. I'm guessing Christmas Creek was what is now the community of Kurpatiya, a settlement so remote Google can't calculate distances to it even if you manually select it. For what it's worth, I couldn't find a single continuous road that linked Top Springs, Halls Creek and Christmas Creek, but that's the nature of these back roads – they exist when they're needed.
