Item #116524 Across Australia in a British Car. The 14 HP Bean [drop title]. Motoring.
Across Australia in a British Car. The 14 HP Bean [drop title]
Across Australia in a British Car. The 14 HP Bean [drop title]

Across Australia in a British Car. The 14 HP Bean [drop title]

[Melbourne], A. Harper, Sons & Bean, Limited, [1924].

Quarto, [4] pages with 6 illustrations (from photographs).

Drop-title, folded as issued; South Australian agents' stamp on the first page; a few light marks and creases; a very good copy.

This detailed account of the first 'road' trip from Sydney to Darwin and back in 1924 is not in Trove, and we can find no mention of this leaflet elsewhere. However, the Bean Car Club website is very informative about this journey of the Scarlet Runner, 'a Bean Fourteen painted scarlet. Scarlet Runner is also the name of a variety of the edible runner bean. Francis Birtles, Malcolm Ellis (a motoring journalist) and Simpson (a Bean mechanic), made the trip from Sydney to Darwin and back, a distance of 6278 miles, a journey never before attempted in a motor car. They left Sydney on 4 June 1924 and returned on 21 August 1924'. This journey precedes the motoring epics that made Birtles a household name. The National Museum of Australia owns the subsequent Bean, named 'Sundowner', that in '1926 Birtles drove from Darwin to Melbourne in a record-breaking eight and a half days. The following year he left London on a 26,000-kilometre trip to Melbourne' (NMA website).

Item #116524

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