Francis Birtles

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Birtle's Oldsmobile 30 used for the Darwin to Adelaide overland speed record trip 1908

Francis Edwin Birtles (born 7 November 1881 in Fitzroy, Melbourne, died 1 July 1941 in Sydney)^[1] was the third child of David Edwin Birtles and Sarah Jane Bartlett. Francis was an Australian adventurer who set many long-distance cycling and driving records, including becoming in 1927 the first man to drive a car from England to Australia. Birtles had set a speed record driving from Darwin to Melbourne the previous year.

He served in the Second Boer War, and later was a mounted police officer in the Transvaal. On his return to Australia, he cycled round Australia twice and by 1912 had crossed the country seven times. He was the first person to cross Australia from west to east on a bicycle and in 1912 he became the first person to make a west to east crossing from Fremantle to Sydney in a Brush Runabout ^[2].

As a publicity stunt, Birtles was commissioned by Barlow Motors, the Melbourne agent for the Bean cars, to drive a modified Bean 14 car from Darwin to Melbourne. With his co-driver Alec Barlow, they left Darwin at 4am on 23 October 1926 and completed the 5440 km (3380 miles) journey in eight days and 13 hours, a record. The car was dubbed the Sundowner by Birtles.

Following this success, Birtles was asked to make an attempt at becoming the first person to drive from England to Australia. He departed from Australia House in London on 19 October 1927, farewelled by a crowd of wellwishers including the 1927 Miss Australia. In an era when there were few roads and gasoline supplies sparse, the epic eight month journey carried him across mountains, deserts and through tropical jungles and included a number of sea voyages - the last being from Singapore to Darwin. He travelled via Europe, Egypt, Persia (now Iran), India, Burma and Malaya.

The record breaking Bean 14.

On arrival in Darwin, his car was seized by customs officials demanding import duty, until direct intervention by the Prime Minister Stanley Bruce averted the situation. He continued south via Brisbane and Sydney to the official finishing point of the journey at the General Post Office on Elizabeth Street, Melbourne. He was promptly asked to move on by a policeman for obstructing traffic.

The journey was not repeated until 1955.

Birtles had completed more than 70 transcontinental crossings of Australia by mid-1927, details of which were described in his book Battlefronts of Outback (1955).

In 1929, the Bean car was presented to the Australian Government on condition that it be placed in the national museum. As there was no such museum at the time, the car disappeared for many years before being recovered in the 1960s and placed into the National Motor Museum in Adelaide in 1980 before moving to the National Historical Collection in the National Museum of Australia in Canberra in 2001.

In 1933, Birtles travelled to Arnhem Land with a prospecting and mining expedition in search of gold, after having found some several years previously during one of his journeys. He subsequently sold his share in the mining stake and retired a wealthy man.

Birtles also made several films of his encounters with the outback and indigenous Australians including Across Australia with Francis Birtles (1912), Into Australia’s Unknown (1914) and Coorab in the Island of Ghosts (1929).