Home stretch as the Bean team reach Queensland on epic adventure

The Bean team are nearing the end of their epic adventure, which has taken them to Europe, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Singapore. But the duo’s toughest challenge to date happened on home soil.

Our sunburnt country with its sweeping plains, far horizons and droughts and rains has proven the toughest challenge for the 1925 Bean roadster’s epic drive from London to Melbourne.

The venerable car with co-drivers, cartoonist Warren Brown and Editor-at-Large Matthew Benns sharing the wheel, has crossed Europe, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and on to Singapore but it is Australia where the heat came on.

From the sweltering tropics of the Northern Territory with storms and monsoon rains to red dust roads and on to Queensland’s green grass cattle country with seemingly infinite horizons and dead straight roads the Bean has powered on. The sun has belted down at more than 42C.

“I have taken the thermostat out of the engine to keep the Bean temperature cool for longer,” Bean team mechanic Tony Jordan said. “For a one-hundred-year-old car the Bean is running remarkably well.”

However the bone shaking roads have taken their toll. Just outside Mount Isa the passenger side headlamp came off with a clattering bang under the car and a cartwheel into the bush. The bolt securing it had sheared off but the headlamp casing survived and was reattached – minus the broken bulb.

Outside Winton the magneto stopped sparking and Jordan stripped, cleaned and repaired the entire unit on a concrete bench at a roadside rest area. “The whole spirit of this adventure is to adapt and keep going,” he said.

The globe trotting Bean team have made it to Australia. Picture: Nigel Wright

The drive is recreating the 1927 drive from London to Melbourne by Francis Birtles and has already raised almost $120,000 for the Royal Flying Doctor Service, Australia’s most trusted charity.

Across the outback the sight of the Bean and the RFDS logo has prompted people to come forward with their own stories and to put cash into the Bean’s collecting tins.

At the Barcoo Hotel in Blackall, Ergon Energy linesman Beau Turlan, 22, came out, beer in hand, to look at the red roadster after winning $2000 on the pokies on Saturday afternoon.

“Here mate, put that in your tin,” he said, handing over six crisp $50 notes. “I am only going to spend it out of my pocket. It might as well go to a good cause.”

Tambo servo cook Helen Mayne emotionally handed over $50 for the Royal Flying Doctor Service.

The Bean team have already raised over $120,000 for the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Picture: Nigel Wright

“I would not be alive if it was not for them,” she said. “I had a stroke a couple of weeks ago and the ambulance took me to Blackall an hour away where the RFDS sent an air ambulance to pick me up.

“I have no health insurance but I received the best care ever, I was treated like royalty,” she said. “If they had wasted time I might have been dead.”

And in Miles Creek Cafe owner Paula Toohey told how she had been bitten by a brown snake while moving some vines. “I would be dead if the Flying Doctors had not flown me to hospital,” she said.

Former Minister for Veterans Affairs and Tambo MP Bruce Scott, who is on the board of the RFDS in Queensland, had his own experience with the service when his wife Joan had a stroke.

“Standing on the tarmac when the plane door closes is hugely emotional because you know the only help is there in the sky,” he said.

“Driving a car identical to the one that Birtles drove through Queensland in the year that the Flying Doctors started is a fantastic way to raise awareness of what we do,” he said. “We must never forget where we came from.”