Qualla: Gunbarrel Highway

Gunbarrel Highway: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Summerdrought, CC BY-SA 4.0. The man with the bulldozer was named Len Beadell, and he had a habit of carving his name and the date into the trunks of desert trees as he went. He was pushing a road through some of the emptiest country on Earth, and he meant for it to run dead straight, straight as a gunbarrel, which is how it got its name. The desert had other ideas. The Gunbarrel Highway dog-legs and wanders and corrugates the spine of every vehicle that attempts it, and it remains, more than sixty years on, one of the most famous and punishing tracks in Australia.

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Image: Summerdrought | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gunbarrel Highway: A Road for the Bomb

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Summerdrought, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Gunbarrel was not built for tourists or settlers. It was built for the atom. In the 1950s Britain and Australia were testing nuclear weapons at Emu Field and Maralinga and launching rockets from the Woomera range in South Australia, and that program needed roads where none ex...

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Image: Summerdrought | CC BY-SA 3.0

Gunbarrel Highway: The Last Great Explorer

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Summerdrought, CC BY-SA 4.0. Len Beadell has been called the last of Australia's great explorers, and the title fits a man who surveyed and built more than 6,000 kilometres of outback roads largely by hand and instinct. He worked with a tiny crew, a theodolite and a grader, naming features after his family a...

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Image: Summerdrought | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gunbarrel Highway: The Hardest Miles

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ghreumaich, CC BY-SA 4.0. To drive the Gunbarrel today is to take on a serious expedition, not a scenic drive. The roughest, remotest stretch runs east of Carnegie Station, where the track is unmaintained and the corrugations, stones and washaways punish everything. The longest gap between fuel stops, Car...

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Image: Ghreumaich | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gunbarrel Highway: Crossing Country That Belongs to Others

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gazjo at English Wikipedia, Public domain. The desert the Gunbarrel crosses is not empty, whatever the maps once implied. The road threads through Aboriginal lands, and travellers need permits to pass the Central Australia and Petermann areas, because these are living communities and homelands, not scenery. Places like Wa...

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Image: Gazjo at English Wikipedia | Public domain