Qualla: Vokes Hill Corner to Cook Road

Vokes Hill Corner to Cook Road: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Summerdrought, CC BY-SA 4.0. Out here the roads were made one bulldozer-width at a time by a man who treated the desert like a blank page. Len Beadell - surveyor, bushman, cartoonist and one of the great Australian eccentrics - spent sixteen years from 1947 punching some 6,000 kilometres of dead-reckoned tracks across the centre of the continent, often with a tiny crew and a grader, navigating by the stars and his own arithmetic. The Vokes Hill Corner to Cook Road is one of his lines: a remote, unsealed track built in late 1961 that runs south through the Great Victoria Desert to connect Vokes Hill Corner, on his Anne Beadell Highway, with the railway settlement of Cook far down on the Nullarbor Plain. On most maps it is barely a thread. On the ground it is one of the loneliest drives in Australia.

Image: Summerdrought | CC BY-SA 4.0

Vokes Hill Corner to Cook Road: The Man Who Drew the Desert

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Summerdrought, CC BY-SA 4.0. Beadell worked for the Weapons Research Establishment at Woomera, and his job was peculiar: open up the empty interior so that rockets and bombs could be fired across it. From 1955 he led the Gunbarrel Road Construction Party - a name he coined for his small team and their love o...

Image: Summerdrought | CC BY-SA 4.0

Vokes Hill Corner to Cook Road: Naming Vokes Hill

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Summerdrought, CC BY-SA 4.0. The track takes its northern anchor from Vokes Hill, a rise named long before Beadell ever reached it. The explorer Richard Maurice recorded the name during an expedition across this desert in July 1901 - one of a thin handful of Europeans to cross this country in the years befor...

Image: Summerdrought | CC BY-SA 4.0

Vokes Hill Corner to Cook Road: The Road to a Ghost Town

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Summerdrought, CC BY-SA 4.0. The track's southern end is Cook, and Cook is a story of its own. Founded by the Commonwealth Railways in 1917 and named for a former prime minister, Joseph Cook, it sat on the longest dead-straight stretch of railway in the world and once bustled with more than fifty workers, a ...

Image: Summerdrought | CC BY-SA 4.0