ANZAC DAY – On The Track.

When I’m in a town on assignment and I haven’t got anything scheduled for first thing in the morning I usually walk the streets looking for that Drysdale-esque moment that symbolises country town Australia for me – hard light, long shadows and dash of loneliness.

The War Memorial by Russell Drysdale

Usually the pubs

The Gold Fields Hotel, Stuart Highway ,Tennant Creek

War Memorial, Elliott 2008.

The track – This has to be one of the most isolated cenotaphs in Australia, hidden in the trees a few meters off the Stuart Highway at the Southern end of Elliott, a town that was built on the remnants of the7th Personnel Staging camp established by Lieutenant ‘Snow’ Elliott in 1942 , providing a half days rest for the convoy drivers ferrying war materiel and men up the Track to Darwin and then on to the Pacific war.
There is no one to tend to it, no one to play the last post in memory of the thousands of Australian and American soldiers who passed this way from 1942 to 1945.

From Alan Smiths “ Convoys Up The Track”
“The American drivers of No 1 battalion 48th Regiment had only one speed “flat out” , The road was just a bulldozed track through the scrub,”The dust just poured in. It was so difficult to see ahead that the drivers would standout on the running board and steer the truck through the open window”
For safety’s sake the Australian drivers got off the road as soon as they heard the Yanks coming, they didn’t give way for anyone.

“ Male troops in transit often used to urinate on the tyres of the convoy vehicles. This annoyed the drivers ,who took pride in their vehicles.Fitter Gordan Morgan rigged up coils to give electric shocks when they did. When the next troop-in-transit cocked his leg against a truck at Cabbage Tree Bore,1700 volts hit his wife’s best friend and the victim jumped back 5 feet.The driver told him that it was normal for this time of year , because after electrical storms the trucks get charged up.”

But I passed though Elliott in February this year to find that the digger’s statue had fallen victim to this act of bastardry ,that in Australia is equivalent to pissing on the Popes leg.

War Memorial, Elliott 2010

“Vandals who smashed the top off the statue of a soldier alongside the Stuart Highway in a remote Northern Territory town should be dragged back there to repair it.
“And if I had my way, they’d then be taken out the back and given a good old fashioned belting,” says Mr Mansell, the president of the Darwin RSL.
“But that wouldn’t be politically correct and the culprits have so far got away with it,” He adds.

But the story of the convoys that ferried the supplies that made the war possible is not one often told , and it’s my sympathies and connection to the long haul drivers , negotiating single bed trucks from Alice Springs to Larrimah on a 12 day round trip make me pull up at their staging posts and rest stops where the fuel drums rust in the bush and the only sound is of road trains and caravans on the new North-South Road carrying across the Barkly.

Churchills Head 1942

A south bound convoy passes Churchills Head in mid 1942

Churchills head 2010

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 24th, 2010 at 6:42 am and is filed under 42/45, New Work, The Territory, The Track, highways. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.