In 1927, Francis Birtles, a crazy Australian adventurer, set out alone from London to drive 16,000 kilometres to Melbourne. Almost 100 years later, a cartoonist and a journalist set out to recreate that epic adventure.
Words: Roderick Eime. Images: supplied
Warren Brown, the man who put the ‘car’ in cartoons, is widely known to Australian television viewers and readers. A talented cartoonist since the 1980s, he has produced incisive, often controversial political caricatures that appear in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph.
When he’s not at his pen and ink, Brown is a regular television host, author and historian. His passion for cars is no secret. Brown’s garage in the New South Wales Highlands contains a small fleet of vintage Land Rovers, ex-Army trucks and even a 1929 Dennis fire engine. Coincident with a deep respect for automotive history, Brown was instrumental in reviving the Peking to Paris Rally, first run in 1907, and using period-correct vehicles to retrace the 16,000 km route in 2005. He co-drove a 1907 Itala with Lang Kidby.
His knowledge, screen presence, and affinity for all manner of vehicles saw him cast as one of the three co-presenters of Top Gear Australia in 2008, a role he held for three seasons.
For his efforts, Brown was appointed as a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the 2023 Australia Day Honours for "significant service to media as a cartoonist, and to military history”.
His most recent and perhaps most ambitious project was to restore a 1925 Bean open-top motor car as a follow-up to his research and publication in 2012 of a biography of Australian adventurer Francis Birtles, who drove a 1924 Bean 14 Sundowner car solo on a 26,000-kilometre journey from London to Melbourne that took nine months in 1927.
Brown was joined by colleague and journalist Matthew Benns for the reenactment, which took just over four months. Despite having to detour past Iran and Myanmar on Birtles’ original route, the pair travelled through 17 countries and arrived at the Melbourne GPO, just as Birtles did, where they were met by the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese.
“I feel almost guilty,” said Brown after arriving in Melbourne, ”our journey was easy by comparison. We had a support vehicle, satellite phone and (mostly) good roads. Much of Birtles’ driving was alone, off-road, over mountains, through deserts and jungles and without reliable maps.”
Apart from the sheer challenge of the epic drive, Brown and Benns raised more than A$100,000 for the Royal Flying Doctor Service, a life-saving rural medical service that caters to the emergency needs of Australia’s many remote outback communities.
Brown and Benns had numerous adventures and misadventures en route to Melbourne, with the transit of Saudi Arabia being one of the most memorable.
“With the Houtis to the south and Gaza to the north, it was all going on,” recalls Brown in vivid detail, “and Saudi Arabia had only just opened up to foreigners with their own cars. After a ferocious ‘going over’ by Egyptian customs in Safaga, we crossed the Red Sea by ferry to the port of Duba and to our surprise, they were delighted to see us.
“We thought the countryside would be like some giant wasteland and we couldn’t have been more wrong. It was the most beautiful landscape, looking something like Mars, where we found the sister city to Petra (in Jordan), called Hegra. Just magnificent.
“So many people asked us if we ever felt unsafe, but the hospitality of the locals was just extraordinary. We stopped at the only tree in the desert at one point, and this immaculately dressed gentleman in all the Arabian regalia stopped to check out our car. He ended up taking us to lunch and told us all about life in Saudi Arabia and his three wives in the most candid manner.
“When we finally arrived in Riyadh, we were feted by our ambassador, Mark Donovan, who also told us we were not only the first Australians to drive across Saudi Arabia, but we were the top-trending story on Saudi TikTok!”
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