The files of Darwin resident Bob White , who has a close and colourful association with Townsville, cover a wide range of interesting subjects in Western Australian , the Northern Territory , Queensland . Needless to say, he has been urged on several occasions to write his memoirs .
One file is about an uncle, Jack White, a buffalo shooter and croc hunter, who discovered the Rum Jungle uranium deposit in 1949 which became Australia's largest uranium mine , opened in l954 and supplied Britain and America with uranium to make atomic weapons during the Cold War .
(Little Darwin ran details of New Zealand journalist Ross Annabell's time in the Territory and Mount Isa that included being caught up in the Northern Territory uranium boom , about which he wrote a book, The Uranium Hunters .)
Another of Bob's files covers the early taxi service run by the White family in Darwin . It includes the following photograph which shows , from the left, Vince White, Alan White , Bob's father, and Dulcie, Vince's wife, with three of the taxis near the Victoria Hotel cottage .
A Taxi Trip of 1200 Miles
There are newspaper cuttings and at least one photograph related to what was reported to be Australia's record taxi trip - from Darwin to the Mount Isa mining centre ,Queensland , at a charge of two shillings a mile.
A 1939 newspaper account of the trip was thus : J.H. CURLE,
the author of many entertaining and useful books, one of which warns the white
man’s world of the looming danger of the coloured races attaining the
ascendancy, has already in his 40 years of travel covered 2,000,000 miles of
the earth’s surface.
At present engaged in again seeing Australia, Mr. Curle
last week completed what is probably an Australian record taxi-cab journey. He
travelled the 1200 miles from Darwin to Mount Isa in a taxi at 2s. a mile. Being
a mining engineer, the Mt. Isa mine was, of course, the special attraction for
him.
During this journey he received news that the trustees of a wealthy
estate, in Perth ,have been trying to reach him to pay him money for mining
stock in a South American mine.
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A pre- war view of Mount Isa from the town side, across the Leichhardt River , taken from Boyd's Hotel, which had a notorious lounge bar at the back known as the Snakepit . |
Another Northern Territory newspaper report , following , refers to the rough taxi trip.
Mr Vin White, of White’s Taxi Service, who recently undertook a taxi trip to Mt. Isa, returned ( to Darwin ) by Guinea Airways plane on Wednesday. Owing to the
bad state of road between Katherine and Adelaide River, on the Stuart Highway , he arranged to have the
car sent back by train. In the meantime, the service is being carried out with
his other taxi unit
The above photograph was taken during the epic trip . It shows the taxi, minus the boot lid, with a shed in the bakckground displaying AVON in large letters on the roof to help pilots know where they were .
It is on the Avon Downs pastoral property , situated on the Barkly Highway, 260kms norhwest of Mount Isa. The so-called highway was just a rough bush track in those day.
The globe trotting man who hired the taxi for the long run , a 6 ft. 3 inch Scot , John Herbert Curle (1870-1942), was described as a slightly stammering mining engineer, traveller , writer , eugenicist and keen philatelist . He wrote the above book, reprinted several times . At one stage in his travels in South Africa he was the mining editor of the Johannesburg Star .
Wikipedia contains fascinating details about how Curle first came to Australia.
In 1885 he travelled to Australia in the care of a physician whose passage had been paid by Curle's father. The physician drank the brandy from Curle's flask, attributing its disappearance to "evaporation" and, according to Curle, much of the rest of the alcohol on the ship. Curle arrived in Australian at the age of 14 and after visiting relatives and staying in "the bush", visited his first gold mine at Ballarat. He went to Tasmania before returning to Scotland in 1886.
When Curle , unmarried, died from cancer in British Columbia , Canada, in December l942, about three years after his taxi trip from Darwin to Mount Isa, an obituary in The London Philatelist said his valuable stamp collection had been his "wife and children", there being no distance he would not travel to add to his collection.
He left his stamps to the Africana Museum, Johannesburg, and donated 2000 pound to the Eugenics Society.
(Taxi . Outback. Author.)
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