For five days the wind did not stop. Len Beadell sat it out in the lee of his Land Rover, somewhere in the spinifex on the western edge of the Gibson Desert, waiting for his road crew to grind down from the north. He could barely step away from the vehicle. When he finally named the spot, he chose the only honest word: Windy Corner. It was August 1963, and Beadell was running reconnaissance for what would become the Talawana Track, the final road of a career that had drawn more than 6,000 kilometres of lines across the empty heart of Australia. He did not yet know it would be his last. He only knew the sand ridges ahead, and the long habit of pushing through them alone.
Beadell's method never changed. He went first, usually by himself, nosing a Land Rover through raw scrub to find a line a grader could follow. The Gunbarrel Road Construction Party came behind, blading the track he had scouted. By 1963 the team had spent eight years on this work, opening desert country for the Woomera rocket range far to the southeast, and they were tired in the way only heat, dust, and flies can tire people. They had just finished 1,350 kilometres of the Gary Junction Road. The vehicles limped into Port Hedland for overdue repairs. Then Beadell parted from his crew at Marble Bar and turned south alone, beginning a 600-kilometre survey for one more track.
Driving east from the ruins of the abandoned Talawana homestead, Beadell crossed the weathered remains of the rabbit-proof fence and found a survey marker left by Alfred Canning seventy years earlier. Then he came to a clear water hole and saw fresh footprints at its edge. Further on, smoke rose above the spinifex. Beadell switched off his engine and waited, because he knew a meeting would come. Two Aboriginal men approached while others held back. This was Martu country, lived in continuously for tens of thousands of years; Beadell was the newcomer crossing it, not its discoverer. He treated the encounter as significant, and later guided anthropologists back to the spot. To the people of the Western Desert, the land he was charting had never been empty or unknown.
The desert exacts a tax in machinery. The grader's gearbox failed 160 kilometres from the goal. Then the Land Rover's gearbox shed several cogs, stranding Beadell in a handful of usable gears 120 kilometres from camp and forcing him to change his plans and limp to Warburton to wait for a mechanic to fly in. Idle for two weeks, he did what restless men in the bush sometimes do: he started writing. Those days became the opening of his first book, Too Long in the Bush. When the gearboxes were finally repaired, road-building resumed on 30 October, and the crew reached Talawana on 6 November 1963. With that, eight years of desert road work for Woomera came to an end.
The Talawana Track runs 596 kilometres between Windy Corner on the Gary Highway and the Marble Bar Road, though Beadell and his party newly cut only 451 of those kilometres before joining old station tracks. He surveyed it back to front, starting at the western end on purpose, because parallel sand ridges have a habit of converging at their western tips into traps with no way out. Working from the open valleys between dunes kept his line clear. Today the track gives four-wheel-drive travellers access to the southern reaches of Karlamilyi (Rudall River) National Park, and runs together with the historic Canning Stock Route between Wells 23 and 24. According to his biographer Mark Shephard, Beadell never much liked the name Talawana. He preferred to call his last road the Windy Corner Road, after those five long days in the wind.
The Talawana Track threads east-west across remote desert at roughly 22.98 degrees south, 119.99 degrees east near its Marble Bar Road end, climbing toward Windy Corner on the Gary Highway far to the east. From the air it reads as a faint, arrow-straight scratch across red sand dunes and spinifex, with almost no settlement along its length. The nearest sealed infrastructure and fuel lie at Newman (Newman Airport, ICAO YNWN) to the southwest and at the small towns of Marble Bar and Nullagine to the northwest. There are no services and effectively no airstrips along the track itself, so this is country to admire from cruising altitude rather than to count on for a landing. Visibility is typically excellent in the dry season; summer brings extreme heat and dust.