Gunbarrel Road Construction Party

The Gunbarrel Road Construction Party (GRCP) was the name bestowed upon a team of road builders by Len Beadell in 1955, after which the well known outback track Gunbarrel Highway was named. Over a period of eight years, Beadell and the GRCP built more than 6,000 kilometres of dirt roads in remote areas of central Australia for the Weapons Research Establishment at Woomera, South Australia. By the time they had completed their work in December 1963, the GRCP had built eleven major roads in twenty-four separate stages across South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia.

In Len Beadell's book Beating about the Bush, he explained how the name of the party was derived. During many kilometres of driving around sand-ridges and spinifex hummocks, the mental picture of a corkscrew kept appearing before his mind's eye, when the word "straight" described what was desired. Suddenly the word "gunbarrel" representing something very straight materialised in his mind, so on return to camp, he announced to his team that they were to be known as the Gunbarrel Road Construction Party. This was well received by the men, and the name passed into folklore. He later joked, "It didn't matter that when we got to the sandhills, a more suitable name might have been 'The Corkscrew Road Construction Party'".

Beadell's usual method for building roads was to carry out a solo reconnaissance in his Land Rover, bush-bashing through virgin scrub, referring to a magnetic compass for direction, and the vehicle's odometer for distance. When he had determined a feasible path he would return to camp and guide a bulldozer by standing on top of his vehicle while flashing reflected sunlight from a mirror towards the driver. Beadell joked that the bulldozer driver followed the flashing mirror for eight years and never caught it. If large sandhills intervened, flares fired from a pistol were substituted. Some reconnaissance forays took many days, hundreds of kilometres, and usually several punctured tyres. He used a theodolite to observe stars, the sun and the moon to accurately calculate his position which he termed an "astrofix".

If the path ahead consisted of thick scrub or trees, the bulldozer made the first pass with the blade above ground level to knock the scrub down, then returned with blade lowered to clear the debris. The next pass partially overlapped the first to widen the road. A grader would then make up to five passes over the freshly cleared track, followed by a "cherry-picker" to remove sticks, roots, or stones by hand.

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