Tom Kruse (mailman)

Esmond Gerald "Tom" Kruse MBE (28 August 1914 – 30 June 2011) was a former mail carrier on the Birdsville Track in the border area between South Australia and Queensland. He became known as the result of John Heyer's 1954 film The Back of Beyond, and in the year after the film's release, in the 1955 New Year Honours, Kruse was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for "services to the community in the outback".

Kruse was born at Waterloo in South Australia to Harry (Heinrich) and Ida Kruse. He was the tenth of their twelve children. He left school when he was 14 years old, and worked as a casual labourer on local farms. However, due to the Depression, he "went 'bush'" around 1934 to work in John Penna's haulage business which ran out of Yunta in the mid-north of South Australia.

Kruse married Audrey Valma Fuller (known as Val) on 24 January 1942 in Adelaide, South Australia. They had four children: Pauline, Helen, Phillip and Jeffery.

In 1936 Henry Edgar (Harry) Ding (1907–1976) bought the mail contract from John Penna, and Kruse began his first run on 1 January of that year. Kruse bought the mail contract in 1947. He sold the contract in 1963.

Kruse worked the Birdsville Track mail run from 1936 to 1957, driving his Leyland Badger truck. He delivered mail and other supplies including general stores, fuel and medicine to remote stations from Marree in north-west South Australia to Birdsville in central Queensland, some 325 miles (523 kilometres) away. Each trip would take two weeks and Tom regularly had to manage break-downs, flooding creeks and rivers, and getting bogged in desert dunes.

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