Across the Katherine river, the citroen reached the railhead of the Darwin line at Emungalan on 8 October. The rains had begun, and here the car halted for ten days to give the tracks a chance to dry out. Westwood traveled by train to Darwin to try and fins some new inner tubes. When he returned to Emungalan he was armed with a selection of tubes from Harley-Davidson, Triumph and Indian motor cycles, all of them secondhand, but at least they fitted.

On the 18^th the young missionaries were off again, and between Emungalan and Marranboy met a prospector who was suffering from ptomaine poisoning. Alone on his cart, he had already traveled four hundred miles in search of a doctor. He only had another hundred miles to go, so firmly refused the offer of a lift in the car.

The 'wild' aborigines in the vicinity of Boola Boola mission were said to be fierce and treacherous, but Westwood found that they responded to kindness and would not attack white men unless maltreated or interfered with.

At one point the citroen had difficulty in finding and following the track, but its crew knew that they were not lost when they came across a burned-out car which had been abandoned by Francis Birtles during one of his long drives. They struck the Overland Telegraph line which linked Darwin and Adelaide, and headed for Daly Waters, two hundred and ten miles from Emulgalan. From there iT was another ninety miles to Newcastle Waters station. For a stretch of a hundred and eigthty miles there was no sign of human habitation, until Anthony's Lagoon station was reached.

On some stages of this journey through the wilderness, enough petrol for seven hundred miles had to be carried. The Barkly Table land was unfolding before the citroen in an endless vista of long golden almost tree-less plains, high dry and undulation. It was cut up into properties which might be the size of Belgium each inhabited by a maximum of a dozen white people. Men traveled tow hundred miles to buy tobacco, and seven hundred miles to the annual race meeting at the Rankine store. In the dry, the black soil offered a perfect surface for a car, but a shower would turn it into an evil morass in a few minutes; a gumbo into which man, beast and machine sand and swallowed. If cattle were driven along the track while it was still soft, the sun on coming out, would bake the churned up soil into iron hard ridges and potholes which shook to pieces any car which tried to bounce over them at more than a couple of miles an hour.

Punctuation the grassy plains were small patches of so called 'desert' soft sandy soil growing spinifex and some other species of starved scrub, and studded with anthills. The tracks across the Tableland were confusing and liable to disappear altogether, which is a largely waterless country without landmarks was dangerous for the motorist. Brunette Downs and Alexandria station went by, and near Lake Nash the car crossed into Queensland through he rabbit proof wife fence, six hundred miles long, which separated that state from the Northern Territory.

It was 2 9 October. From here to Brisbane there was a good fair weather road, with the emphasis on fair weather. In fact the five hundred and thirty miles from Lake Nash to Winton took only twenty seven hours. Five or six miles of very boggy going was encountered at first, in which a number of stranded cars were passed, but the citroen was extremely light and had a good ground clearance, so experienced no trouble.

After Camooweal , the Tableland ended and the country became thicker and more difficult. The bush-land was intersected by innumerable sandy creek beds and gullies were corduroy crossings of timer might have to be cut and laid down. Some creek crossings were of fine shingle, into which a car would sink more easily than into sand, which offered more resistance.

It was seventeen hundred miles from The Northern Territory border to Brisbane, and the little citroen accomplished the journey in the remarkable time of seven days. November 6 found Westwood in Brisbane and from there he descended the east coast by easy stages. He reached Sydney on the 17^th, passed through Melbourne and was in Adelaide by 14 December. By this time he was alone, Davies having left the expedition at Albury in New South Wales

PART THREE