Henry Hampden Dutton and mechanic Murray Aunger make roadless first car scramble 1908 from Adelaide-Darwin

Descending a sandhill during Henry (Harry) Dutton and Murray Aunger's second successful drive from Adelaide to Darwin in 1908. Top and bottom right:  With wellwishers at Burra Burra, Dutton and Aunger in the 1908 Clemens Talbot car (later at the National Motor Museum in Birdwood, South Australia) .
Images courtesy State Library of South Australia and National Motor Museum

South Australians Henry (Harry) Hampden Dutton and Murray Aunger made the first crossing in a motor car from Adelaide to Darwin in 1908. A keen motorist, Dutton was the wealthy heir to the Anlaby pastoral property near Kapunda, left to him by his “squire” father in 1914.

Dutton bought the 20-horsepower Talbot, with a four-speed gearbox, that in 1907 made the first of his two attempts to cross Australia from south to north.

His fellow driver and mechanic was Murray Aunger who’d been apprenticed to Adelaide's Kilkenny workshops of consulting engineers G. E. Fulton & Co before joining Vivian Lewis’s cycle works. They later worked with Tom O'Grady in building the first petrol-driven motorcar in South Australia. (Riding Lewis bicycles, Aunger also was the colony's one-mile champion in 1899 and set the Australian record for 50 miles in 1901.)

Dutton and Aunger left Adelaide on the 2,100-miles (3,380km) journey to Darwin on November 25, 1907. Without roads in central Australia, they battled rivers, sandhills and boulders before the pinion in the Talbot’s differential collapsed in mud south of Tennant Creek and the vehicle had to be abandoned with the wet season coming. Dutton and Aunger returned on horseback to the railhead at Oodnadatta and then to Adelaide.

Determined to try again when the rains ended, Dutton bought a larger and more powerful Talbot. With Aunger, he left Adelaide in June 1908. At Alice Springs, telegraph officer Ern Allchurch joined the team. They reached Tennant Creek in 30 days. The first stranded Talbot from 1907 was repaired, driven in convoy to Pine Creek and taken by train to Darwin. Continuing by the second car, the trailblazers reached Darwin on August 20. International motoring circles recognised both expeditions’ feats of skill and endurance.

The second Talbot was preserved in South Australia’s National Motor Museum at Birdwood.