From the Strand to Boorooloola : M H Ellis as pioneer motorist

If the name of journalist Malcolm Henry Ellis (1890-1969) is remembered at all, it is more than likely for his vehemently anti-communist politics at the height of the cold war, his contribution to Australian historiography as the biographer of John Macarthur, Lachlan Macquarie and Francis Greenway, or in this context the many disputes he inspired within Australian intellectual and cultural life. His role as a pioneer of Australian motoring during the 1910s and 1920s is less well recorded and features only briefly in his entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. This article addresses M H Ellis's exploits with the legendary overlander Francis Birtles and, in particular, their 1924 trip from Sydney to Darwin, the first such crossing of the continent. This expedition is recorded in Ellis's first book, The Long Lead (1927). This article also explores Ellis's 1927 unsuccessful attempt to drive with Birtles from London to Sydney, recounted in Ellis's second book, Express to Hindustan (1929). The purpose is not simply to provide empirical grist to the mill of an underexplored subject--the history of motor sport and motoring in Australia--but to explore some of the social and political context of motoring and car culture in the inter-war period. It also shows how Ellis's continuing obsessions, his conservative politics and his personality flaws (specifically, his inability to acknowledge the contribution made by others), were reflected in his motoring exploits.