Mr Blair's Big Trip

The untold story of J.W. Blair's epic motoring adventure across Central and Western Queensland: one of Australia's most extraordinary car journeys.

The idea of a Brisbane politician visiting outback Queensland these days is reserved for carefully orchestrated media calls (complete with an Akubra fresh from the box). But in 1908, Queensland Attorney-General J.W. Blair went literally off the beaten track, driving over 5,600 kilometres in two weeks across Central and Western Queensland in one of Australia’s earliest motor cars to learn more about the conditions faced by his constituents. The trip was an astonishing feat of endurance, effort and discovery. 

During the 1908 parliamentary recess, Queensland Attorney-General and Minister for Mining James William Blair announced that he would tour Central and Western Queensland, to ‘accede to numerous requests that I should travel from place to place and familiarise myself with the wants and requirements of particular districts in remote parts of Queensland.’ 

Given the short time available to him, he decided to use his own car: a 1905 4-cylinder 25-30 horsepower 1905 Panhard-Levassor. The car, described by many as one of the largest motor vehicles in the country (and in one recollection as looking like ‘a couple of armchairs upholstered in leather and lashed together on a lorry’) had neither windscreens nor any form of roof, meaning both driver and passengers would be completely open to the elements. 

Many of the places on Blair's itinerary had never been reached by car. Blair’s Panhard – which he had owned for only a year – had been mainly used to travel between his home in Ipswich and ministerial duties in Brisbane. His proposed journey would take him in a triangle from Blackall northwest to Cloncurry (‘the exceedingly rich and extensive mineral district’), across to Hughenden and then returning south to Blackall. 

Blair wouldn't be travelling alone. He hired as his driver a Canadian man named C.E. Hall, who had reportedly ‘motored through Canada, the United States, Mexico, the Argentine Republic, South Africa, and over the Brooklyn track at a speed of 100 miles per hour’. 

Joining Blair on the trip was his Private Secretary J.D. O’Hagan; pastoralist and owner of Blackhall’s Northampton Downs station, Alexander Dyce Murphy; and – as “Special Representative” of the Brisbane Courier and Queenslander – agricultural journalist H.N. Leach.  

The journey begins

Blair (and his car) travelled to Blackall by train on 18 May 1908 along with his fellow Ministers Kerr, Airey and O’Sullivan to celebrate the opening of a new rail line from Jericho to Blackall, and to attend the Blackall Show and Races. 

On 23 May, Blair and his companions departed Blackall. This first leg of the trip was uneventful, and around 4 ½ hours later the big Panhard – which had already picked up the nickname the "Overlander” – drove into Barcaldine.

The 5 travellers washed off the Blackall road dust at the Barcaldine swimming baths before attending a dinner in their honour. ‘Queensland [is] a place of magnificent distances,’ declared Blair during a speech that night, ‘and it [is] the duty of the government to annihilate those distances.’ 

Blair undertook 2 days of meetings and functions – and even kicked off a local rugby union match – before attending a wine party at the Shakespeare Hotel on 25 May to celebrate Empire Day.

On 26 May, they drove to Longreach via Ilfracombe, arriving at 5 pm, just in time for a celebratory wine party that ran ‘till well nigh midnight’. The next day saw the party travel 4 hours of a ‘very rough journey’ over ‘scandalous roads cut up by travelling stock and teamsters’ to Winton.  

A unique incident 

By 28 May, the men were off to Cloncurry, stopping at nearby Elderslie Station for lunch. Elderslie’s owner, Mr Ramsay, allowed his chauffeur to travel in the Panhard to guide them to their destination. After 3 miles following the chauffer’s directions, it became apparent they were on the wrong road. 

Curiously, they happened upon another car – a Minerva– driving the other way. Its occupant, Mr Wills Allen of nearby Toolebuc Station, informed them they were instead heading towards Boulia. They turned around and astonishingly met yet another car: Mr Ramsay in his Vulcan, racing to catch them. 

'That constituted what I think may fairly be called a unique incident,’ recalled Blair, ‘as it was a meeting of the only three automobiles in the vast north-west.’ 

A night in the cold 

Blair’s group reached Cloncurry a day later than planned, but after resting the night, Blair proposed they take a day trip to visit nearby Mount Elliott and Hampden copper mines.  

Despite taking 2 local guides with them, they were quickly lost, and once again ended up on Boulia Road. With darkness falling, they were forced to spend a cold night with no shelter, food or water on a stony spinifex ridge. 

The next day, they made it to both mines and by 2 June returned to Cloncurry for another wine party featuring ‘many glasses and many toasts’, where Blair’s ‘health was drunk in the most enthusiastic manner possible by the residents.’ The “Overlander” had made the world’s first car trip between Blackall and Cloncurry. 

Blair was reported to have sung the praises of the people he met ‘in every place he had been’ and urged those on both sides of politics to ‘agree on the great principles for the development of Queensland.’ Moreover, he announced his wish for the formation of a new national political party – ‘The Young Australia Party’ – an idea he never appears to have revisited outside that happy evening. 

The Attorney-General's enthusiasm was no doubt fuelled partially by Cloncurry’s generous hospitality, and partially by the fact the next day’s travel would be in the quieter comfort of a train carriage (he had promised the Minister for Railways he would inspect the Cloncurry to Julia Creek rail line, which diverged too far from the road to be viewed by car). 

Grasshoppers and corrugated iron 

2 days later, Blair’s journey resumed by car from Richmond, pausing briefly at Marathon for some repairs. They had left behind pastoral country and entered what Blair described as ‘a region which suggested some huge volcanic upheaval in the twilight of Time.’ 

During the day they passed through a mile-long cloud of grasshoppers which took 7 minutes to traverse and ‘almost cut pieces from the flesh’ as they collided with the unprotected travellers. 

Their skin had by this time already been ravaged by the weather. ‘Along the route we had the sun in our faces,’ Blair later recalled, ‘with the result that the skin became rough and resembled to a small extent corrugated iron. Gradually our faces grew redder and then darker, and noses assumed peculiar appearances.’

Full circle 

Blair and his companions arrived next in Hughenden, where they were greeted with (you will not be shocked to learn) a wine supper. Local newspapers, reporting on the progress of the trip, noted that Blair had thus far travelled 1,600 kilometres without a mechanical mishap. 

Invariably, the next day, as the party was making the 240 kilometre journey between Hughenden and Muttaburra, a tyre blew out, requiring a 1 ½ hour wait. Once they were moving again, the car stuck a rut while running at 80 kilometres an hour, shooting the passengers into the air before landing on their luggage. 

Luckily, they were only 10 minutes from Muttaburra, and were soon sitting down for a welcome banquet, where ‘Mr. Blair’s health was drunk with much enthusiasm.’  

The next day, 7 June, the Panhard arrived back in Barcaldine, completing Blair’s declared circuit of North West Queensland. In total, he had covered nearly 2,500 kilometres.  

Be rude not to 

Having arrived back at Barcaldine a fortnight earlier than planned, Blair decided to extend his tour. Murphy and Hall drove the short distance to Northampton Downs to make repairs while Blair and Leach travelled by train to nearby mineral fields at Clermont and Sapphire.  

They met back up at Blackhall to begin the unplanned second portion of the tour, starting off through Tambo, Augathella and Charleville. From there, the journey continued to Morven, Mitchell (where, in the dark, they ‘steeplechas[ed] through a brush sheep yard’) and into Roma, where they faced a long delay due to the size of the crowd coming to meet them. 

The Panhard struggled over ‘villainous roads’ through Miles and Chinchilla the next day, before arriving in Toowoomba on 19 June and spending the night at Gatton. The passengers lunched leisurely on sandwiches as Hall navigated down the Toowoomba Range, despite its reported danger (‘the last car which attempted to descend broke away’, they were warned, ‘and the two occupants escaped only by throwing themselves out’). 

On the morning of 20 June, the “Overlander” pulled up in front of Ipswich Town Hall, where Blair – the boy from Coalfalls – was given a homecoming welcome.  

'A course of practical utility' 

At noon on 20 June 1908, Blair’s journey came to its official end. 

Escorted by members of the Brisbane Automobile Club, Blair and his party arrived in Brisbane City to an uproarious welcome by ‘a crowd of fully 1,000 persons’ who had gathered outside the Courier Building on the corner of Queen and Edward Streets. The occupants and the car itself were stained with dust and somewhat degraded. Remnants of spinifex grass, prickly pear (and, presumably, grasshopper) could be found for days after. 

Later, at a reception at The Brisbane Club, Blair admitted that when he started on his trip, he had ‘grave doubts’ whether he could finish it, but ‘though many difficulties had to be overcome, the party had succeeded.’ He estimated he had covered over 5,600 kilometres (over one third the distance of the famous Peking to Paris motor car race one year prior), all on a single set of Continental tyres. 

On mostly unsealed and uncharted roads, their average day’s run was between 200 and 250 kilometres; on one occasion 320 kilometres was covered in 8 hours.  

‘There is nothing heroic about it,’ said Blair later of his trip. ‘I took what seemed to me to be a course of practical utility.’ 

‘The reason why I motored was this: I had only a certain time available in which to see a tremendous amount of country. So it occurred to me that I might be able to see a good deal of country that had previously never been visited by a Minister, if I took a motor car.’ 

For the people, from the people

At every stop, Blair and his colleagues listened to the suggestions, complaints and comments of locals, many relating to the necessity of new rail lines connecting towns, stock issues and the failure of water bores. Mining companies asked for ‘telephonic communication’ to their sites, and a bigger share of the £50,000 government funding promised to ‘the development of mineral fields’. 

Blair, to his credit, appeared to act on many of the requests (including a regular passenger train to Cloncurry), and seems to have been genuinely committed to helping where he could. At many of his stops, it was remarked that he was the first Minister ever to visit. There is no doubt he won over a swathe of future voters by declaring a holiday in nearly every State school he stopped at. 

‘I hold the view,’ said Blair in a later interview, ‘that it is impossible for a Minister sitting in his office in Brisbane, to form a correct estimate of the requirements of the country districts, in order to grasp thoroughly what is wanted.’ 

‘On this trip, I have been able to do certain things, and to grant the requests of certain deputations, and I hope I shall be able to get my colleagues to seriously and favourably consider many other requests that have been made of me.’ 

The long journey 

Blair is better remembered today as Sir James William Blair, Chief Justice of Queensland. In his lifetime he also held other esteemed positions including Lieutenant-Governor of Queensland, Chancellor of the University of Queensland and President of Queensland Rugby Union. His name lives on in Blair State School – one of the few Queensland State Schools not to be named for a location or landmark – only a few minutes from where Blair was born. 

Resources 

• A brief account of the life and times of The Honourable Sir James William Blair, K.C.M.G., Chief Justice of Queensland, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland volume 10 issue 2: pp. 80–104
• Sir James William Blair, Australian Dictionary of Biography website, accessed 1 December 2025.
• Trove website (various pages), accessed 1 December 2025.
• Through Queensland in a motor car, 1909, James William Blair (1870–1944), Fryer Library, University of Queensland.