Road Trip

Rail travel to remote NSW was available long before cars and petrol stations became commonplace. However, the railways weren’t built for sightseeing or leisure; they existed to haul goods from the small towns that grew up around industries like farming and mining. The pace of travel was sedate, and large stretches of countryside were the scenery.

Enter the game changer! Albert Arthur Withers (1862–1929) founded Withers & Son in 1909 and, in the twenty years that followed, gave curious travellers the rides of their lives.

In an Australian first, the Withers family launched the first-ever Melbourne-to-Sydney motor tour in 1917. Motor tours were a game-changer for adventurous spirits who wanted to see the country and enjoy the benefits of shared costs, and a godsend for small businesses in the remote locations they visited.

Trading in the 1920s under the banner of Pioneer Motor Tours, cheerful advertisements declared, ‘No luggage or accommodation worries! No tedious rail travelling! The enjoyment starts when the engine starts.’ Withers wanted passengers to experience the excitement and immediacy of road travel economically, with ease, and in style.

Believing that ‘Australians who have not left the beaten track don’t know the real Australia’, by 1925, Pioneer offered tours in ‘the four states and Tasmania.’

Just before his death in 1929, Withers guided ten travellers on an almost 6,000-mile motor tour to Darwin. A 59-day road trip involving tents and strangers may sound like a living nightmare now, but tours were all the rage at the time. On their return, passengers raved about seeing glistening gems in opal fields, meeting children who had never seen rain, and experiencing their first mirage.

Not content with just ‘seeing’ the real Australia, some early tourists decried its lack of development, claiming it was being ‘retarded by sheer neglect.’ Some grumbled that they hadn’t seen good land for sheep, while others, missing the point completely, provided commentary on trees they deemed destined to become ‘assets’ when the railways expanded.

The Withers brothers took over the business when Albert died, adding weekly tours to Lightning Ridge via Bathurst in the summer of 1939. They continued to trade until WWII when the National Security Act curbed the movement of citizens; in 1944, Ansett bought the company.