jar’ at the cairn on top which contained the seven or eight names of those prior climbers, along with a dog’s paw print! I wonder what became of that very historic coffee jar which saw many more additional names added over the following years. Photo Ron Dingwell at left, with the coffee jar by his right foot, with Reg Lewis wearing sunglasses and Len Tuit, atop the Rock in 1950. In 1957 the first of a series of Women’s Weekly magazine sponsored women-only “Petticoat Safaris” accessed Alice Springs via The Ghan and TAA aircraft, and continued via camping tour to the Rock, also aboard Tuit’s vehicles. As mentioned earlier in Chapters 14 and 18 another first occurred, also in 1957, with the complete round-trip camping safari from Brisbane to …show more content…
Their unsuitable Morris van became stuck in the sandy going and they perished after leaving the vehicle and attempting unsuccessfully to walk for help. Len Tuit’s business operations had commenced when he won the mail contract from Alice Springs to Darwin in 1946. He combined this with a rather rudimentary passenger service, loading both passengers and mail aboard a round nose single-axle semi-trailer pulled by an ex-military KS5 International prime mover with ‘tropical’ cab, pictured next. By 1953 Tuit and Bond, having become arch competitors in the post-war Alice Springs based tourism industry, buried the hatchet and merged their local operations into the weekly “Alice Springs – Darwin Motor Service” which included services to Mt Isa. However Bond’s share in this business would soon be sold to his partner after he had suffered the loss of his son in an aircraft accident, and had eventually seen his business forced into liquidation due to a multiple fatality level crossing accident involving a Bond’s Tours coach in February 1951, at Horsham in Victoria. Photo Len Tuit’s tropical KS5 being readied for a trip to