The real Tom Kruse

The Birdsville Track is one of the best known, and loneliest, tracks in Australia, and for twenty years Tom Kruse was the mailman, battling the searing heat, floods and mechanical breakdowns. He made the run every fortnight, and was a lifeline to the isolated settlements and stations along the way, delivering everything from letters to essential supplies.  He made running repairs of his truck, he loaded and unloaded tons of stores to ferry his cargo across flooded creeks. He kept people in touch with the outside world, and was sometimes caught up in the grief of a lonely death.

'Tom the Outback mailman' by Kristin Weidenbach  is a children's version of Kristin Weidenbach's bestselling 'Mailman of the Birdsville Track' and is illustrated by Timothy Idle who has a feel for the beauty and hardship of life in the Outback. And he also has a touch of whimsy as showcased with the double-page spread of Tom's efforts to conquer the sandhills by building up speed doing circle work on a claypan then gunning the truck up the sand slope.

The book  is a reconstruction of life on the Birdsville Track in the early 1950s.  Parts of the book are a faithful recreation of the original story complete with the armchair and dressmakers dummy.
It has been shortlisted for the Children's Book Council of Australia's Eve Pownall Award for Information Books. The winners will be announced on Friday 16th August, the eve of this year's Book Week (Saturday 17th to Friday 23rd August 2013). The theme this year is "Read across the universe".
 Tom Kruse was the Birdsville Track mail-man from the 1930's to the 50's, he was born in Waterloo in the Clare Valley in 1914 as Esmond Gerald Kruse and died in Adelaide in 2011. His Leyland Badger truck was reconstructed and driven from Sturts Stony Desert near Birdsville to the Birdwood motor museum in 1999.
 

Tom's story was first chronicled in the iconic John Heyer film 'The back of beyond' - the film won the Absolute Grand Prize in the Venice Film Festival in 1954 and was nominated for the1955 BAFA for Best Documentary Film.

The film encompasses a period between the exploration and opening up of the country and the contemporary -  the Afghan Bejah in the film was the cameleer on the Madigan Expedition into the Simpson Desert in 1939.

Of the stories within the film, the most moving has to be the re-telling of the two young sisters Sally & Roberta who left their home on the Track to walk to the nearest neighbour with only their spaniel dog and billy-cart with a demi-jar of water. The sequence when they come across their own tracks, dreamily accompanied by Roberta playing a flute, is made all the more wrenching by Sally concealing the significance of their disorientation as they continue into unending dunes. Later their father returns and searches for them till their tracks disappear under the windblown sand.