The expedition
The British Museum (Natural History) had lost most of its Australian bird material when the Rothschild and Mathews collections were sold to the United States. J. D. Macdonald, head of the Bird Room, had led a museum expedition to South West Africa in 1949 and through his African connections learned of Harold Hall, an Australian who had made his money at the Mount Morgan goldfields and was interested in natural history. In the early 1960s Macdonald secured £25,000 from him, £5,000 a year for five years, enough to equip and mount five expeditions from London. The plan, set out by Pat Hall in the 1974 report, was that each would consist of about six people travelling in three Land Rovers, some from the museum and some from Australian museums, each lasting about six months, and each ending where the next could start: Perth to Brisbane, Brisbane to Melbourne, Melbourne to Perth through the deserts, then two loops out of Perth.
The expeditions were fitted out in London with three long-wheelbase Land Rovers, tents and camping equipment, nearly all of which lasted the whole six years. Help came from the War Office, the Rover Company and Martin Walter Ltd, who fitted two of the Land Rovers with Dormobile roofs; members slept in the camping tops of the vehicles. For the central-desert expedition a Traeger transceiver was added, with instruction from the Royal Flying Doctor Service at Port Augusta. The vehicles and equipment were unloaded at Perth on 12 November 1962 and camp made on Dom Serventy's property at Gooseberry Hill. The 1st Expedition (Macdonald, with G. S. Cowles, P. R. Colston, Dr Betty Macdonald as doctor and cook, and the Australians Allan McEvey and Bill Middleton) crossed the Eyre Highway to Adelaide, collected at Nelson on the Glenelg estuary, in western Victoria, at Albury, Dunedoo, Grafton and Tenterfield in New South Wales, then worked west from Brisbane through Roma, Langlo Crossing, Thylungra and Monkira on the Diamantina. At Tyrone homestead near Langlo Crossing in May 1963 the party collected the new species later named Hall's babbler. Late rain closed the Birdsville Track, so the party returned to Brisbane in June 1963, where two Land Rovers were stored; the third was driven to Melbourne.
The 2nd Expedition (I. C. J. Galbraith, February–August 1964) worked northern Queensland from Glendower station near Hughenden through Glenore, Moonlight Creek and Wernadinga on the Gulf, Inkerman, Ayton south of Cooktown, Tully and Mount Dryander, then drove to Melbourne. The 3rd (Pat Hall, March–September 1965, with Derek Goodwin, Cowles and, for the first month, General Sir Gerald Lathbury) was the desert crossing: Gawler Ranges, Aroona Valley in the Flinders, Innamincka, Cordillo Downs, the Birdsville Track, Oodnadatta, Kingoonya, the Nullarbor at Eucla and Cocklebiddy, then from Perth up the Warburton track to Warburton Mission, Giles weather station, and west along Len Beadell's Gunbarrel Highway through the Gibson Desert to Carnegie station and Perth, where Faull's Motors stored the Land Rovers. The 4th (Colin Harrison, February–June 1966) worked the south-west forests, Newdegate, the Chichester Range and Karratha in the Pilbara and Bush Bay south of Carnarvon. The 5th (Major B. D. MacDonald Booth, April–November 1968, with D. J. Freeman, Clifford Frith, R. A. Whistler, Harry Butler and A. Hiller) had the vehicles overhauled at Derby, worked the Kimberley from Mount Anderson to Mount Elizabeth, Lake Gladstone and Wyndham, then with four members in two Land Rovers went on to Pine Creek, Darwin, Oenpelli in Arnhem Land, the Roper and McArthur rivers and Borroloola, and drove home through Tennant Creek and Alice Springs across the Nullarbor to Perth on 25 November 1968 after 16,500 miles.
The fund also paid for two South Australian Museum expeditions in 1963 and 1964 and for Clifford Frith's collecting in northern Queensland in 1970. In all 4,709 study skins, 786 skeletons and 910 fluid specimens went to London. Results appeared in a numbered series of papers and in Birds of the Harold Hall Australian Expeditions 1962–70, edited by Pat Hall (1974). The expeditions were opposed by some in Australia on nationalistic and conservation grounds, and Macdonald, keeping a promise to Hall, retired to Brisbane in 1968 to write Birds of Australia. What became of the three Land Rovers after 1968 is not recorded in the report.
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