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CAWOOD, STANLEY WALTER (STAN) (1907– ), pastoral worker, driver, forester, timber mill manager,
transport and shipping officer, cafe and theatre manager, road transport operator and businessman, was born in
Bellingen, New South Wales, on 8 March 1907, the son of John Charles Cawood, one time Government Resident
of Central Australia. After primary schooling at Bellingen and De La Salle College in Armidale, New South Wales,
he went to Saint Joseph’s College, Hunters Hill in Sydney, for his secondary education. Upon leaving school he
went jackerooing on a sheep station near Moree in New South Wales and then in 1924 worked on the Widden Stud
at Muswellbrook, New South Wales, where many well-known racehorses had been bred. In 1925 he travelled to
Calcutta, India, to deliver 500 horses that were sold to an Indian Army remount depot.
Cawood was a jackeroo at Lake Nash Station, Northern Territory, for about two years and in 1927 travelled by
car with Constable Harry Allen, who was stationed at Lake Nash, to Alice Springs to see his father. Their vehicle
was only the second to travel the route via the Sandover Track.
In 1928 and 1929 Cawood drove cars for A G Bond of Bond’s Tours, Adelaide, carrying tourists on excursions
lasting several days to places such as Arltunga and Palm Valley.
In 1929 he was a member of the party that retrieved the bodies of Keith Anderson and Bob Hitchcock who
had died of thirst when their aircraft, the Kookaburra, was forced through engine failure to land in wild country
between Powell Creek and Wave Hill. They had intended to assist in the search for Charles Kingsford-Smith
and Charles Ulm who had gone missing in their aircraft Southern Cross on a stage of what was to have been a
pioneering flight to Britain. Anderson and Hitchcock were forced down in remote country to the north west of
Alice Springs on 10 April and it is thought they died a couple of days later. Their aeroplane was sighted from the
air on 21 April and a land party set out from Wave Hill Station on 24 April. It was decided to bury the bodies on the
spot. The Prime Minister, S M Bruce, however, announced that the Commonwealth would reclaim them.
A new Thornycroft truck, loaned by Thornycroft Australia at no cost to the Commonwealth government, was
sent by rail from Adelaide to Alice Springs to assist in the recovery mission. The party, which left Alice Springs on
31 May, comprised Thornycroft’s South Australian manager, Frank Nottle, driver and mechanic Les Miles from
Sydney, reporter and photographer William Berg, Mounted Constable William George Murray and Cawood,
who was cook and relief driver. On 13 June the party reached the Kookaburra.
The bodies were exhumed and placed in lead lined coffins. A rough strip was cleared so that the aircraft could
be flown out at some later date. As it happened, the Kookaburra never flew again; it was virtually ‘lost’ for nearly
50 years. A search party rediscovered its derelict remains in 1978 and they were removed to Alice Springs.
Cawood married Ethel Underdown in 1932. They had six children. Soon after his marriage he moved with Ethel
to New South Wales where he obtained a position as a forester with the New South Wales Forestry Commission
and later became a timber inspector. He was stationed at Coffs Harbour and Grafton at various times before he
moved to Carney’s Creek near Clermont in Queensland in 1940 where he was manager of a mill cutting bridge
timber for the Army. In 1941 he contracted dengue fever and was sent to Sydney. When he recovered he was
appointed to an American army supply division as a transport and shipping officer responsible for the procurement
and movement of supplies for United States forces on the mainland and in the South Pacific zone.
In 1942 he returned to Alice Springs with his wife and managed the Capital Cafe and Theatre for his
mother-in-law, Daisy Underdown.
After the war Cawood began carting copper by truck from the Home of Bullion Mine to Alice Springs.
He later transported ore from Harts Range. He converted his truck into a semi-trailer and carted beer, 60 wooden
kegs per load, from Alice Springs to Darwin in the days when Adelaide brewers supplied the Territory’s beer
requirements.
In 1949 he became a founder of the Territory Transport Association (TTA), which was formed to protect the
interests of road transport operators in the Northern Territory. In turn the TTA formed Co-Ord to undertake the
coordinated road and rail freight service between Alice Springs and Larrimah under contract to Commonwealth
Railways. He was one of the original shareholders in Co-Ord. He was also its Chairman of Directors from 1953
to 1957.
As business grew and the volume of freight increased under road and rail contracts, Cawood purchased bigger
vehicles, (Fodens), to haul two and three trailers at a time on road trains from Alice Springs to Larrimah, Mount Isa
and, occasionally, Darwin.
He perceived a bright future for tourism in the Territory and began to diversify his interests. His Co-Ord business
was operating satisfactorily with his sons Greville and Ian looking after the day-to-day freight handling and driving
requirements. So he established a company that he named Alice Springs Tours and acquired Jack Cotterill’s small
tourist business when the latter intimated that he wished to devote his energies to developing King’s Canyon as
a tourist attraction in association with an accommodation project he was planning at Wallara, south west of Alice
Springs. Cotterill had built up a small fleet of passenger vehicles to carry tourists between Alice Springs and Ayers
Rock, where Daisy Underdown had built The Chalet. Eventually Cawood took over The Chalet and combined it
with his Alice Springs Tours business.
To compete with the growing Ansett operations in the Territory, the management of Trans Australia Airlines
(TAA, later Australian Airlines) approached Cawood and several others interested in tourism with the idea of
setting up a local tour organisation that could offer a variety of tours radiating from Alice Springs, as well as
accommodation. After 20 years in freight transport he decided to sell his share in Co-Ord and in 1961 helped
form the Central Australian Tours Association (CATA) and became its first Chairman. Operators of town tours and
district tours as well as four wheel drive excursions, together with hotel and motel owners, were included in the
membership of CATA so that fully accommodated tours could be packaged by TAA in competition with Ansett.