Thread: French Line Anniversary - no interest from LR

An interesting post on the OL forum: Overlander 4WD • View topic - Tell Me How You Would Cope

Originally Posted by French Line Veteran

Yesterday the LandRover Media outfit advised me by phone they were not interested in any involvement with me and my friends in anything to do with the Simpson Desert, even though the 50th anniversary of the French Line construction was getting closer.

Hard to believe, isn't it? Some 20 x Series II LRs helped us get through in our gigantic three month attack on the dunes that has lasted to this day for many thousands of our followers.

Our efforts, that of CGG Party S6507 in particular, have often been undervalued and sometimes pointed in favour of other parties and even other roads at other times when it suits. I remember writing on my website about the people who walk, run, drive whatever - the French Line, with their water bottles in hand and interviewed on camera and say nought about the surface of the track beneath their feet and how it might have got there. Scratched by aborigines with sticks, was it? Well, we don't need to know, do we? It is people like LandRover who will perpetuate myths, if we let them.

Those readers who remember my writings from years ago will recall my affront on learning a prominent map maker declared the history of the French involvement in cracking the Simpson consisted of a French Boeing 707 bringing in the workers and surreptitiously, carting away the dead bodies. All the while ignoring I ran the RFDS box and never had a fatality.

Originally Posted by p38arover

Just to clarify, John, were you working with the same company and did the other crew have many Landies?

The poster you quoted was apparently working for Compangie General de Geophysique, a French geophysical contractor working for French Petroleum (hence the "French Line") in South Australia. They used Landrovers as their primary light vehicles. I was working as party chief of one of two crews belonging to Austral Geo Prospectors, and American owned (but almost entirely Australian manned) geophysical contractor doing work for Amerada in the Northern Territory. As the prospecting permit we were working in stopped short of the Qld border, we had no communication to the east. As far as I am aware, most if not all CGG's light vehicles were Landrovers, probably, however, only about half a dozen. They had a variety of heavy vehicles, including a trial (complete flop) of Nodwell tracked carriers.

John