Thread: you dont need a Land Rover or 4WD - Northern Safari

Originally Posted by V8Ian

Capitalist! I remember cracking $20 as a second year and thinking I was a millionaire.

Hmm,maybe your showing your age....

I used to get a living away from home allowance.Iused to claim it every 6 months.

I can't remember how much it was,but it was well under $80 for 6 months.

When i got the cheque i used to think same as you,i was rich....

Funny thing was my parents lived at Daisy Hill,was called Slacks Creek,in those days,i worked in Brisbane,boarded at this ****hole,so got the allowance

I bought my first Landrover in 1962, replacing the Kombi I had at the time which did not like the severe dust in the area we were working. (I was making, I think, 130 pounds a month at the time, which was good money, so I could afford an expensive 4x4 - I think I paid 425 pounds for it)

When I returned to the field crew, which was working in the Lake Galilee area, there were several other of the blokes had their private cars, none were four wheel drive. After the wet started I remember one I had to pull out of a mudhole, but then I had to winch the Landrover out of one as well.

During the wet I got called to help a property owner on a station about forty miles away, as he had managed to get every vehicle on the place bogged - none of them were four wheel drive. Another property owner nearby owned a Landrover and one of his workers owned a Landcruiser (first one I had seen - not very useful, no low range), but apart from that none of the stations round there seemed to have any four wheel drives. Mostly large cars, either older US models or Ford Mainline utes or similar, or US style pickups, mostly IH, Ford, or Dodge.

I must be a bit younger than both of you, I started on $95/week as a first year.
It was an absolute stitch up as for the first three weeks I worked as a TA and was earning double what I ended up being paid as a first year.

My paternal grandfather had a '27 Chev 6 ute during the war years according to Dad, he used it to cart timber and water.
Pop would drive into the dry Nepean River bed at Wallacia and hand pump water into a tank and deliver it during the drought.
He'd also cut Telegraph poles and fence posts for council. I think it was Wollondilly Shire in those days, I'll have to ask mum.
Things were so tight during those rationing periods that he'd resorted to stuffing the tyres with straw.
He was doing some contract work at the big army base at Razorback near Camden and was told to look in the bushes under a big Box tree after leaving the gate.
Someone from stores had left tyres and tubes for him.

Re the Rolls as a farm ute, the ex's mum tells the story of when her now husband went to ask her father for permission to marry.
Father guessed what was up and so took the prospective suitor on a trip down the paddock to gut a sheep to work out why it died. (And test his mettle)
All in the near new Rolls.
That family had massive fine wool holdings in the New England, all sold in sixties.

In the late fifties/early sixties dad and mums family would do a lot of country touring and bush driving in their Holden's.

They reckoned the tall wheels and reasonable ground clearance worked well.
I'll have to double check the details with mum, but several weeks after one of their weekends away a story was published in one of the Sydney papers of the Sydney Land Rover club driving the same tracks and cars experiencing broken axles and damage. Dad and mum says they got three Holden's through ok, just a bit of rock stacking and careful driving.

Dad bought his first 4wd in 1971, a three year old Jeep Wagoneer.
He reckoned he was sick of getting stuck on dairy farms in Holden vans, at the time he had about 110 dairies on his books.
My uncle followed with a new Series III SWB about two years later

Originally Posted by scarry

Hmm,maybe your showing your age....

I used to get a living away from home allowance.Iused to claim it every 6 months.

I can't remember how much it was,but it was well under $80 for 6 months.

When i got the cheque i used to think same as you,i was rich....

Funny thing was my parents lived at Daisy Hill,was called Slacks Creek,in those days,i worked in Brisbane,boarded at this ****hole,so got the allowance

You got paid in $$ ? PM Menzies paid me in pounds and shillings.

Originally Posted by V8Ian

Capitalist! I remember cracking $20 as a second year and thinking I was a millionaire.

Somehow I have retained a pay slip from my second year apprenticeship when the apprentice supervisor outposted me to Fairymead sugar mill to get more varied training and experience. Quite common then to outpost country apprentices where their master's business didn't have the range of work required to fill in their logbooks. For two weeks it was the LSD equivalent of $31.32 which included some overtime and a $2.50 bonus whose reason escapes me after 60 years. First year pay was less than five pounds weekly.

A friend was apprenticed as a boilermaker at Evans Deakin shipyard. He was initially employed as a junior labourer for three months and then apprenticed. He told me pay went from four pounds something as a labourer to two pounds fifteen shillings as a first year boilie.

Originally Posted by Bigbjorn

Somehow I have retained a pay slip from my second year apprenticeship when the apprentice supervisor outposted me to Fairymead sugar mill to get more varied training and experience. Quite common then to outpost country apprentices where their master's business didn't have the range of work required to fill in their logbooks. For two weeks it was the LSD equivalent of $31.32 which included some overtime and a $2.50 bonus whose reason escapes me after 60 years. First year pay was less than five pounds weekly.

A friend was apprenticed as a boilermaker at Evans Deakin shipyard. He was initially employed as a junior labourer for three months and then apprenticed. He told me pay went from four pounds something as a labourer to two pounds fifteen shillings as a first year boilie.

Ha they were the biggest joke of all time.
I still have a couple here.
We filled them in every 6 months or so with all sorts of.......well,whatever we wanted to fill them in with.

My Boss in those days used to say put as much electrical stuff in you can fit,must be all 3 phase,or they will try to only give you an appliance repair guys electrical ticket.
We did mostly 3 phase gear anyway,so that was OK,but trying to remember what we had done during the last 6 months was absolutely impossible.