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

Originally Posted by rick130

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

Alf Tranby-White of Tranby Station, via Winton drove a Holden ute from Winton to Perth, shipped it to South Africa then drove it to Tranby, Yorkshire for a family reunion. I don't know how he crossed the Mediterranean or whether he went via Israel and Turkey. This was late 1950's. Almost no information exists on this mighty endeavour.

My old Hillman Avenger, like the one pictured, used to drag a trailer full of firewood through muddy paddocks.....

Originally Posted by scarry

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.

It bugs be no end and is absolutely ridiculous that Qld, the NT and WA won't recognise my NSW quals and demand one of their restricted electrical licences.
We still did cross bother incursions but are careful of what we do.

Funnily enough I'm deemed safe and competent in NSW, ACT, SA and Tassie.
Go figure.

My first two trips across Australia were in one of these! Ha ha!

VIC > all over WA > VIC
VIC > NT incl Kakadu > VIC.

At the time many others were doing the lap in Ford and Holden wagons.

If course I always yearned after a Land Rover or Toyota Troopie! But the Gemini was pretty awesome. Needed a new engine in Broome! But other than that and the rust holes in the boot it was super reliable and I learned how to drive off road carefully!

Great memories.

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I thought this thread was going to be about the story behind Northern Safari.

I have read the book and the watched DVD numerous time - never get sick of it.

it's really is an amazing story. A guy called Keith Adams, his wife, his wife's sister and a fox terrier dog take off across Australia.

He rebuild the gearbox in the middle of the bush, shot crocs to sell the skins to get money and the ingenious method of making a winch out of bush materials to retrieve the bogged Buick from a creek was amazing.

Oh yeah, I did all that too. 😇

Originally Posted by rick130

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

Ground clearance counts for a lot, my mate towed a Land-Rover out of a sandy river bed in Rhodesia with a 3rd generation Chev C10 pick up truck, which is only 2 wheel drive, but had tall wheels, Chev did make a 4WD version called a K10.

I think you are absolutely right - ground clearance is the major requirement, which is almost completely unavailable in 'normal' cars today.

For much of the period about 1960 - 2000, many of my rural friends and relatives laughed at UK origin cars because of their low ground clearance (and vulnerable bits underneath), prferring mostly Australian built cars for this reason. I became aware of the change about 25 years ago - when one of my sisters grandsons, having finished his apprenticeship as a diesel mechanic, bought his first new car, a top line Falcon ute. He brought it out to his grandmother's farm to show her - and knocked a hole in the sump crossing the creek, on a road he had driven his earlier (i.e.older!) cars on ever since he had been old enough to reach the pedals. Same place one of his aunts knocked a hole in the sump of a Morris Minor, and where another aunt did the same in a Morris 1500.

And when we think about needing wide tyres for outback travel, it might be worth considering that for at least twenty, and probably thirty years, the car most used in the bush, and generally successfully compared to others, was the Ford T - on 3.5" tyres. But with over 12" clearance and 30" diameter tyres.