Thread: AULRO Book Club: 'On the Road'

Crossing the Dead Heart, C.T. Madigan, 1946,1948, 1974, possibly since then as well.

Account of the first crossing of the Simpson, probably should be compulsory reading for anyone planning a crossing (together with "Where Dead men Lie").
Since the crossing was in 1939, it did not use a Landrover - in fact it did not use any sort of car - they used camels.

John

Originally Posted by Numpty's Missus

John,

Picked up on your cameo appearance in the book.

And...

you were wrong weren't you?

They DID make it

yes, stopped at our camp halfway across and made extensive use of our workshop facilities!

Originally Posted by JDNSW

yes, stopped at our camp halfway across and made extensive use of our workshop facilities!

That was supposed to have a picture! Try again.

Still didn't work! I give up!

OK, fourth try! Actually I have realised what the problem was - the file had no suffix - Unix does not worry about this, but AULRO obviously does!

John

Originally Posted by numpty

That's a great read. Am trying to get a copy of it, there seems to be a few around. Amazing where they went and with so little trouble.

http://www.firstoverland.com/index.html

you can buy a copy of it through the first overland webpage... and I met the 5 surviving fellows when they revisited Singapore to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the feat

Originally Posted by Numpty's Missus

John,
After reading "where dead men lie" plus "first overland" and all of Len Beadells books, I wonder if the leylands were ratbag drivers or just pure and simply had incredible bad luck to do the number of diffs that they did...

I reckon the problem with the Leylands was that they had the LWB Land Rover heavily overloaded, and they were towing a heavily overloaded trailer off road. It was the LWB that broke all the diffs.

For six people they should have had 3 LWB utes, not a LWB, a SWB and a massive trailer. Very poor judgement IMHO.

Originally Posted by Numpty's Missus

John,
After reading "where dead men lie" plus "first overland" and all of Len Beadells books, I wonder if the leylands were ratbag drivers or just pure and simply had incredible bad luck to do the number of diffs that they did.

BTW...have now seen the pic...and I do understand why you thought they would not make it. Was that track north you suggested to them the Colson Track?

As Michael2 says, their problem was they were overloaded. Grossly!

I don't know which track is the Colson track - I have not been back there since any of them had names.

John

The Way of the Chariots

Barbara Toy , London 1964

From the Niger River to Libya via the Sahara in a Series 1 in about 1960, driven by a woman alone. Also any of her other books (this is the only one I have found) "A fool on Wheels", "A fool in the Desert", "A fool Strikes Oil", Columbus was right!", "In search of Sheba".

John