While our editors traverse the country to find the best content for those magazines, we find other oddities related to the old-car hobby that we really had no place for - until now. With this blog, we're giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what we see and what we do during the course of putting out some of the finest automotive magazines you'll ever read.
Australia's Cape York, which reaches to the northernmost point of the continent, might not be an adventure on the order of, say, the Darien Gap, but it still required considerable fortitude, resources and daring in the Seventies, as we can see in this pair of documentaries detailing two different trips. The first, shown below, followed the Leyland brothers in their Land Rovers in 1972 (and for a brief bit in their caravans!) while the second (see it here), in 1975, tells the story of the Needhams in their Land Cruisers (with a baby in tow!). Plenty of contemporary off-roaders make the trip, of course, and treat the peninsula like their off-roading playground, but 50 years ago, it took a good deal more planning and effort.
Re: Video: To Tackle Australia's Cape York, Take the Land Rover or the Land Cruiser?
06/24/2021 6:45 AM
Yes the Leyland Brothers really did it tough, like when they came through our camp at an oil drilling rig in the desert, the whole 26 vehicle convoy as they struggled on "alone in the wilderness"!
Re: Video: To Tackle Australia's Cape York, Take the Land Rover or the Land Cruiser?
06/26/2021 8:42 AM
You saw them also!.
They did "play it up" more than a little to help create the interest in the programs they were delivering. If there were no challenges, then the audience would have dropped.
It was all marketing, including the not-so-subtle references to their particular brand of tyres, their references to the vehicle supplied by .... their gas cookers, sleeping bags, caravan suspension rebuild and so on.
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Just an Engineer from the land down under.
Re: Video: To Tackle Australia's Cape York, Take the Land Rover or the Land Cruiser?
