THE LONG WAY ROUND

There is a great tradition of overland trips by Land-Rover, but the tale of this 70s Aussie epic and the car itself was discovered by chance

- ED FOSTER

The Nullarbor Plain on the southern edge of Australia is truly enormous. Its dusty, flat tentacles stretch from the gold fields of Western Australia right down to the Eyre Peninsula in the south.

Running along its coastal edge is the longest, straightest and flattest road in the country, some 780 miles' worth of Tarmac.

Fifty-two years ago, my father, mother and three friends crossed the Plain in a longwheelbase 2.25-litre petrol Land-Rover, as part of a 10,000-mile trip around the country.

By 1972, the 1964 Series IIA was an experienced veteran, having done a similar trip (again with my father) the year before. It was also used by Sydney University's geological college in the 1960s, during which time it circumnavigated the five-million-square-mile country twice.

Within eight years of arriving in Australia, the car had covered more than 150,000 miles.

Remembering the trip half a century later, my mother remarked: "The Nullarbor Plain was particularly bad. It was literally just dust! We went for days without seeing anyone. We needed to have the front vents open to let the air in because it was so hot, but then you got covered in the dust." A friend, Margie Adamson, had written home about the first week on the trip. 'We have only passed three towns,' she wrote, 'with no more than just a garage and a motel. It's just miles and miles of desert and shrub.' The first I knew about the Australian LandRover trips must have been in the early 1990s.

Idly rummaging through my father's workshop aged 10 or so, I came across an old suitcase.

In it was a snakeskin, a small stuffed crocodile and packets of photos. I was mesmerised. The full story has taken another 30 years to piece together - and to come full circle, because the car that crossed the Nullarbor Plain all those years ago is now my daily driver. Sadly, my father died a few years ago, and never got to see the Land-Rover's return to the UK in 2022.