Nullabor Adventures

I am starting this thread to give anyone that might have had an "Adventure" on the old Nullabor 'gravel' Road

I have a few of my own but am a bit short of time at the moment..........so who wants to be first.

Daz

Never done it
But have it on the list to do even though now it sealed

....travelled across the Nullarbor Plain in 1981 on the big odyssey around Australia in the VF Safari wagon : :

....all bloody bitumen and got nowhere near the old road :'( :'(...ah well, it was still great fun as a 22 year old


......although there were plenty of other old roads that near shook the old girl to pieces!!

The first time I headed to Perth from Melbourne was in 1970 (a few months after migrating to Oz from Switzerland) in this:





The diff blew up in the Chrysler on the badly corrugated road in the Nullabor, and my friend towed it to Perth (1000 miles) on a short wire rope (that I couldn't see because of the long bonnet) with his Landrover

...you bloody Switzerlanders would do something just like that! ....the poor old girl was 40 years old! : :......''it's a Chrysler car and i demand it will take me from A to B''

....all things back in the day seemed fraught with worry, but you gotta look back and laugh at all the things we put ourselves through ....

...thanks for the stories thus far Globi...keep em all coming...cheers mate

The first time I crossed the Nullabor was Xmas 1966.
I was 1 of 2 passenger drivers in a mates 1962 Falcon. The three of us were in the RAAF at Laverton Vic and were travelling home to Perth on leave.
The gravell started at Ceduna and from memory continued on to around Baladonia.......there was quite a lot of the new formation on the WA side but wasnt sealed. There was no road crews at work .........I suppose they were home for Xmas.........and we did ' illegally' try out parts of this new work when it got close to the old road.
We drove no stop and I think it wouldnt have taken 3 days. The most vivid memory of the trip was at about midnight east of Ivy Tanks. There was heaps of traffic out there and the dust was horrendous. You could from time to time see the lights of the car in front and also the lights of the car behind. You couldnt slow down and let the dust settle a bit as that would allow the car behind to overtake you and then you would have that cars dust. There was I suppose about 4 or 5 miles between the car in front and the one behind........plus the occasional car heading east. When we got to Ivy Tanks we did walk off the road about 100 metres and there was no dust. There was absolutely no wind so the dust just hung above the road.
It was day time when we passed Balladonia homestead and we drove off the road about 1/2 a mile to a water hole and had a swim to wash the dust off. The inside of the car was totally full of dirt.........no aircon and even at night too hot to drive with the windows down.
I returned to Laverton by train..........not that I didnt want to drive it was just that I didnt have as much leave as the other two guys so had to be back before them.

More to follow...........Ive been across at least a dozen times since then.

I managed to be able to hitch hike over the paddock from Port Augusta all the way to Perth, this would have been in about early 1966. The road to the West was tar up to about 60-70 mile past Ceduna, there was an Abor-a-ginal reserve/camp out about that far, you had to turn of the highway and head North to get to this reserve. That

Good yarn Greenie. What about the Navy boys...did they beat their ship?

Tacho, never found out whether they did or didn't.

regards greenie [smiley=vrolijk_1.gif]

Hey Greenie, These two photos were taken from Ray Gilleland's old 16mm film that he shot back in the mid 1950's on his trips to the west ..... I guess this is very similar to what you describe in your yarn.

Bit of moisture on the road


The 'new' road goes off to the right behind the car