Jeremy Clarkson Australia Motorworld 1996

[Music] mrs hode has been into town for the groceries [Music] but silly mrs hoda's forgotten the salt she's got to go back and that may take a while because the nearest shop is 281 miles away everything i can see from here and a whole lot more besides is one farm it covers 13 000 square kilometers that's the same size as devon cornwall dorset and avon one farm and when you get to the far end of it there's another farm which is even bigger and then another and then another and it's the same story in every direction for a thousand miles if i were to drive from here to the nearest big city alice springs it would take 18 hours for european this is just unbelievable the australian outback is about the same size as mainland america but it has the population of leeds to get anywhere you have to fly cars well they're just the guys spend a fair bit of time on the cars and that sort of thing and they come out here get rid of a lot of aggression that we build up in town in town oh yeah it wouldn't call it a town it's a stressful city yeah say it's 25 000 people it's got to be stressful hey living in the middle of australia stressful trust me you make your own sport your own entertainment you have to there's nothing else here they're brilliant cars with 36 inches of suspension travel and highly tuned toyota engines how long have you got out here then if you've lost without water i'd say 30 years at the maximum in the summertime which is now which is meaningful how far is it from where we're standing now which is by your station to the nearest pub um our classes uh pub is uh which is overall that is there is a hotel is um top springs 150 kilometers from here so you can't just pop out in the evening for a drink not really that's a bit fair now what about the guys that come up here to to muster the cattle i mean they're young fit triangular torsoed bronze guys i mean i haven't seen too many loose single women kicking around no no what happens is usually we do have a few females we usually like to have um some you know there's female domestics or what have you providing they're not married and they used to fall in love very quickly this is a bit of a dating agency yes yes it's not quite the romantic idea that a lot of the girls have when they come is it enormous by australian standards this one i think it's about the the second biggest in the northern territory anyway oh yes it is big how many cows are there well we've just um got over just a shade over forty thousand lady at the present time forty thousand always quite so high tech this old wreck is one of the few survivors from the early pioneering days it's a bit beaten up now but strangely its owner was more concerned about how he looked you only stand on a boxer and do a bloody shorty look like charlie dre amazingly this old car is a rolls royce so what were they doing bringing status symbols out here didn't make any difference when you go 10 miles out in the sticks no one sees it anyway so as long as you had plenty of um under the bonnet it was the main thing for getting over sandhills let the top back tyres down about 10 pounds and you could just tackle about any sand hill with it so in other words they were looking for a rolls royce because it's the toughest car you could get your hands on convert it into australian spec and that was the ideal thing and saw the prestige well more or less here yeah it was a mainly practicality point of views not only with rolls royce but very uh numerous other cars model t's ships uh to get up from adelaide you just didn't even consider coming to central australia unless you took the back off put the wooden tray on the back loaded up as much gear food water and everything else as you possibly could that head up that 1 600 kilometer trip what's with the light and the gun racks and things on it in the late 40s eddie can allen started tours here in a place called wildman river in the northern territory he used to fly up people from alice springs and for three and six months a day you could crock a shoot or buffalo shoot and this was the vehicle was used for taking the people out on the back of the tray there the light of course was obviously for crocodile shooting and you have a rolfer rack on the side here for a couple of 303s there's an espana squeezer i've seen up here as well that had a perkins diesel in it and that also was used for bush trips so it really was a question if you had to buy the toughest and if it was a rolls royce well what the hell in the first part i would tell you before land rovers and toyotas dominate the territory certainly camels are notoriously unimpressed by flash cars if you want to catch one you need two things four wheel drive and a lobotomy this is the kind of bus i mean it but absolutely no man it's been before we're 100 miles from alex springs there we look what it does to people when you live out here look ahead [Music] keep saying benzene is fancy knees they're bent practice coming in here happens when we catch the cattle or the plan is gun here denmark's only camel catcher is gonna oh hold on that's that tree he's gonna get on the running board and literally what they call it bulldogging he's just gonna leap off the vehicle and grab it around his neck and wrestle it to the ground well the first attempt was a failure perhaps because it had been a two-hour chase during which time we'd rip through the bush at up to 80 miles an hour having our hands and faces torn apart by passing trees the second attempt was also a failure but gunn had had enough of being battered to death in the land cruiser he was going to take on mr camel man to man [Music] this is a good one alright yeah it's a good little ball yeah not a bad looking little bull he's a tough old bird isn't he but he did very well and you know they say people are supposed to look like they're dogs don't you think there's i don't know i think that words exactly look it's all right they've got lots of food and everything there's no veal protesters where you're going he'll be all right [Music] you know what the outback is it's a giant adventure playground you can have some serious fun out here here 2 700 feet down there are machines which have never and will never see the light of day in one mine there are 300 miles of roads and that means the only way to get about is in a car they're used for getting men machinery and explosives to the face and then getting the hell out as fast as their governed engines and doctored gearboxes will allow not surprisingly they don't last very long a big part of its driver abuse they just get in there kill the vehicles i've got to fix them up again then they're off again uh nickel is another thing just the corrosion it eats away absolutely everything it touches without the big it's been washed every day [Music] i've got five land cruisers and two land rovers uh the land rovers the biggest trouble we have with them they keep breaking in half uh the suspension keeps falling out everything keeps falling out on them the nickel seems to see everything away the land rovers have been down here just on two years now i think they've already spent over a hundred thousand dollars on one of them not looking at it you wouldn't think so it is in fact a toyota though that holds the record for the shortest life span down here the lowest i've ever seen is three hours it was driven underground parked in a in a bay and then run over by a 50-ton truck on average they spend 4 000 pounds a month keeping each car going but that's okay because this area is well known as the richest square mile in the world miners can earn 75 000 pounds a year and that brings them flocking from all over the planet and that in turn makes the town of kalgoorlie the world epicenter of pecks and pints square passes by are kept up to date with international gold prices and on tv there are commercials for hasuute blokey things like water pumps and dig with adverts as bad as that on tv it's small wonder that people go out more here and because they go out there's more of a community spirit and because there's more of a community spirit things get done especially when there's stuff like that lying around all over town and things needed to be done because until a few years ago kalgoorlie was an industrial-sized time bomb there's something like about 30 40 containers of cyanide going through moving through that street every day in conjunction with all the other cocktails if you had an lp gas truck hit an explosive truck i wouldn't know what to do flatten the whole area without permission the townsfolk built themselves at bypass oh we did it in three days but in fairness it wasn't sealed in that time but it was a very serviceable fully formed traffickable road for heavy people and how did you get rid of official then oh i think doug he um spoke to a few and suggested maybe they get out of town for the weekend and he kept it all secret yeah yes very secret you had to why's that because as we thought we would have been stopped by the local authorities which we would have made stop by the local targets this is newberry in reverse the whole town got involved it's challenge annika gone mad i mean there was a lot of support in people turned up with all sorts of gear and food and drinks and it was a marvelous event and this brought the town together there's no question of it in fact it's still talked about when there's something that needs to be done at the council or in one of the local communities where somebody's standing on the hose as we say here in australia they say well we've got to get the rebel road builders in they'll sort it out it's and it's become almost part of the local uh idiom get the rebel road builders they'll sort it out [Music] every miner every farmer every housewife every single person we've met in the australian outback drives a toyota it may not have the land rover's twin airbag system but what are you gonna hit out here it doesn't have a v8 engine either but so what it's reliable and frankly nothing else matters [Music] i'm a huge fan of the discovery but three of the four that we've been using out here have been showing signs of senile dementia one turned us hazard warning lights on and then even when we offered it money wouldn't turn them off again another one kept refusing to start it's such a shame because they're such good cars they're just not built well enough to handle life out [Music] here land rover's market share has recently crept back up to 17 but that's almost entirely due to their popularity in the cities if i lived in australia i wouldn't drive a land rover and one of the reasons is i wouldn't drive anything at all in the massive northern territories there are no speed limits what's the point of paying a policeman to sit around in 140 degree heat being eaten by spiders just in case the one car he sees all week is going too fast the novelty though of being allowed to do 130 140 miles an hour wears off after about three minutes just as you pass a sign saying adelaide 1950 kilometers driving in australia is so boring that you long for a bullying animal to bounce out into the road in front of you and do something interesting yesterday i considered having a crash just for something to do i'll tell you driving it what the hell was that does 1.3 miles to the gallon each cylinder is 3.1 liters and its stopping distance is measured in light years always had a love affair with the truck so it's only right and proper that an australian should have been the one to take the concept to the limits of what's possible [Music] to build a road train i took a load of young stud bulls out to property about 200 miles out and they were so pleased with the results chaplain over ted dixon he said why can't you build a truck that'll carry 100 head instead of just 20 that's what i suppose i could but i haven't got that sort of money he said well there's a couple thousand pounds here anytime you wanted and this is what you built yes how long did it take about two years it took about six months for each trailer to build the modern tracks that one gets these days the max and the canvas have got sort of bunk beds and air conditioning yeah women it's all mod cons oh yeah old mod cars in you must feel quite proud these days as you're going around australia and seeing countless road trains now yes it's it's quite a lift to the ego particularly when i used to be ridiculed about even attempting such a thing northern australia would starve normal trains can get from adelaide to alice springs but then the tracks stop and all the containers have to go the rest of the way by road first though they've got to get out of alice springs [Music] how on earth do you drive something this enormous through a town well you sort of uh try and keep your wits to you a bit and keep your eyes out for other traffic and make sure they don't get on the inside of your to whichever direction you're turning because you'll run over them and up here we're going to turn at the set of lights and we'll be turning left sometimes you sort of have to hop the wrong line a bit but people understand or they soon get the message you can see here i'm going right out wide to my right and um look at that many around so we made it yeah it's as maneuverable as a sports car so these roundabouts have got special bits on them for road trains are they yes is that why they like this yeah to let the road trains drive across the middle of them to allow us here to get through on the massive journeys many drivers use drugs to stay alert but the guys at tanner my transport are a bit more responsible when you're out on the road how do you just not fall asleep you do get tired and i think that's where a lot of willpower comes into it when the time does come when you can't concentrate enough you do you just pull over for a while and have an hour off in the bunk or what about some guys they read though oh well not so much with us but you hear of the freight guys that haul freight from here a lot of them read they just drive along with a good one not always but just at times an awful lot of wildlife in outback australia yeah oh yes you have birds kangaroos never spend your entire life mowing them down some nights you tend to hit many of them sometimes maybe up to 20 a night or something like that and what happens to them well they burst i was in a lot of them do and make a terrible mess on the vehicle what about emus you ever had one yeah yes we've had one there and one that i hit was full of worms [Music] i'm not the only truck on the road there's probably another 20 or 30 of the whole road so you can imagine that it does add up to a lot of bodies on the road over each night the good thing though is that they're very unlikely to run over a person amazing isn't it that the most notable piece of television to emerge from this wilderness continent is a program called neighbours you

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Length: 23min 34sec (1414 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 07 2020