Patrol's 60th Simpson crossing anniversary

IT HAS been 60 years since the first motorised vehicle crossing of the vast Simpson Desert was achieved, not in a Toyota LandCruiser as many may think, but in a Nissan (Datsun) Patrol.

Decent four-wheel drives were thin on the ground back in the early 1960s until the likes of Toyota and Nissan arrived.

Land Rover was here, but the old Landy was a somewhat agricultural beast that you wouldn’t want to drive across the continent.

Crossing Australia back then would have been a daunting prospect given the lack of roads, rudimentary maps, the level of mechanical reliability in vehicles at the time and the sheer distances involved.

There was no sat-nav, no satellite phones, fuel supplies – apart from what was carried – were non-existent, accommodation was sparse and emergency assistance was simply not available.

With the arrival en-masse of Japanese vehicles locally in the early ‘60s came a swag of Nissans, sold under the Datsun brand name at the time. Among them was the Patrol G60, a competitor for Toyota’s LandCruiser.

Like the Toyota, the G60 earned a reputation for near ‘bullet proof’ reliability and a go-anywhere drivetrain that range a bell with Australian buyers. Engineering companies were the first to see the benefits and bought both the G60 and J Series Toyota by the truckload. Both vehicles looked eerily similar at the time.

However, it was the Nissan G60 that achieved the feat of being the first motorised vehicle to make a crossing of the vast Simpson Desert 60 years ago this week achieved by the Sprigg family in 1962.

Today, Doug Sprigg is approaching 70, but he was just seven years old when he, his sister Marg, and his parents Reg and Griselda, all squeezed into the front seat of their G60 and set off from Andado Station in the Northern Territory for a two-week journey across the seemingly endless sands of the Simpson.

The adventure would eventually end at Birdsville in Queensland, earning the Sprigg family – and the G60 Nissan Patrol – a permanent place in Australia’s record books. The family completed the journey on September 11, 1962.

The size and scale of the endeavour can’t be overstated. The Simpson Desert is the largest parallel sand dune desert in the world, stretching more than 170,000 square kilometres and touching the Northern Territory, Queensland and South Australia.

With no real tracks or maps to follow, the family averaged just 5km/h on their journey.

Saltbush crops that dot the desert presented more than just a driving obstacle – in the searing heat of the desert, they were a real fire danger due to the hot exhaust pipe any time the G60 would get momentarily beached on a sand dune.

And when a 200-litre drum of petrol is included in your cargo, fire risks can be a tad scary.

According to Mr Sprigg, there was plenty of breathtaking scenery to take their minds off the challenging task at hand — and young Doug even had a unique place to view it from.

“I have such fond memories of that G60. It was such a robust and reliable vehicle. I was even shorter then than I am now, and Nissan had even provided me a way of seeing forward – through the air vents below the windscreen.

“With four of us sitting across the front seat, a 200-litre drum of fuel in the back, and a 200-litre drum of water, the vehicle was pretty heavily loaded, so I got to see the scenery through the air vents, but the big sand dunes coming up I could see through the windshield.”

By day, the family would track across the desert, and each night they would camp beneath the stars. Mr Sprigg says his mum, Griselda, made sure the family was well supplied and ready for anything.

“Mum was the one that did a lot of the preparations. They were an amazing team. Without mum, dad wouldn’t have been anywhere near as successful,” he said.

“And the vehicle was magnificent. Every other vehicle had significant problems, with gearboxes in particular, or with differentials, but the Nissan never had any issues. And it was punished – Dad believed that vehicles had to work for their living.”

Doug is now the second-generation owner of the Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary – hidden deep in South Australia’s red-dirt outback, some eight hours drive from Adelaide – after his father, famed Australian scientist Reg Sprigg, fell in love with the property.

“Dad used his four-wheel drives to go and explore different parts of the country and one of the places he came to in 1937, as a geology student, was Arkaroola. He fell in love with it, and later he went to the state government and tried to convince them to buy it as a National Park,” he said.

“Parks wasn’t interested, so eventually he bought it in 1968, and it’s been about the same ever since. There is nowhere quite like this — a 144,000-acre property, and it has an amazing diversity of geology, animals and plants in these arid lands.”

Nissan caught up with Mr Sprigg – already a verified Patrol Legend – at Arkaroola with a perfectly restored G60 Patrol to celebrate the anniversary of that momentous crossing. It was a reunion of man and machine that unlocked plenty of powerful memories.

The G60 details would be considered downright primitive by today’s standards. It used a separate ladder chassis with a bolted-on body and crude leaf spring suspension front and rear. Brakes were drums all round with no power-assistance and the gearbox was a three-speed manual.

The 4x4 system was via a two-speed transfer-case and part time front-axle engagement, giving the driver a choice of 2H, 4H and 4L. There we no free-wheeling front hubs or limited-slip differentials.

The vehicle was severely limited by its three-speed manual transmission with four speeds appearing a few years later.

Power came from a grunty, 4.0-litre in-line six-cylinder petrol engine with no diesel available at the time. The engine was fed by a single carburettor had pushrod valve operation and made respectable power and torque with a claimed 108kW and 319Nm.