2005 Victorian 4wd Show

Matt Barnes

February marks the beginning of the four wheel drive show season with the grand-daddy of them all, the Victorian Four Wheel Drive Show. This is put on by a dedicated group from the Land Rover Owners Club of Victoria.

I’d often heard reports of how good this show was and I’d decided that 2005 would be the year that I would find out for myself. As an added bonus, as part of the expo committee, I could also use it as a fact finding mission.

Through my “on-line” friends that frequent the AULRO forum, (AUstralian Land Rovers Online), I not only got some local knowledge of the area, but organised to meet up with some of them at the show and on the trip down. I’d also organised a few of the expo committee members who unfortunately dropped out, one by one. So in the end, it was myself and one other LROC member, Trevor Tivey that made the trip.

I wanted to do more than just the straight drive down to Wandin. I wanted to make a bit of a holiday out of it. The route we chose was to travel down to Yass on the Hume hwy, then head into the Brindabella mountains for the first night camping. Although I hadn’t been down there for about eight years, with the help of my maps and the trusty GPS, I managed to navigate my way into Macintyre’s Flat on the Goodradigbee River. I’ve stayed here a couple of times and it’s always a beautiful spot. Care was required in selecting a campsite as all of the trees in the area had been damaged by the catastrophic bushfires of two years ago and it became obvious that some of the limbs looked less than stable. No matter what you spend on a swag, they just don’t seem to offer much in the way of protection from falling branches.

The aim for the next day was to make it to Yarra Junction, where one of my AULRO mates had scouted out a bush camp for us within about 15 minutes of the Wandin four wheel drive show site. So a 5.30 am rise was planned to give us a good run through. Leaving on time, we snaked our way back up the long steep climb from our campsite at roughly 400meters above sea level, to an altitude of around 1300 meters within 2 km of camp. Our run from there was fairly straight forward along the ridge top south towards Brindabella. To the east we watched the sun rise behind Mount Coree and to the west we could see and hear the forest workers starting their day about 8km’s away. Our planned route was to continue south through the Brindabella National Park to the turnoff to Brindabella, then continue south along the Brindabella road to meet up with the Snowy Mountains hwy just west of Kiandra. From there we were to head towards Khancoban, then on to Wodonga and the Hume Hwy.

At this stage I’d like to point out the importance of paying attention to every detail on your topographical maps. They are a wealth of information and every little symbol tells a story. Having said that, our progress was abruptly halted by a “No Through Road” sign and we were directed west to Tumut. Closer inspection of the map showed a locked gate about halfway between Brindabella and the Snowy Mountains Hwy. If we had more time, we would have headed down to confirm the locked gate’s existence, but we had a long trip ahead of us and no time to spare.

Our lunch stop on the Hume hwy was at the town of Holbrook. We’d been in phone contact with our other Sydney travellers, one of them was about 15 minutes behind us and would meet us for lunch, the other was still on the other side of Yass.

“Noddy”, aka Tim, a forum member from Bondi, staked himself out near our two utes to see who they belonged to. As we approached, came over and introduced himself. Trevor, myself and our newest member of the party, Tim, in his white Defender Extreme, then headed south to Albury for fuel. Another forum member, “LRHYBRID100” aka Mark, (in his wife’s Subaru, the hybrid is still under construction), caught up with us while we milled around at the servo filling up.

We were about an hour south of Wodonga when we saw a large, silver, shaky image in the Defender’s side mirrors, gaining on us fast. Within a minute, the fifth Sydney-ite making the pilgrimage, “DEFUTE” aka Marcel, came sailing past us in his company loan car, a silver TD6 Discovery 3. He works for Premier Auto Group, hence the D3. Needless to say, he just kept on sailing and that was the last we saw of him until Sunday, he was visiting family in Victoria before the show.

It was late and dark by the time we got into Yarra junction and set up camp. Over the campfire that night was the first real face to face conversation our group had had with each other.

The next morning while we were having breakfast, our forward scout that had found our campsite for us and compiled the precise directions to lead us there in the dark, had turned up to pay us a visit and welcome us to Victoria. His name was Mick, another forum member, “D110V8”. He had a defender with a 6.5 litre V8 diesel engine.

After a slow start, we noticed that one of Trevor’s tyres had died through the night. After we had changed that and put on his “virgin” spare, we ambled into Wandin. We then got lost, rang Mick, got directions, backtracked and finally found the place.

Entering the gate of the north Wandin equestrian centre, the officials politely informed us that we were a day early, we politely explained to them that we were from Sydney and had spoken to Ken West (the head organiser), prior to our visit and were planning to camp that night. We were then directed to a gate further up the paddock where we met up with Ken and some of the other LROCV members. Ken had remembered my email and was expecting us. After a bit of a chin wag, we paid our $10 dinner fee and our $10 camping fee (they gave us admission free as we were members of an affiliated club) and were given suggestions of where to set up camp. “Pretty much anywhere, but keep your distance from the dam ‘cause we’ve seen a few black snakes down there today” was Ken’s advice.

We spent the rest of the afternoon looking around at the other vehicles that had arrived, we had a bit of a walk around the show to have an early look at the exhibitors and finally took the long walk down to the 4wd track that the club had set up for use by visitors to the show, at the bottom of the neighbouring paddock.

The amenities provided were first class and after 3 days in the driver’s seat, we all thought it would be a good idea to try out the showers before dinner. It becomes apparent when chatting with people, that they come from all over to see the Victorian 4wd show. After my shower, I met a guy in the shower shed, nothing suss, who had travelled from north of broken hill to visit the show.

The LROCV had provided a roast dinner on Saturday night for whoever wanted it, accompanied by a local band for a lousy $10. We all tucked into our dinner then returned to our camp and basically sat around talking with the Victorians until midnight. A very cold wind had whipped up since dinner and after sitting around for a couple of hours in summer attire, we were all pretty-well frozen by bedtime.

Sunday morning had a leisurely start. Out of the swag at about eight, ablutions, then over to the 1st Vermont scout tent for breakfast. A lovely, fresh bacon and egg roll. Time for a coffee and a bit of a chat, then into the show at about 9.30.

The Victorian Land Rover Owners Club certainly did a fantastic job of organising this. They had an all-day program of demonstrations which included basic recovery, winches, explanation of 4wd systems, a “jaws of life” demonstration, snake bite treatment and, burning vehicle recovery. The recovery sequence was repeated a couple of times throughout the day. There was about 144 exhibitors present on the day, ranging from 18 local, rival 4wd clubs to ride-on mowers and everything in between. During the day I’d had a bit of a chat with some of the LROCV members that came up to Sydney for Easter 2004 at Paxina, with Patrick Sutcliffe. There was talk of the LROCV returning the favour by hosting a combined LROC (syd)/LROCV trip in Victoria sometime in the near future.

Trevor and I had discussed our travelling plans for the return trip and decided that we would shoot through at about 2pm to make a run for the border before nightfall. By the time we’d said our goodbyes to all of our new found friends, our planned departure time had passed and we really had to hit the road. We stopped in Wodonga at dusk for dinner and to discuss whether to stop there for the night, in the rain, or continue on to Khancoban where Trevor knew the owners of the motel. We decided to push on through the dark, rain, kangaroos and flying creatures to Khancoban.

On arrival at the motel, at about 9pm, we were informed that Trevor’s friends had sold up about a year ago and moved up the hill to the “Queen’s Cottages”, since we were knackered, we decided to stay-put and hunt them down in the morning.

Snoring is a funny thing! When you’re a snorer yourself, you can make enough noise to scare the wildlife away for miles, but never manage to wake yourself up. I must’ve been woken by Trevor’s snoring on the other side of the room at least half a dozen times through the night. When we had awoken in the morning before breakfast I said to Trevor “gosh! (not actual word) you can snore”, to which he replied “you’re not too bad yourself”. It became evident at this stage that we had slept in shifts. My snoring would wake him; he would eventually fall asleep again, start snoring and wake me. And so the night went on.

The flying things we saw on the way to Khancoban were found to be small bats. This was demonstrated by the ex-bat that was stuck to my driving light. I could have been excused for thinking I was hallucinating on the drive in, seeing the “bat signal” projected on the clouds of fog, but luckily, this was not the case.

After breakfast, we headed up the hill to the Queens cottages to meet up with Andrew and Annie. They had met Trevor on a tag-along trip across the Simpson Desert hosted by a mate of Trevor’s who, at the time, had been in the tour business. They had lived in Khancoban for close on 30 years and, as mentioned before, had now purchased the Queen’s Cottages. This small group of bungalows were originally built to house some of the construction hierarchy during the early years of the Snowy Scheme. The Queen and Prince Phillip stayed here when they attended the opening of the Murray No1 power station, hence it was renamed the Queen’s Cottages.

After a few cuppas and more goodbyes, we headed off towards Kiandra, Cooma then back to Sydney. Both Trevor and I were running BFG mud-terrains with over 90,000kms on them. Trevor had lost one to a small stone on the way down. It was my turn on the way back. Just north of Goulburn, without warning, my rear, driver’s side tyre suddenly let go at around 110km/h on the freeway. So I too returned to Sydney with a “virgin” tyre on my vehicle. Over the next couple of days we rang around and got a great price on some new muddies from “Advance Tyre and Wheel” at Waitara. Never before have I seen a tyre outlet go to so much trouble to fit tyres correctly. Not only did they get them balanced properly, but got the torque wrench out to do the wheel nuts up to the correct torque. Good service isn’t dead after all!

I, for one will definitely return to Victoria for next years’ show. With a bit of planning we might be able to make a club trip out of it over 10 days and fit in some more four wheel driving around the snowy and the Victorian high country.

Keep an eye on the trip calendar