JACK DOBSON

Down Under Dobbo

“Having grown up scrabbling in muddy driveways, a carport seems an extravagance”

Welcome to my first column for LRM – I am thrilled to have joined the team and equally hope that you enjoy my editorial each month. My name may be familiar to some of you – I wrote the story ‘Grandma’s Return’ in the December issue. For the uninitiated, she is my first car and much-loved V8 Series IIA.

As I write this, Grandma is aboard the CSCL Star container ship bound for Australia and she will be joining me at the end of the month subject to no hidden nightmares. To say I am excited doesn’t even come close and I’m constantly logging onto the Marine Traffic app to check on progress and pirate activity across the high seas.

So by way of further introduction, I’m a British expat who moved to Australia seven years ago, arriving with a massive regret that I couldn’t bring my Land Rover with me (and, of course, leaving friends and family behind). It took me just a couple of months before I started looking for another Land Rover.

The vehicle I found was a 1968 LWB Series IIA fitted with a Holden six-cylinder engine. Whilst many purists might shun this block, it is very much a period conversion over here and I am sure, somewhere, I have read that Land Rover dealerships were even fitting them. But buyers beware: there are many poor installations out there – and mine was one of them.

Wanting to gloss over the collection of my new machine (ever driven a vehicle with a blown head gasket over the Sydney Harbour Bridge?), I found myself back in Sydney where it was to sit for the next year as my social life took priority.

It also didn’t help that I had no tools (I had left them back in the UK – why, oh why?) and I was living in a place with only basement parking, so in reality there was no way I could easily get things moving anyway.

Moving to a new place with the luxury of a carport – when you have grown up scrabbling around in muddy driveways, a carport will seem like a real extravagance – finally I could see the extent of the project. By this point she had gained the name ‘Old Girl’; I was clearly growing attached to her.

I will not go on about the long list of jobs completed (that is perhaps something for another column) but the starting point was to tackle the blown head gasket and to make her slightly less derelict-looking. It took me three months to get her sorted and through the roadworthy inspection but it’s actually only now, some five years later, that I finally feel she is finished.

The most recent job was to replace her radiator and relocate her headlight panel back to where it should be (it had been shifted forward as part of the Holden bodge job). She now looks completely standard from the outside, so it’s only you and I that know the dirty Holden secret.

I use Old Girl as my daily transport and, if the odometer actually worked, I would hazard a guess that we do around 20,000 miles a year. Now you would be forgiven for thinking Old Girl is my only form of transport and that this poor, deluded soul has no choice but to drive this ancient relic, but it is of my own choice and I love it!

The other vehicle in the fleet is ‘Bruce’, a late-model Defender that my wife and I bought a couple of years ago for our furtherflung camping adventures. Air conditioning and generally much more comfort and reliability made a Defender seem infinitely more appealing after a particularly horrific Christmas trip in Old Girl where we broke down near Adelaide in 40- degree heat and I found myself engulfed in green coolant and needing a new engine (I really did feel like selling her that time).

Whilst Bruce might offer more by way of refinement and even some degree of comfort, he is no cabriolet and for that reason Old Girl will always be my vehicle of choice when it comes to exploring Sydney’s Northern Beaches.

Now, whilst I’m a big fan of what you might call the more traditional Land Rovers, I think the current generation is incredibly capable and there are several I would absolutely love to own (though hopefully not when they fall into the category of old relics).

So that’s how things currently stand: two Land Rovers and a third on the way. Right now it sort of feels like preparing for the arrival of a baby and, in the absence of a suitable garage space (work in progress), I’ve been busy filling the spare bedroom with Land Rover parts for the new arrival – it’s looking a bit like the Land Rover Reborn production line in there.

While I would love to sign off by telling you I am off to the beach to soak up some sun, it’s actually pouring down so I will be down in the basement with a torch trying to put the roof up on my Series. When Brit Jack Dobson emigrated to Australia in 2010 he brought his passion for Land Rovers along with him.