Friends for Life – Recreating An Epic Journey

What’s your earliest memory?

One of mine is watching a film made by my Great Grandfather. It was a silent, black-and-white film chronicling a road trip he took in 1926 from Adelaide to Darwin and back. There was something magical about those old cars cruising through the outback that made me dream about doing it myself one day.

It probably wasn’t long after that that I joined Scouts and started to get a taste for adventure. Long trips away from home, becoming self-sufficient, facing and overcoming challenges. But that wasn’t the best thing about Scouts; it was the friends I made.

Fast forward a few years and the centenary of that original car trip was approaching. What better time to fulfil a lifelong dream? So who do I talk to about it? A friend from Rovers, all those years ago, and together we start to plan the trip of a lifetime.
We secure a 1925 Studebaker, the same model as the original trip, and give ourselves 2 years to prepare. It seems like a long time, but things slow down when you’re dealing with a 100-year-old car.

We replaced the wheels and tyres with stronger ones, fitted an electric fuel pump for greater reliability, and tightened every nut and bolt on that car to prepare it for the bumpy roads. It was greased, oiled and driven relentlessly to iron out all the bugs before we set off.

Something about that “Be Prepared” motto must have stuck with me.

And who helped us? Friends from our Scouting, Venturing and Rovering days. They understood adventure and wanted to help other people experience it. Not only that, they wanted to join the adventure themselves and come along as support. Of our core team of 7, 6 had been scouts.

The trip took 6 weeks on some of the roughest roads Australia has to offer. The cars endured dust, sand, mud and rocks.

Our crew of former Scouts used their ingenuity to troubleshoot along the way. We dodged floods, found a way around closed roads, and drove the length of the Birdsville Track in a day to beat the rain. Problem-solving reached the next level, but the seeds were sown years earlier. I credit them for making my dream a reality.

Not only did we succeed in our centenary re-creation, but we raised almost $30,000 for the Royal Flying Doctor Service along the way.

Scouts gave me so much more than my values; they gave me Friends for Life.