Opinion
These SUV bro-blingers look prepped for the apocalypse. Shame they never leave the suburbs
Marish Mackowiak
ContributorCavalcades of heavily laden 4WD adventurers roar along our remote country lane on Friday nights, seemingly oblivious to the surrounding bush and the animals that dart out unexpectedly at night. High-riding and extensively equipped, these warriors’ weekends have just begun.
All is not as it seems, however, since their destination is a series of campsites easily reached by the smallest city runabout, via a cul-de-sac that goes nowhere else. I’ve found firepits there stuffed full of glass beer bottles that, no doubt to these individuals’ great surprise, failed to burn. Perhaps it’s just a dry run for their next trip, to “the Simmo” (Simpson Desert) or beyond.
The modern four-wheel drive is in your face and built, it seems, for the end of days. Credit: Hummer
On darkened weekend highways, they can easily be mistaken for Christ’s second coming, heralding their arrival with an intense white aura just beyond the next crest. Unable to clearly perceive more humbly equipped drivers in time, they cause a second or two of blindness before they dip stadium-quality lights that are legally only allowed on 4WD tracks.
Motoring has always been tribal, but this is a wave unlike any before it. Never before has there been a greater variety of ruggedly styled off-road vehicles sold, nor a greater zeal by city-based motorists to equip their cars with a dizzying array of awnings, fridges, winches and snorkels. Bro bling ready for Armageddon, or perhaps the ultimate showdown at the traffic-light grand prix. After all, nothing says “tough” like a 4WD with an imposing bull-bar and hi-lift suspension.
They are, literally, “preppers”, getting ready for any conceivable emergency, though probably not in the sense of survivalists – motivated by fear of an end-of-days disaster.
Despite escalating environmental concerns, 4WD-ers are paradoxically following the current Ford exhortation to “go big”. Forget about treading lightly with high-tech sleeping bags and bushwalking tents that fold into stuff sacks the size of bread loaves, the current 4WD equipment arms race favours bulky swags lashed to custom-fabricated ute canopies, atop rigs that are ever up-sizing.
An SUV in its common habitat - a city street. Credit: Craig Abraham
The irony, winter potholes notwithstanding, is that our roads have never been better. Back in the day, new suburbs were initially accessed by muddy tracks and Aussie sedans, featuring good ground clearance and chubby tyres, were expected to do it all. Not any more.
Nowadays, even the most pedestrian family SUVs are adorned with faux-metallic bash plates and nudge bars to protect against precarious suburban outcrops. Mini-me Outlanders, Crosstreks and X-Trails nip on the heels of the larger Defender, Wildtrak, Rugged X, Tank and Gladiator. Aspirational names evoke a distinctly masculine brand of turbo-charged, cross-country escape.
I too was once hooked on the dream of distant outback destinations, with my oddest purchase being a satellite phone that we only used once, to test it out. The magazine I subscribed to showed eager bush bashers apparently spending most of their time pulling each other out of impossible quagmires they should never have entered, within habitats that deserved to be better protected. Like trophy hunters in Africa, blokey triumphs over the environment would be toasted with tinnies around the campfire, followed by meaty meals that looked designed to push sedentary bodies to cardio-vascular breaking point.
It’s all a long way from where it all began, with the Leyland brothers in the 1960s and 1970s, whose painstaking progress through genuinely remote, off-road wilderness was earnest and judicious, always with great humility towards the vast landscape around them. Bull bars were home-made, ridiculously undernourished by today’s standards and attached to the most utilitarian of Land Rovers. Mechanical and other calamities were frequent, severe and unwelcome, neither staged nor celebrated. I can’t remember the brothers or their wives ever tossing back any beers, though for sure any empties would have been taken back to civilisation.
Perhaps today’s generation is genuinely seeking the same back-to-basics challenge, or at least a semblance of it, amid a life that is otherwise too soft. Though, as the Leylands found out again and again, even the best-prepared 4WDs are good… until they’re not, as there will always be a limit to their capabilities. It’s perhaps just as well then that most enthusiasts will remain safe from the extremes of their wildest fantasies. There’s also little doubt that wild places will breathe a sigh of relief if the purchase of yet more boys’ toys remains the steadfast focus of ardent aficionados.
Marish Mackowiak is an English teacher and freelance writer.
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