Bush Mechanic

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When you travel through the Australian Bush, you must be prepared to improvise. Access to services or basic materials is rather constrained. Sure, there are villages every 100 km (maximum distance a horse-drawn buggy used to cover in a day), but most of the time, it’s only one street with 2 or 3 dilapidated houses. If you’re lucky, you’ll also find a trash can. But just one.

Having travelled through almost the entire East coast of Australia, it was about time to give Shocker an oil change. When asking small local garages, it turned out to be around $ 120 for such a job. $ 120 for a 40 minutes lube job. And we’re substantially talking about unscrewing a bolt and a filter and WAITING 40 minutes… So I took this affront as a challenge. It’s not because we’re in the Bush that we can’t be resourceful.

A few years ago, on local television, there was a show called « Bush Mechanics ». It followed Aboriginal mechanics’ ups and downs in the most isolated parts of the continent. More often than not, when they needed to work on the underside of the car, they would call 10 of their neighbours and basically flip the car sideways. Once done with the repair, they flipped the car back to its original position and hoped it would start again. A little extreme, but it gives you ideas…

So we decided to find the necessary tools to do the oil change ourselves. Even if each of these tools were 100 km apart, the spanner, the gizmo to unscrew the filter and the oil pan were all justifiable buys in a pattern of travelling, since they don’t take too much space in the car. However, the ramps to lift the car front were not. And since the spanner I finally was able to put my hands on was almost 2 feet long, I really needed a way to jack the car so I could work under.
Everybody gave us suggestions. Park the car on top of a creek, one wheel on each side. Maybe, but I didn’t feel like working lying down in water. Dig a big hole and park the car over it. Good too, but a shovel takes as much space as a set of ramps. It’s also quite astonishing to realize how difficult it is in such a flat country to find natural holes. The winning course of action was a lucky one.

When we arrived in Dululu, we parked the car for the night in a rest area hidden from the road and intrusive eyes (In Queensland, it’s illegal to change car oil in nature). We found the perfect natural ramp. Two huge flat pyramid shaped rocks. Just what we needed to jack the car and give me necessary leeway to operate my tools. 40 minutes later, it was all done. We even found an old Polish guy in Dululu, who was more than happy to salvage our waste oil. Another Bush story ending well. And for once, we didn’t have to flip the car over.

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