Nissan marks 60th anniversary of Patrol’s record-setting Simpson crossing

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the first motorised crossing of the Simpson Desert in 1962 by the Sprigg family in their Nissan Patrol.

And to celebrate, Nissan has produced this cool video commemorating the feat, undertaken in the second-generation G60 Patrol produced from 1959.

Now approaching 70, Doug Sprigg was just seven years old when he, his sister Marg and his parents Reg and Griselda took to the front seat of their G60 and set off from Andado Station in the Northern Territory for a two-week journey across the Simpson.

The family completed the journey on September 11, 1962 at Birdsville in Queensland, after crossing the world’s largest parallel sand dune desert in the world (170,000 square kilometres and spanning the NT, Queensland and South Australia).

Of course, it was a different trek to the one undertaken these days, when a modern 4x4 can complete the crossing in as little as a couple of days, with an average speed of just 5km/h, no real tracks or maps to follow and a 200-litre drum of petrol presenting a fire risk whenever the G60 got beached on a saltbush.

“In 1962 my dad took my sister, mum and I across the Simpson Desert, and that would become the first motorised crossing of the desert,” says Doug.

“I have such fond memories of that G60. It was such a robust and reliable vehicle. I was even shorter then than I am now, and Nissan had even provided me a way of seeing forward – through the air vents below the windscreen.

“With four of us sitting across the front seat, a 200-litre drum of fuel in the back, and a 200-litre drum of water, the vehicle was pretty heavily loaded, so I got to see the scenery through the air-vents, but the big sand dunes coming up I could see through the windshield.

“Mum was the one that did a lot of the preparations. They were an amazing team. Without mum, dad wouldn’t have been anywhere near as successful,” Doug says.

“And the vehicle was magnificent. Every other vehicle had significant problems, with gearboxes in particular, or with differentials, but the Nissan never had any issues. And it was punished – dad believed that vehicles had to work for their living.”

Now the second-generation owner of the Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary eight hours’ drive from Adelaide, Doug is following in the footsteps of this father Reg, a noted Australian scientist.

“Dad used his 4WDs to go and explore different parts of the country and one of the places he came to in 1937, as a geology student, was Arkaroola. He fell in love with it, and later he went to the state government and tried to convince them to buy it as a National Park,” says Doug.

“Parks wasn’t interested, so eventually he bought it in 1968, and it’s been about the same ever since. There is nowhere quite like this – a 144,000-acre property, and it has an amazing diversity of geology, animals and plants in these arid lands.

“Dad was amazing in his diversity of knowledge and I didn’t realise just how much I relied on him until he died. And suddenly, this amazing resource was gone.”

Nissan recently treated Doug to a drive of a perfectly restored G60 Patrol at Arkaroola to celebrate the anniversary of his momentous Simpson crossing, and the reunion brought back plenty of good memories for him.

“But jumping in this Nissan brings those memories back, it’s been amazing,” he said. “Driving this vehicle now, 60 years later, it’s just incredible.”