Time Tunnel: Taking Toyota back to its roots

Down at the bottom of a gully on the Elliott Way, a road winding through the Australian Alps between Cabramurra and Khancoban in southern New South Wales, is the entry to a tunnel.

Dug into the side of a tree-covered hill, it’s the Tooma-Tumut Tunnel and it’s one of the first places where Toyota and the LandCruiser began making a name for themselves in Australia.

Nowadays, we take their reputations for granted, but in the post-war years Toyotas, like most other things Japanese, were disdained in Australia.

In 1958 the Queensland construction company Thiess Brothers brought at least 12 FJ25 LandCruisers (some accounts say 13, some say 12 plus a spare) to the construction site for this tunnel, the first Snowy Mountains hydro and irrigation scheme project the company was awarded.

Those few basic vehicles marked the start of a process which eventually, via some twists and turns, led to the establishment of Toyota Australia. And we all know how dominant that company is in Australia’s new vehicle market now…

Let’s be clear though, the LandCruiser did not build the Snowy scheme as has been claimed by some. In 4x4 terms, that accolade belongs to Land Rover.

But by the time Thiess completed the Talbingo Dam in 1974, the last and largest of 16 dams constructed as part of Australia’s largest civil engineering project, the LandCruiser name had been established by the 25’s successors such as the iconic FJ40, long wheelbase 45s and 47s and the first of the family wagons, the striking FJ55.

And Toyota has continued to expand its SUV and 4x4 line-up ever since, exploiting its tough-guy reputation and the Snowy connection. Along with two distinct streams of LandCruiser, its dominant line-up includes the HiLux, Prado, RAV4, Kluger, Fortuner and now, the C-HR.

In part, it was the arrival of the C-HR which prompted us to explore the Snowy. What better way to sample the latest and least off-road capable Toyota SUV than by taking it to the place where Toyota’s 4x4 reputation and corporate course germinated? And just for good measure, take a current limited edition LandCruiser 200 Series Altitude along for the drive.

With Toyota closing its manufacturing operations in Australia later this year, it’s also a good time to reflect on where it all started. The Snowy itself is currently in the news too, with Prime Minister Turnbull advocating a multi-billion dollar expansion of the scheme.

Our first stop is bustling and energetic Tumut, the town which guards the northern approaches to the Kosciuszko National Park. There have been as many as six new-vehicle dealerships here in the past, but now only Tumut Toyota survives.

Mr Albert Manning, whose family ran the Toyota franchise from 1963 to 1985, says reliability was crucial to the establishment and popularity of the brand in the region.

“It was a vehicle you could bring home and sell and not worry about it,” he says. “They would come in for an oil change and a grease and that was it.

“There were very little warranty claims on vehicles in those early days because the vehicles were so good.”

Albert is a true Toyota man. He owns a 60 Series Sahara with 412,000km on the clock, a Stout light truck and a Lite-Ace. He’s just bought himself a Lexus RX330 to add to the collection.

He says the reliability of early Toyotas and their standard 4x4 capability was important in overcoming the antipathy of locals towards all things Japanese.

“One farmer at Adelong, I went out to see him, and he said ‘I need a four-wheel drive but I hate the Japanese, I was a prisoner of war. But they buy my wool and I need their product’ ”.

“And quite a few of my customers were POWs and at some stages you felt like you were still fighting the war.”

We climb out of Tumut, tracking alongside the huge Blowering Dam. The LandCruiser and C-HR deal with the snaking Snowy Mountains Highway in contrasting ways.

The ’Cruiser, with its 200kW/650Nm 4.5-litre twin turbocharged V8 diesel engine, 4990mm length and 2740kg kerb weight lumbers along, rolling into corners and steering approximately. Really, the road seems remote, shielded from us by steel, plastic, rubber and glass. The environment is overwhelmed by the Altitude’s sheer mass.

Our front-wheel drive C-HR Koba is far more connected. As already reported by motoring.com.au this is a Toyota conceived in order to live up to global boss Akio Toyoda’s mantra of making the brand an attention grabber.

No doubt, the C-HR’s exterior styling ticks that box. It’s angular, undoubtedly polarizing, and the most distinct in its segment. Inside, the Toyota is less radical, lacking the sort of modern infotainment presentation the exterior suggests.

But its downsized 85kW/185Nm 1.2-litre four-cylinder turbo-petrol engine is stronger than the figures suggest, delivering peak torque from 1500-4000rpm. Response always seems to be on tap.

The dynamic balance is just sharp enough to keep you interested, without the ride becoming too stiff and intrusive. On these entertaining roads the C-HR is encouraging to drive, rather than disinterested.

We stop at Talbingo Reservoir. It’s a place where the sheer size and ambition of the Snowy scheme comes into focus. Six massive pipelines carve down a hillside, feeding water into the Tumut 3 hydro-electric power station. If you live on the east coast, there’s a good chance when you switch on the lights at night the electricity is being generated here.

You can drive between the station and the pipelines on the way up to the dam wall, where you can look over a vast valley of water sheltering between forested hills.

When full, the Talbingo Reservoir holds 920,000 megalitres of water. It’s an incredible number, but only one of many which define the Snowy scheme. Construction began in 1949 and continued until 1974. It consists of 16 major dams, seven power stations including two underground, two pumping stations and 225km of tunnels, pipelines and aqueducts. This is an engineering masterpiece so grand it was added to the Australian National Heritage List in 2016.

Nor can its social impact be overstated. More than 100,000 people from 30 countries worked on the scheme during construction. Many were migrants from war-torn Europe and made Australia their new home, accelerating our multi-cultural course.

Albert Manning has no doubt about its impact on Tumut.

“There were a lot of Europeans and the like who came here to work and a lot of them are still here. They married local girls.

“It left a big mark on Tumut, because it was a small country town. People stuck to themselves, but the influx of migrants changed the town and boosted it. There was big influx of money from the scheme that boosted it.”

South of Talbingo we continue climbing and the world starts to change. The sky and ground compress.

The clouds have morphed from distant relatives to intimate relations. It’s as if we could reach out and touch them. The gum trees are stringier and the grassland bleached.

By the time we reach the Link Road turn-off to Kiandra and Cabramurra, the hills are bald. Orange poles used to measure snow depth stand unused.

Built in 1954 as part of the Snowy scheme, Cabramurra, at 1488m, is Australia’s highest permanently inhabited town and is striking for the symmetry of its angled rooves and for stunning views out across the roof of Australia.

Khancoban, south of Cabramurra, was also built to house Snowy workers and their families. It’s still doing so. It’s also has got an incredibly high population of Toyotas, some of them Snowy Hydro fleet vehicles, many of them private. Almost every driveway seems to have a Toyota parked in it.

Including the driveway of 62-year old Ian Caldwell, where his well-used 1984 HJ47 Troop Carrier resides. It’s got a 2H 4.0-litre six-cylinder diesel engine, a four-speed manual gearbox and 290,000km on the clock.

The fitter and turner, who’s just retired from Snowy Hydro, has used his ‘Troopy’ almost every day since he bought it in Wangaratta in the mid-1980s. His son even learned to drive in it.

“I just use it for bush bashing, towing my horse float, just general driving around,” Mr Caldwell tells us. “When I go away shooting, I load it up. If luck has it, I load it up with deer coming back.

“My grandkids call it shake rattle and roll … because it shakes, rattles and rolls,” he laughs. “But other than that, it’s a good reliable vehicle. I wouldn’t get rid of it for the world.”

Our 200 Series LandCruiser is a world away from Ian’s Troopy in terms of refinement. But then, we’ve hardly been on dirt and not had to test its off-road ability. Which is appropriate in a way, because those original FJ 25s had 4x4 systems with no dual range, just an ultra-low first gear. Toyota didn’t start to encroach on the Land Rover’s dominance until the arrival of the 40s.

Mr Bert Knowles, head of the Snowy Mountains Scheme's base workshops in Cooma at the time, recalled the arrival of the LandCruiser in an official Toyota press release in the late 1990s.

“The LandCruisers played a major off-road role in building the Snowy Mountains Scheme, but also set new standards by combining highway and four-wheel drive capabilities.

“The Toyota LandCruiser provided sedan-like ride and comfort on the bitumen and then coped extremely well when the going got tougher in the mountains.

“Its smooth highway performance did not compromise its four-wheel drive capabilities.”

Those quotes from Mr Knowles, who died in 2012, came at a time when Toyota was actively promoting its history in the Snowy, even launching a limited ‘Snowy’ edition of the 60 Series LandCruiser to celebrate it.

Former Thiess executive and Toyota Australia boss, Mr John Conomos, says exploiting the LandCruiser’s history was all part of a 10-year marketing plan in the 1990s dubbed ‘the decade of dominance’.

“The foundation of that was tradition and our heritage vehicle was the LandCruiser,” Mr Conomos told motoring.com.au. “We needed something to reinforce the brand image and at that stage there was nothing stronger for us than LandCruiser and that’s how we based our attack on the marketplace.”

It worked. And our visit to the Tooma-Tumut Tunnel delivered vivid evidence of that.

We had set up at its mouth to do some photos with our LandCruiser when a sound like a hungry dinosaur came rumbling from the darkness.

Minutes later, the security gate swung open and a Snowy Hydro Toyota HiLux emerged. It was shift changeover time and several of them drove past, bringing workers up from the Tumut 2 underground power station. Then, incongruously, a Mitsubishi Outlander appeared before normal HiLux service was resumed.

Whatever it might have been in 1958, the message is clear that almost 60 years on, this is now Toyota Territory.

From little things big things grow
Sir Leslie Thiess is the businessman credited with driving the establishment of the Toyota brand as a powerhouse in Australia.

The Queenslander drove the use of LandCruisers on the Tooma-Tumut Tunnel project and then went to Japan and negotiated the right to sell Toyota commercial vehicles in Queensland.

He did this despite the opposition of his brothers, with whom he ran the Thiess Brothers construction business.

Within years he had gained the national distribution rights to Toyota commercial vehicles for Thiess Sales (later Thiess Toyota) and set up its headquarters in Sydney.

Meanwhile, Australian Motor Industries distributed Toyota passenger vehicles and became the first manufacturer of Toyota passenger cars outside Japan, in 1963 in Port Melbourne.

There are riders and exceptions to all this, as some other state-based distributors were involved at various times. For instance, Western Australian distribution remains under the control of Toyota WA, a private company owned by the Perron family.

Toyota Japan took a share in both Thiess and AMI in the 1960s, had assumed complete control by the 1980s and had merged them into Toyota Motor Corporation Australia by 2002. But marketing and sales operations stayed in Sydney and the manufacturing and administrative HQ in Melbourne.

Only now, with the end of local manufacturing coming in October, has Toyota finally decided to consolidate operations to its Melbourne offices.

Toyota C-HR Koba FWD
Price: $33,290 (plus on-road costs)
Engine: 1.2-litre four-cylinder turbo-petrol
Outputs: 85kW/185Nm
Transmission: Seven-speed continuously variable
Fuel: 6.4L/100km (ADR combined)
CO2: 144g/km (Estimated)
Safety Rating: Five-star ANCAP

Toyota LandCruiser Altitude
Price: $93,460 (plus on-road costs)
Engine: 4.5-litre turbo-diesel V8
Outputs: 200kW/650Nm
Transmission: Six-speed automatic
Fuel: 9.5L/100km (ADR combined)
CO2: 250g/km (Estimated)
Safety Rating: Five-star ANCAP