The expedition
After the mud and airlift of Borneo in 1985 the Camel Trophy went to Australia, its first event outside the tropics' poorer countries and its first in a developed one. Applications had grown to about half a million; the fourteen teams that came through the national selections represented Australia, Belgium, Brazil, the Canary Islands, France, West Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, the British, Australian, American, French and Malaysian teams all newcomers. Each pair drove a Land Rover Ninety prepared and equipped identically by the organisers; the One Ten again served the support crew. The full fleet was twenty-four vehicles and seventy-three people — twenty-eight competitors plus mechanics, judges, journalists and cooks — flagged off by the president of R. J. Reynolds.
The route ran from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean across the far north. The convoy assembled at Cairns and went north over the Daintree River and up the Bloomfield Track, opened only months earlier amid protests, to the Aboriginal community of Wujal Wujal and on to Cooktown, the historic settlement overlooking the Great Barrier Reef where the whole town turned out with a spit-roast feast. The official start was at Cooktown. From there the route followed the old railway line through the hills to Laura, and was meant to take the Old Coach Road to the gold-rush ghost town of Maytown; environmental protesters, incensed by the Bloomfield Track, had felled trees across it, so the convoy went north to Fairview and back down through Palmerville to Maytown. A special stage there involved a deep river crossing which the Australian team drove first and cleared; the next two cars could not, the test was abandoned and Jones and Begg's points were struck out. The route crossed the wide Palmer River, went through private station country to an overnight camp at King Junction Station, crossed the Mitchell River at Dunbar — where a raft-building stage became a formality because the river was so low the crews walked the rafts across — and reached Normanton, camping at the airfield, in the height of the wet season.
West of Normanton the road to Burketown and the Northern Territory border was two wheel tracks in the sand. At Hells Gate the roadhouse had just opened; the teams wrecked its new lawn. At the border the convoy turned north on station tracks and worked west through a series of properties, past creek after creek — one is named Camel Creek — to rejoin the road near Borroloola, then ran on via Roper Bar to Darwin, where the final group photograph was taken in the casino car park. Twenty-four hours were spent at one flooded river where the teams built rafts to ferry the cars across. More special stages were run than in any previous event: winching every vehicle out of the water, crossing ditches, ferrying the cars on inflatable boats — the water stages worrying the organisers most because of saltwater crocodiles.
The convoy averaged about 250 km a day and finished at Darwin thirteen days after Cooktown; at 3,218 km it was the longest Camel Trophy to that date and, as one history puts it, the quickest. Jacques Mambre and Michel Courvallet won for France, with the Italians Daniele Terzi and Giorgio Albiero second, and Glenn Jones and Ron Begg of Australia were voted the Team Spirit Award. The Ninety was retired after this event; the 1987 Madagascar Camel Trophy used Range Rover Turbo Ds and the One Ten returned for Sulawesi in 1988. In July 2011 members of the Land Rover Owners' Club of Sydney, helped by the Cooktown Historical Society and by John Ayre, Geoff Stubbs and Derek Stringfellow of the original organisation, re-drove the 1986 route from Cairns to Darwin in seven Defenders over fourteen days.
