Outback 6×6 Ambo

History

Shorty-four were built, and they took over the Army's overseas casualty-evacuation work from the ageing Gen 2A ambulances.

The ambulance is the most specialised of the three fully enclosed Outback 6×6 bodies, and the only one built purely to carry people rather than equipment. Its liability code, 74505, spells out the specification in Army shorthand: light truck, four litters, fitted for radio, winch, MC2. The stated role is to transport up to eleven personnel including the driver — four stretcher (litter) patients or eight seated casualties, plus two medical assistants — with seatbelts provided at every position and three seats in the cab. The treatment module is the point of the vehicle. It is a fibreglass box mounted to the chassis on exactly the same points as the cargo tray body, and apart from some hoses and wiring it is entirely self-contained: it can be lifted off and put back on without touching the running vehicle. Wikipedia's Outback variant table gives 94 ambulances built, against REMLR's ARN register, which lists Shorty vehicles under the full nomenclature — a modest and typical discrepancy between the published figure and the surviving registration ledgers. Either way it is a small class: roughly one in seven of the 699 6×6s, and about the same size as the air defence batch. The vehicles served through Timor-Leste, the Solomon Islands and later deployments, and remained visible on exercise well into the 2010s.