I don’t like offices. I’m much more at home tapping away on a laptop next to a campfire and being surrounded by bush than in a cubicle made of something that looks suspiciously like asbestos and cheap carpet panelling.
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I was literally on my way out of the Unsealed 4X4 office doors to head somewhere a little more scenic for the evening (and to write this column) when I was grabbed by our designer extraordinaire Laura, who told me to stop stealing all of the camping gear from our storeroom; and that we’d officially cracked the 300-page mark this issue. That’s over 100 pages more than any other mag on the market – and we’re still charging the low-low price of nothing. And from looking at the reader numbers, you guys are enjoying it too. Our previous Issue had over 200,000 readers from all over the world. So we’re not only the biggest and most-read (which we already knew about), but what blows my mind is that we’re continuing to grow – with more and more readers jumping on board what I can proudly say is Australia’s best off-road publication.
So thank you for continuing to flick through our mag and for sending in the hundreds of emails we get each week from people either wanting to get involved or just saying G’day. All of us here are humbled by (and so appreciative of) your good wishes.
Unfortunately, I do have a bit of gripe this month. The annual Tuff Truck Challenge was held a couple of weeks back and, once again, the idiots have put a dent in our reputation as four-wheel drivers. Apparently some MENSA genius decided that throwing a gas bottle on the campfire would be a barrel of laughs and a young fella in his early twenties copped some pretty serious burns as a result. I have no idea whether he was involved in the initial action or not, but this kind of rubbish has to stop.
This is not a new thing, either. I remember I attended Tuff Truck back in 2003 (or was it 2004?) when pretty much the entire campground was woken up at about 3am by what sounded like a Howitzer impacting the site. Somebody who had obviously eaten a lot of lead paint chips throughout his childhood had decided he didn’t need his 9kg gas bottle anymore… and thought it’d be a hoot to throw it on the fire. The explosion was deafening.
This is the kind of behaviour that tars us all with the same brush, and we need to start being proactive in cutting these goons off from our community. Pete, the bloke who runs Tuff Truck, has made huge inroads into cleaning the event up and making it much more family-friendly, and full credit to him and the competitors who make it out there each year. And I’m by no means saying you shouldn’t go there and have some fun – it’s a great event; but the guys who come to off-road events to cause a ruckus and act like window lickers really don’t deserve to be there. These are the same guys driving highly illegal trucks and cutting through virgin bush when they go off-road – they’re the guys the rest us roll our eyes at and mumble ‘dickhead’ under our breath at.
We really need to stop the eye-rolls and start having a word. This is Darwinism at its worst and it’s time to ‘thin the herd’ a little. The culture of competing for the biggest bogan title is causing so many problems for those of us who just want to get out and enjoy the bush in our 4X4s. I hate that a young bloke was hurt, and if it doesn’t serve as a wake-up message for the rest of us to start squashing this type of behaviour before it gets out of hand, I don’t know what will.
Dex.
