Remember the Leyland Brothers?

Most kids of the ’80s will remember the bouncy wobble-board notes and jangly, ocker refrain of the song that went: ‘Travel all over the countryside, ask the Leyland Brothers.’

The tune, written by another brother duo – jingle writers the Provost Brothers – is almost as famous as ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’ or ‘Down Under’. And it belongs, as you might have guessed, to the classic television program Ask the Leyland Brothers, Mal and Mike Leyland’s pioneering travel program.

The show’s premise was simple but sweet: we’d follow along as Mal and Mike bounced around to locations the audience wanted to see – requests sent in via mail.

The Leyland Brothers’ no-nonsense adventures opened wide the eyes of suburban Australians to this country’s expanse and diversity, even if their programs were, uh, super-corny and homespun. That was part of their charm.

Where it began

When Mike Leyland, the older of the two brothers, was 15 years old, he won a prize: a trip to the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. So that Mike could capture this huge occasion in Australian sport, his father bought him a 16mm film camera.

Other future famous folk attended and filmed, including Oscar-nominated director Bruce Beresford (Breaker Morant, 1980; Driving Miss Daisy, 1989; Mao’s Last Dancer, 2009) and Australian’s longest-serving prime minister, Robert Menzies, who made his own home movie too. You can check out their films – including Mike’s – at the National Film and Sound Archive.

By the time he was 21, Mike was working as a cameraman. Mal, the younger of the two Leylands, followed a similar path into the media industry: at 18, he was a cadet photojournalist at The Sun in Newcastle.

It was around this time in their careers that they started travelling together.

The great (on and off) road trips

Before Mike and Mal produced their most successful network television series (which came later, in 1976, once they’d proven their filmmaking ‘chops’), they cut their teeth making documentaries with Super 8 cameras.

These great adventures-turned-into-film are lesser known than the brothers’ popular TV programs, but they’re the journeys that propelled the Leylands into a career that made them a part of Australian popular culture.

Down the Darling, 1963

The Leylands’ very first trip-turned-doco wasn’t in their trusty Land Rovers or iconic orange Volkswagen Kombis: it was a trip in a tinny down the Darling River, a 2300-kilometre journey from Mungindi in Queensland to Mildura in Victoria.

Wheels Across a Wilderness, 1966

Wheels Across a Wilderness follows the Leylands for 111 days and 6836 kilometres, west to east, from Steep Point in Western Australia to Cape Byron in New South Wales.

They took two red Land Rovers – one a small, short-wheelbase model that repeatedly got bogged, the other a trusty long-wheelbase model that repeatedly towed the other out of trouble.

The journey is believed to be one of the earliest, if not the first, off-road vehicle cross-continental, west–east crossings of Australia.

Open Boat to Adventure, 1969

In 1969, the brothers took the kind of boat a weekend fisherman would use, a small Quintrex runabout, on a journey through the remotest parts of north-eastern Australia and down the east coast – an ocean epic from Darwin to Sydney.

For six months, aboard the boat Little Investigator, the Leylands followed Matthew Flinders’ route of 150 years before. At the time, the trip was considered a world record for the longest voyage in a boat no more ocean-going than a tinny.

The Wet, 1972

The Wet is iconic, and it cemented the Leylands as adventurers most intrepid. This trip featured Australia’s Top End in the middle of the rainy season, when many of the roads become impassable, and where very few would dare to tread, let alone travel.

The docos were only the beginning…

These early documentaries gave Mal and Mike a taste for incredibly challenging adventures, but they also honed the brothers’ skills as filmmakers.

In the ’70s, the Leylands followed up with television series Off the Beaten Track and Trekabout. Then, in 1976, they launched their most popular show: Ask the Leyland Brothers, which featured the classic Provost Brothers tune and showed Mal and Mike travelling in the two orange bay-window Kombis that became the Leyland Brothers’ trademarks. The show was watched by millions, young and old.

A challenge too great

Then, in the ’90s, it all came crashing down. The Leylands invested heavily (with borrowed money at a high interest rate) in Leyland Brothers World, a theme park on 100 acres near Coffs Harbour (and also the name of a television series filmed there).

By 1992, they’d filed for bankruptcy, and the theme park was sold. The park still exists on that site, tacky scale model of Uluru included, but it’s now the Great Aussie Bush Camp. But, even after their enormous setback, the Leylands still found ways to make inroads into television – Mal launched travel program Leyland’s Australia in 2000.

The legacy

Before Steve Irwin, Getaway and The Great Outdoors – and even lesser-known TV travellers like Alby Mangels – the Leyland Brothers led the way.

They showed Australian suburbanites their own backyard, journeyed to places so remote they awakened city-dwellers’ imaginations, and created a genre of classic Australian filmmaking that inspired their successors.