Ready for a rough track Caravans and camper trailers capable of roughing it on potholed and corrugated Outback tracks are usually fairly easy to identify. Usually they have lots of gleaming checker-plate from about the waist down, they sit up high enough that a gibber rock on an inland desert track won’t tear a hole in the floor and their tail end is short and angled upwards so they can lurch through a creek or an eroded gully without getting hung up on the slope. Some them are so well disguised that, like the hero in a Japanese karate movie, they don’t show how tough they are until they really have to. The Trakmaster caravans are a good example of this. At first sight they look neat, even handsome, but fairly ordinary. Their owners, who include former Victorian Premier, Joan Kirner, would take issue with that. They claim it is the toughest caravan on the market. Every year some of those owners join the Trakmaster designer/builder team, Russell Seebach and Craig Miles, to trek through parts of Australia where camels are commonplace but nobody has seen a caravan. And now, with the latest 18 foot (caravan people still talk in imperial measurements) model in its Nullarbor range it is certainly one of the most elegant.

Plenty of ground clearance makes light work of rough terrain.