When you visit a machinery museum, a vintage machinery rally or a field day, you can expect to see an assortment of vintage tractors. But when you see a group of them powering along the highway or through the bush, towing caravans and covered in red dust, that’s an entirely different matter altogether. Although we know that tractors were built to handle the rough stuff, it can be quite a sight to see them actually doing it.

So, when I was in Kalgoorlie recently, and came across four tractors from the Chamberlain 9G Tractor Club of WA, I had a chat with the owners. It turned out that they had just completed an incredible 8,000km trek over a period of ten weeks, with most of it on dirt tracks. The club has been staging annual treks since the year 2000, alternating long treks in the even numbered years, and shorter ones in the odd years.

Needless to say, this trek was one of the long ones, with the tractors sett