ASPW's 40 year celebration.
2024 Andrew celebrates 40 years overlanding with the release of some never published work and highlights from his TV series.
Since the first expedition in his own vehicle in 1984, Andrew has been painstakingly recording every trip he’s taken. In 1996 this passion became a career in the creation of the website first called 4xForum. This name changed in 2012 to what we now know as 4xOverland.
Early published work consisted mainly of books. Andrew published 16 4×4 titles and two travel adventures. Three remain today, and are available in digital and soft-cover here. Between 1999 and 2008 Andrew built the map brand InfoMap, dedicated to the 4wd explorer. 16 titles were released, and were the first maps in the world to publish GPS coordinates of main intersections and places of interest. Even the fold was engineered to be easily readable inside the confines of a car. InfoMap was sold in 2008 but continues today.
Between 2005 and 2015 Andrew produced nine 13-part series for South African TV. It was titled, 4WD-Take a Deep breath.
YouTube replaced TV as the primary medium in 2013. This was due to the broadcaster keeping all the advertising revenue as well as demanding payment for every broadcast. This greed meant that production values dropped year on year. Choices left were to produce a mediocre show, or find another track.
YouTube and a group of dedicated fans of the show permitted the best of this work to continue unhindered. So much so that Andrew then made shows in North America, Middle East and Australia. It was around this time that Andrew moved with his family first to the UK, then to Western Australia.
Since then, production output quadrupled because of time once spent landing sponsors, could be spent travelling the world and building some of the most memorable 4wd rigs on the net.
Andrew’s genre is practicality in preference to extravagance. No product placements and no sponsors influencing content resulted in trust levels beyond normal.
Expeditions were seeking remote, exquisite landscapes and isolation in preference to off-road obstacle driving for its own sake.
And that’s the way things are today.
The result is that Andrew is globally AKA ‘The David Attenborough of 4×4’.
Here is a collection of some of his earliest work, some of which were just ‘home movies’ at the time, and also some favourite extracts from his long-running TV series.