Still travelling all over the countryside - five decades on

In an adventurous career spanning more than 50 years, the urge to roam has never left the younger half of the Leyland Brothers, whose travels throughout Australia delighted a generation of TV audiences, drawing up to three million viewers a week.

Now 71, Mal is back on the road accompanied as always by his wife Laraine.

This time Mal is writing a series of travel articles geared especially toward grey nomads.

“We got ourselves a small motorhome and we’re doing what we’ve always done, travelling around Australia, taking our time, going to places that we like and telling stories about them.”

For Mal, who nowadays lives with his wife at Maleny, 80km north of Brisbane, the road best travelled is the one travelled languidly. He said that wherever they pull up, other travellers invariably ask them the best places to go, and what to see and do.

“Often they’ve travelled thousands of kilometres to get where they are, and I say ‘Well, you’ve already gone past heaps of them!’

“They have this idea that it’s all about putting miles up – but it’s not. It’s about enjoying a place by spending enough time in it, to get to know it. And that’s what we’re writing about.”

It has been a busy year for Mal, whose biography, Still Travelling, was published in February. “I’ve spent a lot of time promoting the book, travelling around and getting a lot of PR along the way. It seems to be doing well – they’re doing a second printing.”

Mal was always the writing part of the team made up of him and older brother Mike, from whom he was estranged for years before reconciling with him just before his death in 2009.

“I liked writing, whereas Mike always found it a chore. His forte was the camera work. He just loved being behind the camera and he was damn good at it. “I can do fairly good camera work but I always reckon he was better than me.

“In the film-making process I was responsible for the all the sound editing and the music. One of my specialties, I suppose, and the thing I enjoyed a lot was selecting the right mood music, which is a bit of an art.”

The best-known piece of music from Ask the Leyland Brothers is, of course, the unforgettable opening theme, which still resonates in the minds of those who were its audience at the time. The ditty was written by country and western performers Bruce and Barry Provost, who were well known in the Leylands’ home town of Newcastle, where they regularly appeared on Channel 3.

“The odd thing is that Laraine – who I didn’t really know at the time, even though we went to the same school – used to work with Barry. “Well, he was sitting there writing out lyrics and she joined him during their lunch break to help!

“About four years later we met – and we got married within six months!”

That happy event came about after Laraine came to Mal’s mother’s house for a jewellery show – like a Tupperware party but with things that sparkle.

“She just walked in the door and that was it. I was smitten.

“I had the daggiest set of clothes you had ever seen and she was done up to the nines and beautiful. I felt like a complete idiot. But still, here we are 46 years later.”

The result of that union was Carmen, now the mother of a son and twin daughters, who was just five months old when Ask the Leyland Brothers began.

“Most people remember her as the baby in the back seat of the Kombi bouncing around during the opening titles,” Mal said.

“Now and then we still meet people our age who we first met travelling with their kids. Now they’re like us, back on the road again as part of the growing grey nomad movement – without the kids.”

Asked about the making of Ask the Leyland Brothers, Mal said the show was not as simple as it seemed. “The secret to making something work is to make it look simple,” he said.

“We were constantly attacked by critics who said the shows were amateurish – they used to call them home movies.

“Well, we were proud of that because that was part of what we set out to do. We reckoned they were professionally made home movies.

“We filmed what other people wanted to do themselves, so we simply filmed it all, no matter what it was. If you’re out in the bush and the axle falls off the truck, well, that becomes part of the story.

“And I think people related to that – the fact we were just average people.”

Mal is gratified that people still remember the brothers’ work with such affection. He said it is surprising just how much people remember.

“The first film we ever did was Down the Darling and I was only 18. And I still meet people who say ‘Ah, I loved that, I still reckon it was your best film. And then they go into the details, 52 years later. That amazes me.”

You can read about and access video recordings of Mal and Laraine’s latest travels in Time to Roam magazine published every two months and available at most newsagents.

Specially for The Senior's readers, here are Mal's top travel tips for grey nomads.