Forward Area Ambulance.

The Australian Army's standard Land Rover ambulance was a 109-inch vehicle with a purpose-built four-stretcher box body. Very few went to South Vietnam: they were large, comparatively unwieldy on tracks and in rubber plantations, and valuable enough that commanders preferred to hold them back from the fighting. The Forward Area Ambulance filled the gap that left. It took the short-wheelbase 88-inch Land Rover — the vehicle infantry units already had in numbers — and made it carry two stretchers laid over the top of the tub. Three changes did it: a floor extension projecting rearward beyond the tailgate to support the stretcher ends, a longer set of canopy hoops, and a longer canvas canopy to cover the overhang.

That canopy is the type's identifying feature and its best disguise. It is close enough in length to a 109-inch canopy to be mistaken for one, but the side window sits in the forward half rather than the middle, lining up with where it would fall on a normal short-wheelbase tilt. Surviving canopies have turned up in both the later vinyl material and earlier canvas. REMLR — which holds the only substantial published account of the type — reads the conversion as most likely a field or local-workshop modification rather than a factory or base-workshop programme, and states plainly that 'little is known of their history or numbers'.

What is documented is the register. REMLR lists 79 vehicles under census code 6005A, all 88-inch: 35 Series 2 and 44 Series 2A. The build dates fall in three blocks — 34 from 1959, 23 from 1963 and 21 from 1964 — matching the Australian Military Forces' Series 2 and early Series 2A contracts. Individual entries carry service annotations such as 'Fitted w/Stretcher frame', several marked for South Vietnam, and a number where the stretcher-frame note was later struck out or tippexed over, which suggests vehicles moved in and out of the role rather than being permanently converted. A related census code, 6005F, covers the same fitment on a winch-equipped 88.

In Vietnam the FAAs appear in Australian War Memorial photography around airfields, alongside regimental aid posts and being unloaded from ships; one 1965 image identifies Gordon Boyd of Jannali, NSW, a bandsman and infantry platoon medic with D Company, 1RAR, beside his vehicle. Markings were the usual red cross on a white ground, sometimes painted over in the field, and at least one photograph shows a vehicle camouflaged with nothing more sophisticated than applied mud. The type also worked at home well after the war: a REMLR registrant recalls FAAs in use at the Infantry Centre, Singleton, in the late 1970s and early 1980s by Reserve units supporting cadet annual camps.

Colours followed Australian Military Forces practice rather than anything ambulance-specific. Vehicles delivered in 1959, 1963 and 1964 left the factory in gloss Deep Bronze Green, the fleet colour until April 1967; after that date the surviving fleet was resprayed in flat Australian Olive Drab, the colour chosen for Vietnam. Few survive in original condition. The best-documented restoration is Phillip Hastings's vehicle in Western Australia, photographed close to completion in 2010 and destined for the Nungarin Heritage Machinery and Army Museum. REMLR's page notes a Series 2 example illustrated in a Defence Materiel Organisation newsletter that may be the prototype, though that identification is not confirmed.

The registry's other Australian stretcher-carrying Land Rover, the 109-inch `series2a-fwsf`, is a different answer to a related problem — a full-size General Service cargo truck fitted with the box ambulance's stretcher rails. REMLR states that the timeframe of the FAAs, the FWSF trucks and the standard four-stretcher ambulances in relation to one another is unknown; they overlapped in service rather than replacing one another.