Series IIA LRPV.

The Australian Special Air Service Regiment, based at Swanbourne in Western Australia, needed a vehicle that could cross the continent's interior without resupply. From the early 1970s it got one by taking the Army's standard Series IIA 109-inch General Service truck and having it rebuilt to regimental specification by a Perth contractor — State Engineering, according to a 1978 Overlander magazine feature reproduced by REMLR. The Army gave the result its own census code, 6028K, 'Truck, Utility, 3/4 Ton, GS, Cargo, Modified for SASR Use'; the regiment called it the Long Range Patrol Vehicle, and REMLR records them at work by 1973.

The conversion was subtractive before it was additive. Doors, tailgate, windscreen, hood, canopy and mirrors all came off, leaving the seat backs as the highest point on the vehicle; a roll bar was added later for crew protection. Onto that went two oversize spares on the bull bar, jerrycan racks that required the front chassis rails to be lengthened and the bar moved forward some 400 mm, rifle carriers along the front mudguards, sump and steering guards, and side plates cut from wartime pierced steel planking. Three extra fuel tanks — one behind each standard tank and one under a false floor in the rear — took capacity to about 360 litres for a road range beyond 1,500 km, and five more jerrycans behind the seats brought water to roughly 160 litres. A PTO winch went on the front and a pack carrier on the tail. The main armament was a machine gun on a bonnet mount (M60) or a rear pedestal (.30 calibre), with astro-navigation gear, a solar battery charger, an AN/PRC-77 for vehicle-to-vehicle work and a long-range set for base carried in the back. Mechanically almost nothing changed: the 2.25-litre petrol four, gearbox and axles stayed standard, and the whole job was described at the time as costing about $15,000 per vehicle. Notably the regiment never moved to the six-cylinder Series 3 that entered Army service from 1977, staying instead with the older, simpler Series IIA.

The registry holds two neighbouring records that this one sits between. The British Army's Series IIA 'Pink Panther' (see `sas-pink`) was a contemporary of the same idea executed differently — 72 vehicles converted in one batch by Marshall of Cambridge to a Ministry of Defence contract, and painted pink for desert work. The Australian cars were not a factory batch at all: they were existing fleet trucks of varying ages sent for conversion in ones and twos, and REMLR's LRPV narrative states the type was 'modelled on the British SAS Pink Panther'. At the other end, the Perentie 6×6 LRPV (see `lrpv`) is this vehicle's direct replacement — a purpose-built, turbo-diesel, three-axle machine of which 27 were made, and the vehicle most people now mean when they say 'LRPV'.

How many Series IIA LRPVs existed is genuinely unsettled. REMLR's page on the type offers 'perhaps only 26... perhaps 37' before adding that 'the latest information indicates that only 20 were made', while REMLR's own ARN register lists 41 vehicles carrying census code 6028K, several of them flagged only as 'possibly LRPV conv.' Those 41 donors were built between 1961 and 1972, overwhelmingly in 1970–71, and several had earlier lives as winch trucks, command reconnaissance cars and in one case a wrecker before conversion. No authoritative published total exists, and the registry does not pick one.

Paint followed Australian Army practice rather than the British pink. Donors delivered before April 1967 left the factory in gloss Deep Bronze Green; from April 1967 the fleet colour became lustreless Australian Olive Drab, which is what most LRPVs wore. REMLR's paint notes record that unit-level camouflage experiments in the 1980s appeared first on Armoured and Infantry Corps vehicles — heavy weapons platoon gunbuggies and the SAS LRPVs among them — in schemes that 'were not uniform and reflected unit level preferences', before the three-colour Auscam pattern of olive drab, tan and black became the official fleet scheme. The Series IIA cars were gone by the time the 6×6s arrived in full Auscam. Two REMLR members in Western Australia own preserved examples, and ARN 172-436 is held by the Army Museum Bandiana.