CAMPER TRAILER AUSTRALIA ISSUE #138- Mag Sampler

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TAKING IT 122

TO THE MAX

Camper caught-up with RhinoMax Director, Andy Dean, to discover more about their eyecatching, super-capable and well-appointed stable of top-spec hybrid campers Words Aaron Flanagan Pics matt williams

THE INSIDE WOR

RhinoMax have certainly made a splash since beginning manufacturing in 2011

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hinoMax don’t muck about.

Although only manufacturing campers since 2011, they’ve quickly established a singular reputation for making genuinely offroad, super comfortable, hybrid-only product. Their campers are bold and striking, featuring clean go-faster design lines, immediately obvious departure angles and high ride clearances.

Everything about them screams, ‘outdoor adventure’.

Camper, keen to learn more about how RhinoMax happened upon their distinctive range, recently caught up with Director, Andy Dean.

“I was a keen mountaineer as a child and young adult, so for me the camping

experience back then was, and remains to this day, all about a lightweight and simple experience in the outdoors — an escape from everyday distractions,” Andy says. “These days, I love the outback camping experience, far away from the crowds, where I can look up into the stars, sat around my fire with a glass of wine, surrounded by family.”

And this is where making campers enters the fray. Like many manufacturers of campers, Andy and his business partner, Steve Punton, decided to build a product that aligned closely with inspiration they’d derived from past expeditions, but also one that captured their enthusiasm for the future.

Andy and Steve studied the offroad habits of intrepid Aussies for two years before laying

out their vision for RhinoMax. Andy brings engineering know-how to the partnership; he’s a Rolls Royce trained engineer with a proven track record in military, civil and industrial turbines. Steve handles the business and strategic side, with more than 30 years experience delivering industrial solutions for a whole host of clients.

“As friends, we formed RhinoMax as an engineering solutions provider servicing the Australian power generation industry,” Andy explains. “A love of camping and outback travel led us to design campers which suited our requirements but pretty soon the success of our campers had us focussing all our energy into this area.”

RhinoMax quickly hit the mark, taking out

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a top gong at Camper Trailer of the Year 2015, their careful planning paying immediate dividends. What’s the secret? Is there a production mantra that RhinoMax stick to?

“The modern life we lead, with all its complications, has made escaping for some quality time with friends and family trickier.

Technology has become a norm in our everyday lives and we feel the average family finds it difficult to leave all this behind,” Andy explains.

RhinoMax decided to focus their efforts building lightweight easily-managed hybrids that allow effortless travel into hard-to-get-to remote areas.

“All our campers are centred around power and water system capability that allow for extended periods off-grid but, fundamentally, also with the kind of modern comfort and convenience to which we have all become accustomed,” Andy continues. “A real homeaway-from-home for those who don’t want to rush back to the rat race, but at the same

Extending your gas or water capacity

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LOW FOR L A T A H T Y IT IL B A P YSTEM CA S R E T A W D N A R E W OMFORT O C P N D R E N D U O O R M A F D O E D R T IN ARE CEN H THE K IT S R W E P O S M L A A C , Y R L U L O A T L N L “A EAN FUNDAME D , T Y U D B N A ID R – G ” F D F E O M S O EXTENDED PERIOD HICH WE HAVE ALL BECOME ACCUST TO W E C N IE N E V N O C D N A This particular Rhino is not endangered by the resource-scarcity encountered out bush

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THE INSIDE WOR

Comfortable and catered to, but never fanned by leaves or hand fed grapes. That wouldn’t be camping!

A welcome sight during a long stint in the bush

time, are over shirking on security and comfort.”

It’s maintaining the delicate balance between adventure and completely overthe-top luxury which Andy sees as key to RhinoMax’s design and manufacturing ethos.

It’s a knife’s edge dance, navigating a perfect course between feeling a connection with the outdoors, such as you’d gain with a simple tent and sleeping bag set-up, and that of wanting for nothing but, as a result, ending inside all the time, shielded from the essential essence of being in the outdoors.

“I’m about to embark on a motorcycle swag adventure,” Andy told Camper. “I appreciate the simplicity of traditional styles of travel, but after a few days removed from my home comforts I begin to understand that this experience (motorcycle swag camping) is not for everyone.

“A hybrid camper allows you to bring those comforts along while still allowing a quick, easy and effortless experience.

Power, lighting, shower and cooking facilities make extended remote travel a breeze and

lets you concentrate all your energy on the experience itself.”

That’s not to say RhinoMax have hit on the perfect offroad, offgrid camper design. Andy acknowledges things never stay the same and that RhinoMax will always have one eye on the future when it comes to designing and manufacturing new models.

“Let’s be honest, we all love the outdoors because it brings us closer to nature. There is definitely a growing focus on the environment and the impact we have on it. Government and local councils are all focusing on how to protect what we have now, and the power of their advocation is certainly being felt.

“The way we travel will change, but the places we want to visit will remain the same.

Saying we’ll build a green camper is an easy statement to make, but the industry will need to provide solutions; that’s a given. This future focus will likely influence everything, from methodology of manufacture to the footprint the traveller, our customers, leave.

But this is cool because, ultimately, we’ll all be working towards securing the experiences we 125

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enjoy now for our children’s children.”

So what of these future design ideas? Any insights for our readers, Camper asks?

“Fuel efficient, lightweight designs that are still capable of withstanding the Australian roads we love so much. Completely selfsufficient power systems able to meet the ever-increasing demands of the everyday adventurer,” Andy answers without hesitation.

And it’s this assuredness that suggests RhinoMax are an outfit who not only extract feedback from customers and camping

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enthusiasts in general, but efficiently use this information to refine and update their product.

“Engaging with the customer from the very start to create a bespoke product designed just for them, one that fits their years of particular camping experiences, is massively satisfying,” Andy explains. “Alternately, so too is guiding a newcomer using our own personal years of experience to build the perfect camper that’s just right for them.

Having them trust us to develop and build a

camper just right for them.”

What of the potential in perhaps exporting RhinoMax’s unique Australian made, Australian designed campers overseas?

“Rhinomax, from its inception, has been focused on providing a quality product for the Australian market – we don’t want to be the biggest, we want to be one of the best – if not the best!” Andy says. “There certainly is a demand for hybrids, like ours, overseas.

However, it’s not currently on the Rhinomax radar.

“The last decade has seen a lot of changes in the industry, with people and product coming and going. Rhinomax have always focused on quality. This, together with our ability to matter-of-factly diversify and customise our products means we’re able to meet the ever-changing demands in the Australian market.”

RhinoMax have only just begun. That’s good enough for us! CTA

THE INSIDE WOR Rhinomax’s hybrids, endlessly striving to combine the best of both worlds

A BREEZE L E V A R T E T O M E R XTENDED E E K A M S IE DEAN IT Y D IL N C A A F – G ” IN F L K E O S O C IT E D OWER AN XPERIENC E H S E , H G T IN N T O H Y IG G L R , E R N E E “POW LL YOUR A E T A R T N E C N O C U AND LET YO

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At Lightning Ridge’s Lunatic Hill a huge open cut mine has been quarried to get to the opal-bearing layers, where the small “caves” have been dug around the bottom

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Opal Sea

Camper's resident offroad-loving geologist takes a closer look at Australia's magnificent interior lands ELSEWHERE IN this issue of Camper we took a look at the great advantages bestowed on this nation by the once great Eromanga Sea, which a hundred million years ago flooded across one fifth of the landscape of modern Australia. It left behind a unique sequence of sandstones and shales which have formed a great bowl to capture rainfall along the wetter northern and eastern margins of the continent and deliver it to the now parched and dry centre.

That flow of water has, over the past thousands of years, sustained small tribes of aboriginal nomads and, in the past 150 years, has made possible a pastoral industry that has helped make Australia one of the

The Eromanga Sea was rich with life, these two coiled ammonites. Wou such as ld be such a shame if I was to take this ham mer here and...

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great food exporters to a hungry world. And it has sustained settlements of everything from individual families up to those of several hundred people in size, allowed livestock to be moved around with some safety and determined where roads and railways were built.

Such seas, like the Eromanga Sea, are known as epeiric or epicontinental seas, and are much less common than in the days of the dinosaurs.

However, we can find examples in Hudson’s Opal mining requires a willingness to work in dark tunnels deep underground, and be a little eccentric into the bargain

Bay in Canada, the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Carpentaria and the Arafura Sea between Australia and New Guinea.

And no less significant for some has been the discovery that underground there were riches to be discovered in the form of the brilliant sparkle opals, a consequence of much more subtle movement of water.

Opal is a hydrated silica which has formed thin layers through what were once fissures in the ground rock, or which has replaced what were once the surface or even all of the remains of ancient life embedded in the rock. This includes bones, teeth, shells and woody tissues of prehistoric plants and animals whose remains were buried in the sediments, almost all of them in the early Cretaceous Period, about 100 to 125 million years ago.

The opal was formed from silica rich water moving through the rock. The silica comes from the sandstone, which in itself is porous enough to permit the movement of the water.

Wherever the water remained stationary for a while or evaporated it would leave a deposit of the silica. In most gems the stone is formed from a strictly regulated almost mathematical three dimensional lattice, but in opal the gem is made up of microscopic “balls”, each of which acts individually and in concert with those around it

R BENEATH THE SU to diffract light, giving the multi-coloured and seemingly random brilliance which makes them so attractive. The smaller balls favour colours towards the blue end of the spectrum and the larger balls favour colours at the red end of the spectrum. The more orderly the balls in size and arrangement, the less the colour; the greater the range of sizes and the more irregular the pattern, the greater the amount of colour.

It is interesting that these not uncommon requisite conditions for the formation of opal are not more readily present elsewhere in the world.

Though there has been a consistent search elsewhere there are still only very few known localities which produce gem quality opal, and Australia still supplies between 80 and 90 per cent of the world’s opals. A recent study has indicated that there appear to be very specific requirements for the formation of opal, with the formation of the basic deposit in quite shallow marine sediments followed by a prolonged sequence of erosion. This followed sampling from 1,036 known opal localities in Australia.

Based on these conclusions the requisite conditions are met at 10 per cent of the Great Artesian Basin, which opens the area for future search.

The early Cretaceous was a time when the dinosaurs dominated life on land, and flying reptiles populated the skies and huge reptiles swam in the seas. Thus we find fossilised bones and even very rare complete skeletons of all these organisms, as well as extremely rare pieces of dinosaur egg shell and skin, along with less spectacular remains of snails and shellfish and other contemporaneous life, all beautifully preserved in sparkling colour.

Based on the many pieces of bone it appears the most common dinosaurs living around the coastal margins of the Eromanga Sea were small dromaeosaurs. These were bipedal animals of between one and 11 metres in length which walked on two of the three main toes on their feet, with the third toe being held off the ground and carrying a large sickle-shaped claw which could have been used for hunting, fighting and/or climbing trees. The best known of the dromaeosaurs was Velociraptor, made famous in the movie Jurassic Park. Based on evidence from elsewhere in the world it is now considered likely that all dromaeosaurs were covered with feathers.

While random bits of unidentifiable bone are often found it is the more usual denizens of the shallow seas – the clams and other shellfish – that are the most common. The Eromanga Sea was connected with the open ocean at Australia’s northernmost margin, and so there are many places where the more archetypal denizens of those dinosaur-era seas are to be found, creatures like ammonites – coiled molluscs (shell-coated relatives of the squid and the octopus) that are a universal marker for marine deposits of those times, as well as belemnites – the ancient equivalent of a cuttle

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A life size re-creation of a Kronosaurus.

Not for the faint of heart

In places like Coober Pedy you can shop in an arcade cut from the opal bearing rock

Church items constructed from opal in Quilpie

bone, from more primitive relatives of modern cuttlefish. Few of these are found in opal deposits as the seas were a bit too shallow for them but are often to be found in deeper water deposits not far away.

These opal deposits are mined at many small towns across the margins of this ancient sea, the main locations being at Winton, Quilpie, Lightning Ridge, White Cliffs, Andamooka, Coober Pedy and Mintabe, though there are hundreds of lesser centres of activity. Lightning Ridge has been the source of the most significant fossil finds, from what was once a rich estuarine and lake environment with prolific forests growing in the area.

Next time you’re looking at a tray of gaudily sparkling opals just realise you’re quite likely to be lusting after what was once a dead shellfish or animal bone. CTA

When admiring a display of opal jewellery you’re also taking a glimpse back in time to a hundred million years ago

y, A bone piece found in Coober Ped ur or perhaps belonging to a plesiosa saur ichthyosaur or maybe even a dino

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