Born the same year

Andy Budge wanted a 1964 Land Cruiser for one reason: it was the year he was born. Not a '63, not a '65 — it had to be '64. The search took years. When he finally found one in Western Australia in October 2013, he was in Bali. He bought it sight-unseen. The previous owner had been using it to launch boats. The rear sills were gone. The floor pan was lace. Every piece of rubber had surrendered to the salt.

His father is the reason this car exists in Budge's life at all. In 1973 or '74, his dad bought his first Land Cruiser and drove it home from Perth to Kalgoorlie with Andy in the passenger seat. That childhood memory — the sound, the ride, the vast emptiness of the Goldfields-Esperance highway — imprinted something permanent.

The restoration took a decade and followed one absolute rule: everything original, nothing modified. Matching numbers, period-correct accessories, factory specification. The engine was rebuilt to standard 1960s spec. The three-speed gearbox — first gear unsynchronised, so it's effectively a two-speed on the road — was restored rather than swapped for something more liveable. The soft top, which arrived as a patchwork of repairs, was painstakingly rebuilt.

Budge sourced parts from around the world, hunting down the kind of period-correct accessories that Toyota dealers would have offered in the 1960s: hubcaps, reversing lights, a pintle tow ball, a locking petrol cap, fog lights with an era-correct dashboard switch. 'I've glammed it up a bit,' he says, which is underselling it considerably. Floor pans were fabricated from scratch by a specialist in Chicago. Rear sills were hand-made.

'You have to earn the respect of the community and then the assistance flows,' Budge says. 'There are many chapters to my car. I can look at any component and there's a human connection.' He keeps it in a Carcoon protective cover. He won't take it off-road. He won't exceed 90 km/h. This is not a car that gets used — it's a car that gets preserved. A monument to a childhood memory and a father's influence, built to the standard that memory deserves.