Most Australians will wander through life blissfully unaware that a saturated outboard starter motor can produce an electric shock capable of scorching a grown man's testicles.
They will never know the sheer terror of crossing a desert with dwindling fuel supplies and only a weathered old boy scout's compass to guide them.
And if a dangerous stranger were to point a loaded rifle directly at their heads from 6 metres away, they would likely lack the nerve and character to spontaneously bluff about being a karate expert who could snap a human neck in the blink of an eye.
They have not led the adventurous life of Mal Leyland.
But the 78-year-old, who is the surviving half of the famous Leyland Brothers travel documentary duo, is not done yet.
Life and loin on the line
"I thought I ruined my chances of having any children," Leyland says.
"But my real concern at the time was to survive."
The Leyland Brothers were just days into an objectively insane mission to retrace the route mapped by Matthew Flinders in 1802 and sail a 5.5-metre boat from Darwin to Sydney.
It was the tail end of the 1960s, and the men had already cemented themselves as an Australian film and television sensation, blazing a path that would later be trodden by the likes of Alby Mangels, Malcolm Douglas and Steve Irwin.
They had danced with death plenty of times in the name of adventure and entertainment, but Leyland admits this expedition was downright cuckoo.
"We'd been out in a little rowing fishing boat with Mum and Dad on Lake Macquarie out of Newcastle, but that was about the limit of our boating experience," Leyland says.
"We were in rough seas coming down the coast, and we'd taken a lot of water on.
"Some of it got into the electrics, and it caused the starter motors to engage — and it went forward, and the motor turning overturned it into a generator."
Suddenly, a huge electrical shock went shot through Leyland's body.
"My testicles, if I can mention them, got very badly scorched," he says.
But smouldering loins were the least of his worries.
Using a tiny outboard motor and a comically small sail, they managed to approach a prawn trawler to ask for bearings.
The skipper told them to clear out or face likely death as furious storm clouds approached and offered to tow them back to Mooloolaba.
A noisy welcome to shore
It was a hell of a trip.
Mike Leyland was married at this stage, and so was their mate Trevor Teare who joined them on a lot of their journeys, so Mr Leyland offered to hang back and steer while the others boarded the trawler.
"The real story behind that is, never volunteer for anything," Leyland says.
"It took us all night, and it was dawn by the time we finally got in.
"The radios still worked in our boat, and I was able to talk to the towing vessel, and he was talking back to me."
Those fraught two-way conversations had a sizeable audience.
"The whole of the fishing fleet came down to the waterfront, where they had safe harbour," Leyland says.
"They were all down there listening to it.
"Just on dawn, when we came up the river, they all came out on their boats and were blowing and tooting their horns and whistles because we'd made it."
Catching the travel bug
The Leylands emigrated from England to Australia in 1950, when Mike was eight and Mal was five, and the pair grew up watching the 16mm-film exploits of wildlife documentary makers Armand and Michaela Denis.
In 1956, Mike entered a comic strip he'd drawn into a radio competition and won the top prize — tickets to the Melbourne Olympics.
"Dad had to cough up for the camera that he promised he'd buy him if he did [win], but the very first film he ever shot was us going on a daily picnic with the family," Leyland laughs.
Mike's first real job, other than a gig as a sign-writer, was as a news cameraman. Leyland later landed work as a photographer with the Newcastle Sun.
"The very first actual trip we did was to go to Central Australia in a Land Rover," Leyland says.
"We very nearly did a perish, though, because we decided to cross a hundred miles of desert without a road in front of us, just using a compass.
"We managed to get out the other side and arrived at Coober Pedy, the opal fields, much to the amazement of a few people because when we arrived, we had virtually not a sniff of petrol in the tank."
'A shiny blob of jelly'
Leyland believes their biggest success was the film Wheels Across a Wilderness, documenting their journey from the westernmost point of the mainland — Steep Point in Western Australia — all the way to Byron Bay in as straight a line as possible by way of Uluru.
"When we arrived at the rock, we got some beautiful shots of it in the sunset," he says.
"But that night, it got up windy and all of a sudden, it started coming down cats and dogs.
"The tents we had were useless, they had a floor in them, but it caught the water… and we woke up sleeping in an inch or two of water."
They tried unsuccessfully to start a fire with a splash of petrol and had no choice but to huddle up and wait.
The sun finally peeked over the horizon, and they were astonished by the view.
"The rock was just like a big, shiny blob of jelly. It was all glistening, and it was completely different," Leyland says.
"And then the waterfalls started running down.
"We had six inches of rain that day, and it was the first time it had ever been photographed in the rain — and I got these shots of these waterfalls.
"They're actually the highest waterfalls in Australia when they're running, but they only run occasionally when it rains heavy."
Those photos ended up in National Geographic, and the film became a huge success, with the brothers hiring town halls and cinemas all over the country to show it.
Gun-slinging in Gulf Country
Leyland says the wildest spots on earth often have the friendliest people, but that's not to say there were never any hairy encounters of the human variety.
He recalls a moment when his life was hanging by a thread up in Gulf Country during that groin-zapping boat trip.
"We brought the boat up this big, long creek, and then this bloke came down, and he was carrying a rifle in his hand," Leyland says.
"He pointed it straight at me, and he says, 'What are you doing here?'
"I said to him, 'What I haven't yet told you is that I'm a karate expert, and I could break your neck in a split second if I wanted to … but I'd rather do this'."
Leyland says he quickly yanked a loaded .303 rifle out of the boat and aimed it at the armed interloper's head.
"I said, 'Now this is like a western, isn't it? One of us is going to die if we don't back down,'" he recalls.
"I had it cocked and ready to go, and he stood there, and he said, 'We'll meet again'.
"But I'll tell you what, for a moment there, I thought I was going to have to shoot him."
Leyland walked away unscathed, but it was the business side of things that really left a scar.
A riches to rags story
The Leyland Brothers were a breakout success, with movies, TV shows and a huge following all over Australia and as far afield as Japan.
In 1990, they decided to open Leyland Brothers World theme park on the Mid-North Coast of New South Wales.
It was a financial disaster.
"What we did was build something that was a 1:32 scale model of Ayers Rock [Uluru]," Leyland says.
"We ended up hiring a huge crane … I did a lot of the welding myself, especially up high because we couldn't get anyone to work up there.
"It was great times, and we were doing very well, but in order to do it, we had to get a loan."
They took out a $3 million bank loan, which had already blown out to $3.3 million by the time the doors opened.
About 400,000 people were visiting the park annually, but the early 1990s were an unforgiving time with high unemployment, bank collapses, and a pilots' strike chiselling away at the economy.
"The interest rates went right through the roof," Leyland says.
"They went from 12 per cent, which we thought was pretty rich, to 28 per cent within 14 months – and that is a lot of money."
Leyland Brothers World shut its doors in 1992, and many years later, that huge replica of Uluru caught fire and burned down to a charred shell.
Something similar happened to the Leyland Brothers' relationship.
Life, death and in between
Both Mal and Mike went bankrupt after the failed theme park venture, and personal tensions that had been simmering away for years finally reached a breaking point.
"My brother and I were very much alike in so many ways, and we'd been through so much together," Leyland says.
"But in the end, it was the interest rates that put the pressure on us and caused it all to happen.
"We missed a payment, and the bank moved on us and basically chucked us out.
"And we were left, then, with nothing."
Mike Leyland died from Parkinson's disease in 2009 at the age of 68.
The brothers had made amends, but Mike's death affected Leyland greatly.
"It was never like it was," he says.
"To be perfectly honest, I couldn't really believe that he'd gone.
"It's a bit like any close family member … [my wife] Laraine's gone too, and that was the same. In fact, it was worse.
"That is life. Death is actually at the end of it for all of us."
Swan song safari
His earlier electric ordeal didn't ruin Leyland's chances of procreation, and his adult daughter Carmen is now his regular travel companion.
These days the outback wanderer hangs his hat in the regional Queensland city of Toowoomba — and he might still have one last show up his sleeve.
"This trip that I'm about to do, I'm going to film it," he says.
"I would like to think that it reached a big audience, and one of the ways of doing that would be to offer it to the TV networks.
"But I'd like it to be perhaps my last hurrah."
