Welcome to old-ambulance.com

Welcome to old-ambulance.com the SA Ambos web site

This website is all about South Australian ambulances, with photos and information about the vehicles and the organisations that operated them.

In an emergency dial 000, call for help and do first aid!

Our site is dedicated to providing a history of South Australian ambulances, such as the Holden Panel Van and Em-Care ambulances and the Ford Transit, F-100 and F-250 Petrol and Diesel Twin-Life ambulances, along with the Mercedes Sprinter. You will find photos provided by colleagues and friends, many of whom have worked as volunteer and career ambulance officers or patient transport officers in the St.John Ambulance Service or South Australian Ambulance Service, while others serviced the ambulances at Hindmarsh or Fulham and helped to keep them running reliably and safely.

The common theme binding all of us together, whether St.John or SAAS, Royal Flying Doctor Service or Industrial is that we were ambulance officers or paramedics and wanted to save lives and help people. To many, these vehicles are just trucks or vans, but to those of us who worked in them for hours on end, they are where mates relied on one other to perform near-miracles under very trying conditions. South Australians over the years have been able to depend on their ambos to come when they are hurt or injured, whether they are in Adelaide or Coober Pedy, Mount Gambier or Kingscote. But we couldn’t have saved any one’s life without safe and reliable ambulances, great training and professionalism, good equipment, or our strong esprit de corps.

Welcome to the SA Ambos website, please enjoy some of our history, and thanks for visiting, from Andrew, Bill, David, Doug, Kevin, Lyndon, and the countless other ambulance officers of South Australia.

If we haven't got an ambulance picture displayed - but you’ve got it and would like to share it – we would love to hear from you. Please call us or send an email! All contributions (including corrections that prove us wrong) are always gratefully accepted!

Holden HZ Em-Care Fleet 50, from a picture posted on the old-Holden's website by Allen Smith. This vehicle was a Marion truck and it was the first ambulance that Kevin ever worked in. The six-wheeled Holden Emergency Care ambulances of the 1970s were a uniquely South Australian design developed by Mueller’s Bodywork on a one-tonner chassis modified, in many cases, by Holden to Premier specifications.

Fleet 155 at Blackwood Centre in May 1991, when the last St.John Volunteer crews operated in Adelaide. The fog lamps were a necessity in the damp misty winter nights that prevail in the Adelaide Hills. Fleet 155 is an example of the later type Twin-Life modules that were fitted to F150 utility trays. Twin-Life ambulances were another South Australian innovation developed by Javelin Bodyworks (Photo by Phil Dunkley).

Fleet 62 is a Mader International Mercedes 315 Sprinter Ambulance Transport Service (ATS) Vehicle sporting the current high-visibility livery that has been adopted by the South Australian Ambulance Service (SAAS) after research from the University of Adelaide. The ATS vehicles are marked Ambulance while the paramedic vehicles are marked Emergency Ambulance (Photo by Kevin Marsland 2008).

The Philips FM900R Hi Band VHF/UHF Repeater Radio in the driver’s compartment of an F-250 Petrol Twin-Life at Mount Pleasant Station 1992. Normally designed to operate on VHF simplex the system allowed the crew at an incident to switch to repeat mode and carry a UHF hand-held radio. The FM900R would receive the UHF signal from the hand-held and retransmit back to base on VHF (Photo by William Watkins).