Leyland brothers
Australian explorers
The Leyland brothers were an English-born Australian duo of explorers and documentary filmmakers, consisting of Michael James "Mike" Leyland, MBE (4 September 1941 – 14 September 2009) and Malcolm Rex "Mal" Leyland, MBE (born 2 October 1944).
The Leylands were best known for their popular television show, Ask the Leyland Brothers, which aired from 1976 to 1980 and 1983 to 1984. Through their exploits the brothers introduced many Australians to the sights of the Australian outback.
Biography
Early life
In 1950, when Mike was eight and Mal was five they migrated with their parents from Hitchin, North Hertfordshire, England to Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia. Their parents ran a local store. Mike would later attend Wallsend Public School. The brothers grew up watching documentaries by Armand and Michaela Denis.
When aged 15, Mike won a trip to the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne from a cartoon-drawing competition, and his father bought him a 16mm movie camera to take along. The teenage brothers would later use the camera to film themselves and their friends as they explored outback New South Wales. They also planned to use the camera to film a journey to Uluru in their father's Morris Minor; a mechanic friend persuaded them to trade in the car for an old Land Rover.
“Leyland brothers” enters the record as australian explorers. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Leyland, brothers and Australian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6538078. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1941, 2009, 1944 and 1976.
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This entry incorporates text from “Leyland brothers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.