The rally that wouldn't stop: A decade of dirt, dust, and $4.38 Million

In Short:

• The 100% Rule: Unlike many charity events, every single dollar raised by participants goes directly to Country Hope, thanks to the organisers self-funding all logistics.
• A Decade of Impact: Over ten years, the rally has raised a staggering $4.38 million to provide financial and emotional support to regional families facing life-threatening childhood illnesses.
• Beyond the Drive: The event supports the towns it passes through, including an opening night auction that has raised an average of $10,000 to $12,000 for immediate local community needs.

How Tammy and Gavin Gilbert turned a simple idea into $4.38 million for Country Hope, and why, ten years on, it's still going strong.

It started with a conversation. Gavin Gilbert had been on a couple of car rallies, loved them, genuinely loved them, but something about the way they were set up nagged at him. He found out that most charity rallies didn't actually require 100 per cent of the money raised to go to the charity. Some only needed 51 per cent. The rest could go to costs, overheads, organisers.

Gavin looked at that number and thought, why not just do it properly?

So he and his wife Tammy sat down, did their research, and started looking at charities. A lot of the ones they looked at already received government funding. But one caught their eye, a local children's charity called Country Hope. They didn't get a cent of government funding. They were doing extraordinary work for some of the most vulnerable families in regional Australia. And they needed help.

The first Riverina Outback Rally, or, as it was known back then, the Riverina Redneck Rally, raised $123,000. That was about half of Country Hope's entire budget at the time. Ten years and ten rallies later, the total sits at $4.38 million. And counting.

Before you go any further with this story, you need to understand what Country Hope does. Because it's the reason everything else in this piece matters. Country Hope isn't just another children's charity. It doesn't just help the kid who's sick. It helps the whole family. When a child in regional Australia is diagnosed with cancer or another life-threatening illness, the family doesn't just face the medical battle, they face the financial one too. The cost of getting to the hospital. The cost of staying near their child while treatment happens. The mortgage that still needs paying while a parent can't work. The phone bill. The groceries. All of it.

Country Hope steps in and covers those things. And because they receive no government funding whatsoever, every single dollar they get comes from people like Tammy and Gavin, and the extraordinary mob of humans who get in a car every March and drive into the unknown for five days. 

"They don't just help the child who's sick," Tammy said. 

"They help the whole family. They pay for the mortgage, they pay for the phone bill, like those sort of things. I was like, right, we want to do something that's gonna be 100 per cent."

And the need has only grown. COVID didn't just test the rally itself, it increased the demand for Country Hope's services. More families struggling. More kids needing help. Which makes what Tammy and Gavin have built even more critical.

Here's how the rally works. Up to 80 cars line up. Teams of two. A mystery route that nobody knows until the morning of each day, and off you go. Five days. Around 2,500 kilometres. Dirt roads, corrugated tracks, dust, heat, the occasional breakdown, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, some of the best scenery this country has to offer. 

This year they're starting out of Wagga Wagga, which is where they finished in that very first rally, a nice full-circle moment for the tenth event, and finishing in Bendemere, near Armadale.

"It's a surprise every morning where we end up," Tammy said. 

"They get the map every morning that tells them where we're going. And I think that's half the fun of it as well."

It's not a race. It's not about speed or who gets there first. It's about the drive, the adventure, the company, and the fact that every single kilometre being covered is putting money into the hands of families who desperately need it. The teams fundraise before they go, some scraping together the $3,000 minimum, others raising tens of thousands, and then once the rally starts, the focus shifts to the communities they roll through.

There's an auction on the opening night. It raises an average of $10,000 to $12,000, and that money goes directly to whatever community they're starting in. But it's not a pre-planned thing. They decide on the night, based on what's actually needed. Last year, it went to a school for kids with disabilities. 

"We don't decide until that night where it's going," Tammy explained. 

"There's no promises or anything, because it depends on what's going on in the community. It might be a family. It might be a school."

The auction itself is something to behold. People paying twenty dollars for a cup. A hundred dollars for a pair of underpants with someone's picture on them. Ridiculous, beautiful, completely over-the-top generosity that only happens when a room full of people decides that the cause is worth being silly for. 

"We're all standing here buying auction items, paying $20 for a cup, people paying $100 for a pair of underpants that's got a picture of someone on them," Tammy said, laughing. 

"And it all goes to help somebody else. It's amazing what can happen when you all get together."

Throughout the week, the rally mob drops into the towns they pass through, books and toys to schools, a boost to the local economy as 80 cars worth of people hit the pubs and diners. It's not organised as a grand gesture. It just happens, naturally, because that's who these people are.

You might have noticed the rally used to be called the Riverina Redneck Rally. It's a good name, fun, irreverent, very much in the spirit of the thing. But Tammy and Gavin changed it to the Riverina Outback Rally, and the reason is pretty telling. When people heard "Redneck Rally," some of them assumed it was just a bunch of blokes going for a drive in the sun. A lark. A weekend away. The name didn't quite communicate what it actually was, a serious, disciplined, beautifully organised fundraising operation that happened to also be an incredible adventure.

That first meeting with Country Hope was interesting, Tammy admitted.

 "We used to be known as the Redneck Rally. Just, you know, you going out in the sun, that sort of stuff. So they weren't sure what to expect." 

But after that first rally raised $123,000, Country Hope knew exactly what they had. And the name change helped clarify things for everyone else.

Here's the thing that sets the Riverina Outback Rally apart from almost every other charity event you've ever heard of. Tammy and Gavin do it themselves. They don't outsource it. They don't hand it off to an event management company and take a cut. They run it, the planning, the logistics, the sponsor chasing, the route planning, the everything, so that every single dollar raised goes straight to Country Hope. It's not a small amount of work. It's essentially eleven months of the year.

The rally itself is in March. The minute they get back, Tammy and Gavin sit down and write everything down, what worked, what didn't, every conversation they had, every issue that came up. Then they switch off. No phones, no emails, nothing rally-related for about three weeks, except a bit of media stuff. Then they start again. Gavin works out the start and finish points. They contact councils. They get the sanction letter from Country Hope. Expressions of interest open around June so people have nine months to fundraise.

"We normally have straight away, you know, at least 60 (entrants)," Tammy said. 

"And then within a few weeks you've got 100. So then you accept them, and you'll always lose people. That's how it works. That's how life goes."

You'll have the ones who fundraise straight away, teams with $28,000 or $29,000 raised and events still running six weeks out from the rally. And you'll have the ones who turn up on the weekend before, saying they've had this going on, that going on, haven't got a sponsor yet, money will be in by Sunday. Deadline's the deadline. 

"You always have those," Tammy said, with the weary fondness of someone who's seen it a hundred times. 

"But you'll always have the ones who fundraise straight away."

Some teams are quiet during the event even though they've fundraised hard all year. Others are loud and present the whole time but struggled to scrape together the minimum. 

“You don't know what people have going on behind closed doors,” Tammy points out. 

“You just make space for all of it.

"Because we want 100 per cent to go to the charity, we do it ourselves," Tammy said simply. "And that's what makes it work." 

They have children. They have grandchildren. They have their own business. And yet, year after year, they keep doing it.

No one does this alone, and Tammy is the first to say so. 

"I'm very lucky to have an amazing group of support crew and mates and things, people who just step up and make it happen," she said. 

U-Haul Australia has been on board for the last nine years. They supply all the trailers. They supply the vehicles. They put two of their guys on every single trailer. They even supply the food along the way, because U-Haul also owns Country Cookies in Donald, and those cookies have become a beloved part of the rally experience.

Then there's Darren, who's gone above and beyond in ways that have nothing to do with the rally itself. He organised the artwork on the U-Haul trailers, pictures of small country pubs from all over the region. Little pubs that most of Australia has never heard of, immortalised on the side of a trailer as it rolls through the outback. It's a small thing, maybe. But for a tiny pub in the middle of nowhere, seeing your building up there on a trailer driving past thousands of people? That's something.

It hasn't all been smooth. Tammy is honest about that. COVID was the biggest hurdle. Making the rally happen during a pandemic, keeping it going when so many community events around the country just folded, that took grit. When they couldn't run the rally itself, they improvised. They ran a tinny run from Darlington Point to Hay to raise enough money to keep the event alive for the following year. They didn't ask for grants. They didn't hold out their hand. They just found a way.

Weather has thrown its own curveballs. Last year they were somewhere that hit 46 or 47 degrees the entire week they were there. Six days after they left, the same area flooded. Roads get blocked. Plans change on the fly. You go on the bitumen instead of the dirt. You reroute. You adapt. That's just how it is. "You'll get to a place and if the roads are blocked, you just have to go a different way," Tammy said. "You just gotta put things in place to make it happen."

And here's the part that nobody really talks about enough, but that might actually be the most beautiful thing about the whole rally. The people who do this aren't all the same. They're not all from the same town, or the same background, or the same tax bracket. Some teams have fundraised $28,000 or $29,000 and still have events running. Others have struggled all year just to scrape together the minimum. Some people budget for months just to afford the week itself. Others barely blink at the cost. But on that road, none of that matters. Not really.

"The most amazing friendships have been formed from people who wouldn't have come into contact in normal everyday life," Tammy said, and there's a warmth in the way she says it that tells you she's seen it happen, again and again, right in front of her. People from all different walks of life, thrown together by a shared road and a shared purpose, finding each other in the dust and the heat and the chaos of five days on the move. Amazing families. Kids making mates. Whole families becoming friends. The kind of connections that start on a rally and last for years, long after the cars have stopped, long after the dust has settled.

"You don't know what goes on behind closed doors," Tammy said. "What people have got happening in their lives. But you put all lots of different people together, and it's amazing what can happen."

When you ask Tammy where she sees the rally going, she's measured about it. Things change. Insurance changes. Communities change. The world changed in ways nobody predicted. But the core of it, the why of it, hasn't shifted an inch. "We're hoping it'll continue for quite a while," she said. "I'm hoping our kids take it on. But at this stage, they're not quite ready for that. So yeah, we just take it year by year."

Year by year. That's how they've done it from the start. Not with a grand five-year plan or a corporate strategy. With a dream, a stubbornly generous couple, and a mob of incredible people who get in a car every March and drive into the unknown because someone, somewhere, needs them to. "This is his dream," Tammy said of Gavin, "and he's made it happen."

She's being modest. They both made it happen. But you can hear the pride in her voice, the kind of pride that comes from watching someone you love do something that actually, genuinely, matters. $4.38 million. Ten rallies. Hundreds of families helped. And somewhere out there, right now, a team is still fundraising, still planning, still believing in the dream. Not bad for a bloke who just wanted 100 per cent to go to the charity.

The Riverina Outback Rally raises funds for Country Hope, a family-centred support organisation for country children diagnosed with cancer and other life-threatening illnesses. For more information, visit riverinaoutbackrally.com.au