He was also an aviator, fencing contractor, labourer, mailman and miner[1] and known a "true son of the Red Centre", referring to the southern desert region of the Northern Territory in Australia.
[3] However, in Deep Well, all was not well with Central Australia being in the midst of a harsh drought and both of his parents experiencing ill health, so, in 1928, the family abandoned the station and moved in to Alice Springs, which was then called Stuart.
[8] Of his invention Johannsen said it was a long held dream: I think the idea of the self-tracking trailers for my road trains, which I built after World War II, originated in my imagination when I was about 10 years old.
I loved to make all sorts of weird contraptions out of tin lids, kerosene boxes and other bits and pieces and hooked my models together with two, three, and sometimes four trailers with wire towbars around bent nails.
In 1992 he published his autobiography: "A son of 'the red centre': memoirs and anecdotes of the life of a road train pioneer and bush inventor of the Northern Territory of Australia".