One of our ATA members was heavily involved in this trial as well as the later Mack and Mog acquisitions and from discussions held with him on the subject it seems that somewhere along the line there developed some deep and damaging "personality" clashes in the upper echelons of ADE, IH and Ford. As a result of these rifts becoming so completely untenable, the whole venture of local manufacture was eventually scrapped, and as mentioned elsewhere, an "off the shelf" product was purchased. This attitude carried on across the board as at this time communication between IH (who at the time was supplying the then current trucks for the army) and the Army became so tenuous that International bit the bullet and the Army went ahead and bought the Mogs and Macks off the shelf. Not long after this IH ceased manufacture in Australia.
The other contender in the 1 ton GS (commonly called ITONGS within ADE) acquisition bid, the Ford entrant, remained at Monegeetta for a number of years, long after the trials were finished, as the local runabout and proved to be almost unbreakable, what with its commonality of parts with the local Falcon 250. (Remember the 250 odd 4x4 Ford Falcon XY utes that were sold in NSW and Qld - that's where a lot of the 4x4 parts that were set aside for this particular ITONGS vehicle were disposed of when the deal with the Army fell through).
To my mind this was one of the saddest times for the military as a whole when we suddenly gave up designing and manufacturing vehicles suitable for our ops (and I may add, in the case of the Mk3/4/F! trays, we were leaps and bounds ahead of the others!) and started to buy often less capable and more complicated to operate equipment off the shelf that had to be modified before use. We still haven't learnt, except for the Bushmaster and Hawkeii that are locally made.
