The Best Australian Trucking Stories Read online

  ‘This Aussie truck driver also has to have phenomenal personal control. He has to deal with delivery and pick-up areas designed by our main rival in Hell, coax a loader to actually work for his money, comfort an accident victim’s family, pay all taxes and fines and put up with endless misguided criticism.’

  With that, Saint Steve leaned over his Boss’s shoulder to take a look at the unfinished model lying on the construction table. ‘It looks almost finished,’ he said with surprise. ‘How have you managed to put all that’s required in there?’

  ‘It hasn’t been easy,’ said the Lord, ‘but it has to be done. This model needs all those specifications and features to operate successfully.’

  ‘Are you sure it will all fit?’ asked the angel as he bent over the seemingly sleeping figure.

  ‘I think I’ve almost managed it, but it’s taken everything I had,’ said the Creator with a sigh.

  ‘Hang on, what’s this?’ asked the angel, bending lower and touching the cheek of the sleeping model. ‘There’s a leak, look. I told you that you were trying to put too much into this model. No living thing can handle all that, surely.’

  ‘That’s not a leak,’ said the Lord, bending low to examine the droplet of water. ‘It’s a tear.’

  ‘Well, that’s amazing; along with everything else you added a tear. What’s the tear for: bottled-up emotions, fallen comrades, or for the mate’s family without its father? You’re a genius, Boss,’ said Saint Steve reverently.

  The Lord straightened up and looked gravely towards the angel.

  ‘I didn’t put that there,’ He said.

  I worked in the transport industry for 25 years from the 1970s into the 1990s; fifteen of those were with Richmond Heavy Towing, a company based in the city of Adelaide.

  South Australia is a vast state, stretching from a mostly isolated coastline to the hot and dry deserts of the outback. Richmond Towing do a lot of long-range heavy truck and rental-car salvage, involving hundreds of kilometres of outback driving. Sometime in the late 1970s I did three rental-car salvage trips to Woomera in three days.

  Now, Woomera is a vast area of government land in the middle of South Australia; controlled by the federal government, it consists of hundreds of square miles of flat, dry and very barren land which has been used since World War II for test-firing rockets and all sorts of explosive weapons. A group of NASA people from the US had gone up there to do some rocket tests. The problem was that the NASA mob didn’t quite realise how big kangaroos were, until they hit a few of them with a rented car or two . . . or three!

  The kangaroos up there didn’t know much about cars either. Roads on the Woomera range are on government land and there are so few cars that the wildlife just run wherever they feel like running, and that can be straight in front of your car, so you have to slow down and watch out for them . . . or play chicken with them and take the consequences.

  Woomera is about 600 miles from the Richmond Towing depot in Adelaide, and that’s only one way. It’s a 1200-mile trip each time, and I did three of them in three days; it was good for the wallet but not so good for my sleep pattern.

  After doing work for a number of rental-car companies over many years, I now know why they like their customers to pay by credit card. You would be amazed at how roughly people treat rental cars!

  I once had to go and get a little Volkswagen Golf from Coober Pedy, an opal-mining town in the outback desert of South Australia, some 550 miles from Adelaide. Normally, if you want to drive a long way in Australia, you rent a four-wheel drive or a bigger sedan like a Ford Falcon or a Holden Commodore. The bloke who rented the Golf was a German tourist who apparently told the rental company he was ‘only driving around Sydney’.

  Not only was he 1700 miles from Sydney, he had been up to Darwin and was on his way back. That’s a round trip of 5000 miles. He had hit a kangaroo and the little car was a write-off; he must have been really moving when he hit that roo.

  One of the funniest jobs I ever did for a rental-car company started one quiet evening about 7 p.m. I was sitting in the phone room at the Richmond Towing depot talking to PJ, the radio operator at the time, when he took a phone call from a rental company. It seemed they’d had a call from a Japanese tourist whose car had broken down. He called from the roadhouse at Meningie, which is about 150 miles south-east of Adelaide.

  When PJ asked me if I would like to do the job, I said, ‘Sure, I could do with a bit of a drive tonight.’

  ‘Good,’ said PJ. ‘You’ll be back just after midnight, so don’t bother returning to the depot. Just take the truck home to save time and get some sleep. Give me a call in the morning about 8. Instead of coming into the depot to start work, you can start work from home tomorrow.’

  I drove across South Road to the London Road fuel depot to fill up the truck, then drove into the city to the rental company to pick up the replacement car for the customer. I loaded the replacement car onto the Ford Louisville sliding tilt-tray tow truck and headed off to Meningie.

  When I arrived at the roadhouse at Meningie I soon found the tourist. He didn’t speak much English, but I told him to hop into the truck and show me where the car was. Off we went, heading east out of Meningie.

  We had gone about 5 miles when I asked him how much further it was to the car. He just pointed straight ahead and said, ‘More . . . more,’ so I drove on.

  Ten miles later I asked again, ‘How far now?’

  Again he just pointed ahead and said, ‘More . . . more,’ so I just kept driving.

  This time I drove about 60 miles in silence before I said to him, ‘Look, tell me what’s going on, where’s the car? You told the rental company it was just out of town!’

  He replied in broken English, ‘Yes, it just out of next big town.’

  Well, the next town was Kingston and that was about 140 miles from where we were.

  ‘Why didn’t you get a lift into Kingston and not back at Meningie?’ I asked, exasperated.

  He said, ‘I just took ride from first car that stop, but it going the wrong way.’

  I drove on to Kingston and, when I slowed down for the town, I asked, ‘So, it’s just out of town now?’

  He answered rather sheepishly, ‘Not this town . . . next big one.’

  I looked at him dumbfounded and said, ‘You don’t mean Mount Gambier!?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, that right . . . Mount Gambier.’

  I shook my head and said, ‘That’s another 180 miles away!’ Mount Gambier is actually closer to Melbourne than it is to Adelaide.

  Anyway, I drove to Mount Gambier and finally picked up the car and headed back to Adelaide.

  It was 8.30 a.m. before I was back in two-way radio range at Tailem Bend, 50 miles from Adelaide. I could hear PJ calling me, so I stopped on top of a hill and told him the whole story.

  ‘I’m not quite ready to start work today, PJ,’ I said. ‘I haven’t been home yet!’

  My association with trucking began in 1950.

  We came from off the land, down near Lockhart, New South Wales, and of course we had a truck on the property that we used for delivering cereal hay around the district. Dad also used to supply fodder to the police stations in the area, which all had horses back then.

  We decided that the trucks would provide a more reliable income and be a back-up to the farm, so my father and my brother and myself set up in the freight business together, originally using rigid Bedfords. When Dad passed away we were hit by death duties and had to reorganise the business so that our mother would be financially secure.

  We were always involved in produce and always generated our own freight. We ended up with five vehicles on the road, mainly servicing the produce markets and building-materials industries.

  Road transport had really only begun in the late 1940s and there were many restrict
ions in the form of road taxes. They had a Road Transport Restriction Act in the 1940s—in reality it was a Railways Protection Act—which imposed a heavy tax on all road transport.

  Freight crossing state borders was subject to a confusing variety of laws up to the early 1950s. As the Commonwealth Constitution did not specify federal control over road transport, it effectively meant that jurisdiction was controlled by the states and territories.

  In 1952, truck drivers became frustrated by the levies on interstate road transport, which were designed to protect the state-owned railways. At Wodonga in New South Wales, vehicles had to line up to buy permits to go into Victoria; it was the same on every border. The idea was to force the trade onto the railways.

  The drivers got together and placed a copy of the Constitution in a wheelbarrow and pushed it from Melbourne to Sydney. The trip took eleven days, which was two days faster than a parcel mailed at the same time and carried by rail.

  They then launched a legal challenge against the validity of the New South Wales Transport Act, on the basis that section 92 of the Constitution provided that trade and commerce between the states should be ‘absolutely free’. This legal challenge became known as the Hughes and Vale case, and eventually led, in November 1954, to a successful constitutional challenge in the High Court which opened up the development of interstate road transport around Australia. The Privy Council ruled that the New South Wales Transport Act indeed violated section 92 of the Australian Constitution.

  Hughes and Vale was the catalyst for the growth of interstate road transport. The growth of this business soon highlighted the limitations of the different road transport regulations between states. Following the case, taxes could only be levied for road maintenance purposes. The end result was that the tax burden on interstate trucks was somewhat reduced, making trucking more profitable.

  The states then got together in an attempt to get revenue from road transport, as they did from the railways. New South Wales introduced the Roads Maintenance Contribution Act. Each state then followed suit and a new tax was introduced whereby each driver had to file returns for each vehicle for each month. The tax was so much per cent per mile on your gross vehicle weight.

  Drivers who took the option of using federal ‘interstate plates’ soon found that state laws prevented the use of those plates unless a load crossed a state border.

  A record of all journeys had to be sent to the state Department of Transport, which had hundreds of inspectors sitting at strategic points along the roads and highways. They wouldn’t pull you up, they’d just jot down your vehicle number as you passed and then check their records against your monthly returns. If they didn’t coincide, you got a ‘bluey’—or summons—and a hefty fine.

  There were massive protests in every state against this new tax, which applied to all vehicles over 4 tonnes. This meant farmers were also caught up in the tax and the Farmers’ Associations soon joined the trucking industry in the protests.

  In New South Wales we formed a Road Transport and Commercial Vehicle Owners group to organise opposition to the new taxes. There were thirteen members on the committee and I was the representative of the freight industry. The farmers, apiarists, coach companies and others were all represented, and 1800 people attended a conference held at the Trocadero in Sydney in 1958. At the meeting we decided to appeal to the High Court to test the validity of the new taxes.

  In the meantime, our barristers suggested that we continue to file our returns but not to pay the charges, pending the outcome of the High Court appeal. In spite of the fact that stiff penalties applied to failure to pay, as well as failure to send in returns, hundreds of us continued to send in our monthly returns without paying the tax. My brother and I had four vehicles running at that time and we set up a special account for the funds in the event that the case was lost.

  The High Court ruled that the new taxes were valid, and an appeal to the Privy Council in London was denied. The new taxes therefore became legal and binding in 1961.

  While this went on we’d had to dig into the savings we’d put aside and the fines had added a considerable amount to what we owed in taxes. Consequently, we didn’t have on hand the £4000 we owed. We had a pile of warrants for non-payment and had to come up with a plan to pay the back taxes and the fines in instalments. There were hundreds of other truckers in the same position.

  Some of the bigger companies went straight to the Department of Motor Transport and came to an arrangement to pay a proportion of what they owed. In some cases the New South Wales parliament accepted a third or half of the outstanding amount plus a written guarantee to comply in future. Many of these arrangements were brokered through the hard work of legendary rural MP Wal Fyfe.

  In my case the powers-that-be were not so sympathetic, as I’d been involved in organising the protests and authorising the legal actions against the tax. Wal Fyfe attempted to help us out and we made immediate representation to the state government, but we were hit with a further £6000 worth of fines and penalties for failure to remit the money, although we had sent in all returns and accepted that we had to pay the back taxes.

  Wal Fyfe put in a representation on our behalf, but the summonses had already been issued and had fallen due at court in Sydney. Our representation was not accepted and I was told that unless I paid up immediately I would be sent to prison.

  Specially commissioned police turned up at my office door one day early in 1963 and demanded the money or me. They even turned up at my mother’s home and threatened her, as she was a part-owner of our business.

  When they turned up at my door at work I told them I had chosen to serve out the time. They allowed me to go home and say goodbye to my wife and four young kids, then they escorted me to the railway station. Another fellow from Wagga and myself were taken by train to Goulburn. The escorting officers had a pile of warrants about a foot thick which they dumped on the desk at Goulburn Police Station.

  The desk sergeant, who had migrated to Australia from the north of England, looked at the mountain of warrants and exclaimed, ‘Fook me dead!’ and called for everyone in the station to come and have a look at the pile. He’d never seen so many warrants issued against one business or individual. They chose the warrant that had the largest amount owing, about £300 it was, and I had to serve out the time for that warrant, which amounted to 123 days.

  So, I spent 123 days in Goulburn Gaol as a fine defaulter. My first cellmate was a convicted murderer. I shared the prison facilities with many violent criminals and murderers, one of whom was the man who had been convicted in the infamous Thorne case some years earlier, when the young son of a lottery-winning family was kidnapped and murdered and the family blackmailed.

  After the classification process, I was assessed as low-risk. (My brother-in-law was actually a policeman in Wagga—maybe he put in a good word for me.) I was appointed to be ‘housemaid’ to the deputy governor and perform household duties for him and his family. As the deputy governor was a strict Methodist and I was a practising Lutheran, we had many chats over a glass of cold ginger beer. By then I was in low-security accommodation at what they called ‘the farm’ and he’d often sign me out in the evenings for a chat.

  Our business went bankrupt while I was in prison, but that at least protected my mother from financial ruin to a degree.

  It took two more decades before the Razorback blockades and the huge protests and strikes of 1979 finally saw the end of the iniquitous road taxes that had strangled the freight industry for so long.

  Luckily our company started up again and I continued to be involved in the freight business until quite recently. I’m now in my 80s and can look back on a lifetime in the business; it’s been an interesting ride.

  I was one of the first truck drivers silly enough to do regular crossings of the continent from Sydney to Perth, across the Nullarbor Plain, back in the early 1950s. The trucks we d
rove were basic, plain, slow and reliable. British trucks like Leyland AEC, Albion, Thornycroft, Foden and Atkinson were the backbone of Australia’s road transport in those days, mostly due to the minimal sales tax they incurred compared to European and American trucks. The British trucks were always available immediately from the dealer’s floor. Anything else had to be ordered, and delivery from overseas took up to six months. Although there were a few Macks, Federals, Diamond Ts and Mercedes-Benz to be seen on the road, they were few and far between. The 1954 AEC Matador and Albion HD models were good reliable trucks. Both were fitted with straight six-cylinder engines and a five-speed gearbox. The trailers were single or dual axles, mostly McGrath or Freighter.

  Those British diesel trucks, which were the backbone of long-distance transport in the 1950s, had forward control cabins. The motor wasn’t out the front of the cabin under a bonnet; the cabin was built around the motor. Between the driver’s seat and the small passenger seat, the cabin was divided completely in half by the metal engine cover. The noise was indescribably loud; you had to shout to be heard above the roar of the motor. We placed all sorts of covers over the metal engine casing: the best was a canvas refrigerator cover, but even that only deadened the noise a little.

  When it was time for a sleep, the driver had a choice. He could sleep out on the ground or build up the driver’s seat and passenger seat level with the top of the engine cover with suitcases or boxes and try to sleep across the top with a couple of blankets.

  Sometime in the late 1950s, after a few trips across the continent, we invented the original Aussie ‘sleeper cabin’. The Albion HD had plenty of room between the front of the trailer and the rear of the cabin. The cab wasn’t a tilt cab, it was bolted to the chassis, and so you had to be able to get to the motor from the rear. We extended only the top half of the cabin, leaving space to put extra tanks underneath the bunk on top of the chassis. The back of the cabin was cut out down to the top of the engine bay and the cabin was extended back on both sides to a width of just over a metre. The floor was cut to fit and the sides tapered in towards the base of the original cabin. Small glass windows with rubber edging were cut into both ends and some foam rubber was cut to fit for a mattress. It was primitive but worked unless you were really tall.