The Best Australian Trucking Stories Read online

  We always allowed three weeks for the trip in case of problems. And there were always problems out there in the ‘Never Never’ land: copper fuel lines could crack and break and there were many punctures. You might find yourself fitting and joining a new pipe or stripping wheels apart to repair them. Things like that were all a normal part of the trip . . . and I mean every trip. Broken springs might need to be wired together till a place could be found to park and fit a new leaf, or a broken centre bolt, or a wheel bearing that had given up the ghost. As there was nothing out there but you and your ability to get out of any trouble, all the extra parts that you might just need were carried in an extensive toolbox underneath the trailer. It was great fun.

  There was no air conditioning or refrigerators in trucks back then, so in the heat and dust nothing fresh lasted longer than a couple of days. Any fresh food items were best bought at the last outpost of civilisation. The main food supply was tinned stuff and fruit in season, like apples and oranges. We survived on tomato soup, baked beans, Irish stew, peaches, pears . . . anything in a tin. I always carried a second tin opener, just in case. I bet very few readers have ever tried to open a tin of baked beans with a hammer and chisel. It can be messy . . . the sauce spurts up into your face and half the beans are lost on the ground.

  There were a few water tanks scattered across the desert but they were usually dry, so it was in your best interest to be as self-sufficient as possible. I always carried around 200 gallons of diesel, a 44-gallon drum of water and a Primus stove, and that was it.

  Perth to Sydney was a distance of 3000 miles, and over a thousand miles of that was only a goat track. Through New South Wales, Victoria and part of South Australia the ‘highway’ was a narrow sealed road that still had long gravel stretches. After leaving Port Augusta, at the top of Spencer Gulf in South Australia, the road became a sandy dirt track for the next thousand miles, crossing uninhabited desert to the little town of Norseman in Western Australia. The last 500 miles into Perth had only a few gravel stretches.

  The Nullarbor was quite a trek back in the 1950s, real pioneering stuff. There were a few scattered properties off the main track but people only knew you were passing if you took mail in to them. That was always a bonus as they could use their wireless to notify those further on that you were around. If you had no mail to deliver no one knew you were out there. So, in any emergency, you had to rely on yourself . . . alone.

  The wilderness was the home of kangaroos, rabbits, wombats, camels, wild scrub turkeys and not much else. Things like scorpions and snakes worried me most. If a death adder bit you, you were a goner. You would be dead long before the next traveller who ventured over the east–west track found you.

  Out of the truck I always wore boots called Leather Necks. They were like sixteenth-century pirate boots that came up nearly to the knees and had a folded top. The death adder was well camouflaged and had a habit of lying still and striking quickly at the ankles. I felt fairly safe in my boots but I constantly surveyed the ground around me when out of the truck, and I always carried an old 1911 model Colt .45 pistol. If you had come across me out there back then you would have seen a tall, slim young man, brown from the sun and wearing a battered old Stetson hat and a pair of swimming trunks, with a pistol hanging from his waist, walking around in pirate boots. It was quite a sight!

  Back in those days there were not many drivers who took on the challenge of the Nullarbor Plain. Maybe you had to be odd to do it! To get to the Nullarbor stretch from Sydney you could cut across the lower part of New South Wales and use the gravel road across the Hay Plain, or stick to the bitumen and go through Victoria. That Hay Plain road was fine in the dry, but when it rained the plains turned into a black-soil bog that clogged up the wheels till they were jammed to a stop. When that happened you had to wait till everything dried out and then chip off the dried mud before you could start again. So, when it was doubtful, it was best to take the longer route down through Victoria to join the sealed road to Adelaide.

  I usually went over the Hay Plain because there was a conflict of interest between the state of Victoria and myself that made life dangerous when I was in their territory. If they picked me up I was in trouble for unpaid taxes and fines; I refused to pay road tax for using roads that were goat tracks most of the time. Taking the Hay Plain route meant that I only needed to drive a couple of hours across the edge of Victoria to get me into South Australia . . . and back to safety. It was then an easy run to the top of Spencer Gulf and Port Augusta, the last big town and the jump-off point to the wild west. Back then it took a couple of days to fuel up, check everything, buy provisions and then double check everything again. It was not the time or place to be in a hurry or to be forgetful.

  I usually took off about sundown and travelled the thin sealed road to the Iron Knob turn-off, which was where the road to the ‘Golden West’ became a dirt track. I’d stop on the edge of the bitumen to have a last check around the truck with my torch, kick the tyres and tighten the ropes. At that point I always mentally ticked everything off for the last time . . . did I have everything? I always had that feeling that I’d forgotten something.

  Penong, about 40 miles west of Ceduna, was the very last bit of civilisation—a shop, a couple of houses and a pub. On most trips I tried to get there in the afternoon. Getting towards sundown was a bad time to drive west looking through the windscreen for the smoothest parts of the track ahead, so it was good to stop here till the sun went down. From Penong it was about 145 miles to the sheep and cattle property called Nullarbor Station. Sometimes the post office in Ceduna would ask me to deliver mail to the station.

  The enormous properties out there are measured in hundreds of square miles and, every now and then, gates had to be opened and closed on the way across. The area around the gate was often a sandy bog from vehicles constantly stopping there. I would usually stop a truck-length back and walk up to the gate, swing it open, make sure it wouldn’t swing closed, and then trudge back to the truck. I’d roar through the sand in low gear and stop a trailer-length past the gate, then walk back to shut the gate. I always felt, as I walked back through the deep sand to the truck, that someone was going to get bogged there sooner or later. I didn’t want it to be me.

  If it was dark it was often a good idea to get through the gate and then call it a night about a hundred yards further on. I’d check the tyres and ropes and the fuel tanks before settling down for a sleep.

  There are unaccountable happenings out there on the Nullarbor, strange lights that move around in the heavens and on the horizon and a wind that blows suddenly and then stops just as quickly, then starts blowing again, hot then cold then hot again—very strange. Back then the Australian government was letting the Poms use the area just a few hundred miles to the north to let off atomic bombs. I often wondered if a strange cloud was overhead in the night sky and what it might do to me out there all alone. You always stirred just before dawn, and then you realised it was bloody freezing! How can it be so hot in the day and so cold at night?

  There were bores put down in a few places along the track; the water wasn’t drinkable but you could have a shower and wash off some of the grime after days of rattling along the corrugated desert road. There was one I remember where a pipe stood out of the ground quite high, and then there was a horizontal pipe at a right angle and another that pointed down. A large wooden handle on the upright part could be vigorously moved back and forth and a large volume of cold artesian water would come pouring out as long as it was pumped. The only problem was that, if you were alone, it became difficult to pump and then jump the few feet or so to get under the water before it stopped. An inner tube cut in half with a small length of rope fixed the problem. You could stand and pump and hold the rope tight, forcing the water across to the lone pumper. You could feel it doing you good!

  There was no official government sign to tell you when you entered the state of Western Australia, only a post in the ground with a tyre hanging off it and a few messages left by travellers. Out there no one cared what state they were in. Often when I crossed the border I hadn’t seen anyone on the track for days.

  The next stop for human company was Roy Gurney’s place at Eucla, which was down on the lower plain near the sea, surrounded by sand hills. It was just an old-fashioned wooden house built many years before for staff at the original Eucla telegraph relay station, which was a repeater station for messages between the east coast and the west coast. Telegraph systems back then were not very powerful. The old sandstone building could be seen occasionally when the constant wind blew the sand away; then it would be lost for months, sometimes years, hidden beneath a sand hill or two.

  To get from the high plain down to the coast the road had been dug into the cliff face with no guardrail or fence and, wonder of wonders, that mile or so of road was a sealed bitumen surface. I always stopped at the top and gazed out to Roy’s place in the far distant sand hills, marvelling at the scenery and thinking what a bloody big country this is. We didn’t know back then that the Nullarbor Plain was riddled with underground caverns, a catacomb of unexplored water caves waiting to be invaded by scuba divers in years to come.

  It was a good time to stop and check everything and look down the cliff face at that beautiful black bit of road and think, ‘If only it was all like that across here.’ But that dream was many years away in the future. Back then we had to settle for this bit of bitumen at Eucla and another section up the cliff face at Madura Pass, about 200 miles away.

  Eucla Pass and Madura Pass were sealed because they were the two sections that could actually close the only road across Australia through lack of maintenance. Erosion from the wind and occasional rain
left nowhere to detour. It was impossible to climb down from the high plain to the basin and back again if those two sections fell away. I’d roll down in third gear to the bottom and all too soon I’d be back rattling and clanking on the corrugated track across the basin to Roy’s small wooden house and the old telegraph station. He had put in a couple of hand-pump petrol bowsers and always had some spare fuel available in 44-gallon drums if needed.

  It was only a short distance over the sand hills to the Southern Ocean. I was always going to go for a swim but could never be bothered walking in the heat of the day over the sand to the sea. I went swimming on one trip at Ceduna, and after swimming well out in the bay I was told that a 20-foot great white shark had been seen where I was swimming only a few minutes earlier. I sort of lost my urge for swimming in the Southern Ocean after that. Bore water was not as dangerous.

  Roy was ahead of his time as a tourist entrepreneur and had some metal badges designed with two holes at the edge that could be screwed onto a metal surface. They had a map of Australia in colour with the words ‘Trans Australian’ at the top and below, in a boomerang, the word ‘Overlanders’. He sold them to the few travellers who came along; the cost was 75 pence.

  I used to take Roy’s shopping list to the shop in Norseman, nearly 500 miles away. The goods would be sent by the first truck coming back east. It would probably take a week or two; it might even be me that brought it.

  The couple of hundred miles of road from Eucla to Madura Pass was fairly easy as it was all soft and sandy, not hard corrugations like the sections to the east. The biggest worry were wombat holes that the sand had covered over. There’d be a jolting lurch as the wheel dropped down and up again, the truck squeaking and groaning and me hoping it all hung together without a blowout—at the same time hoping the steering wheel didn’t break my wrist as it whipped back and forth.

  The Madura motel turn-off would eventually come into view on the left. It was a strange place, just a couple of buildings some distance off the road. One building was made of fibro and divided into a couple of rooms with iron frame beds. On the verandah there were a few well-worn old lounge chairs with springs poking out of them in all directions. The other building had a tiny, sparsely furnished dining room with a couple of tables. A traveller could get a meal there—but only in the dining room and only at specifically stated hours. The motel was hundreds of miles out in the wilderness but if it was five minutes past the time advertised on the noticeboard at the door there was no meal, nothing.

  There were a couple of fuel pumps, one diesel and one petrol, but you were never sure if there was fuel available or even if the proprietors could be bothered serving customers.

  This was the only place I knew at the time that used the American name ‘motel’. This was a new word in the Australian vocabulary back then; we only knew about it from the movies. The ‘motel’ part was a sideline. The place was a large property and the motel had been added because they didn’t really like visitors at the station. I wondered why they bothered with a dining room at all; they certainly were not friendly folk.

  I had a run-in with them once, after I’d taken their mail east from Norseman, along with some supplies, and arrived about mid-morning. I didn’t get a ‘thank you’ or even the offer of a cold drink. They seemed to consider that it was my job to do those things for them, when I was actually doing them a favour. That was the last time I ever went in there; I decided I’d rather cook my own meals and sleep in the truck.

  After Madura the road cut through low scrubby bushes—some could almost be called small trees. It was about a day’s drive from there to that section of road that was 90 miles long and straight as a gun barrel. The surface there was usually reasonable, unless it rained. When it was dry, as it was most of the time, the light ‘bull dust’ covered everything, as fine as cosmetic powder.

  On one memorable trip, part of that stretch of road was covered in a sheet of water after rain. The main problem was that there could be wombat holes in the water. The best way to invite trouble was to drive into it without checking it out.

  Luckily, I knew what to do. I stopped at the edge of the water and left the motor ticking over. I had a pair of sandshoes and a piece of old broom handle, about as long as a walking stick, which I kept for just such an occasion. Walking along through the muddy water, roughly in line with where the driver’s side wheels would come through, I’d poke the broom handle around looking for deep holes, all the way to the other end of the wet section. Then I’d come back doing the same in a line about where the passenger-side wheels would be splashing through. If I found a deep hole, I’d rip a small branch off a bush and poke it into the muddy bottom enough to hold so I’d have a green leafy marker poking out of the water. Then I’d crawl through in low gear, avoiding the markers. Sometimes you couldn’t drive through in a straight line and you had to zigzag.

  Towards the end of the 90 miles I often called in to Balladonia Station to see the Jackson family and camp for the night.

  The next hundred-odd miles was very slow and was often the worst of the whole trip. The road was rock hard and it had corrugations about three feet wide the width of the road. The only way to drive it was to put the driver’s wheel in the very edge of the road, which had a sort of gutter of soft sand, and rattle along till it was time to swap and put the passenger-side wheel in the gutter of sand on the other side. While you did this the cabin and steering wheel would be vibrating so badly that it was hard to hold on to the wheel. This went on for hours and I always felt sick inside on this bit of road, knowing what it was doing to the truck. It was a real nightmare. I could imagine nuts slowly unwinding and spring leaves flexing up and down, getting ever nearer to breaking point. The only thing to do was to grit your teeth and keep going.

  Eventually the little town of Norseman would slowly emerge from the setting sun and you could breathe a sigh of relief and finally relax as you hit the sealed road on the edge of town. The worst was over. A few sections of dirt between the sealed sections north up to Coolgardie and then it was just 400 miles of black bitumen to Perth.

  These days it’s a bitumen highway and takes three days’ driving. Back then it was three weeks and 3000 miles of goat track—but we knew we were alive!

  In a career that spanned more than 50 years, Slim Dusty touched the hearts of Australians all around the country . . . and along the way the man with the crooked hat became a national icon.

  It may be a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll, but try climbing into Slim Dusty’s well-worn R.M. Williams boots.

  Despite a gruelling touring schedule that began in the early 1950s, Slim remained a prolific singer, songwriter and musician. It was a commitment that continued throughout his career, and his celebration of 50 years in the entertainment industry was the perfect opportunity to release his 99th album . . . appropriately called Slim Dusty ’99.

  From the beginning, Slim took his music on the road, putting together an annual show that toured extensively. For many of those miles Slim was behind the wheel driving the trucks from show to show. While Slim didn’t travel by truck over the last two decades of his career, his association with the trucking industry lasted a lifetime. It was the inspiration for many of his songs and his happy memories of life on the road never faded with time.

  ‘My first tour was in ’54,’ Slim recalled when we were chatting one day. ‘From Sydney to Toowoomba and back. We had a ’38 Ford and a caravan with a great big tow bar on it. The caravan took four of us to pick up and we’d put it on the back of that poor old Ford and she’d just about lift off the ground.’

  The first tour hit the road with wife Joy, daughter Anne, rope-spinner Malcolm Mason and guitarist Barry Thornton. In those early days the accommodation was usually just camping outside the halls where they performed, with some of the crew bunking down in the dressing rooms.