Great Australian Outback Trucking Stories by Bill Marsh

Author:Bill Marsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC Books
Published: 2019-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

Nonstop

I grew up on a farm at a place in the mid-north of South Australia called Melrose. So farming was more in my blood than was truck driving. Anyhow, when I was in my early to mid-teens, my parents got divorced and I moved up to the Northern Territory where the old man had bought a cattle station. That was out at Douglas Daly, which is about halfway between Darwin and Katherine. Dad then ran the station for five years until it was sold. After that he plodded around doing agricultural contracting and stuff till he bought Nighthawk Transport. That was in about 2012.

Nighthawk was run out of East Arm, which is a port facility about twenty kilometres from Darwin. When Dad first took over the business I think it only had two prime movers and a bunch of smaller delivery trucks. At that stage there wasn’t much opportunity for me to go farming, so I ended up buying a truck and subbing — subcontracting — for Dad. I was in my early twenties by then. And that’s how I got into trucking.

When I first started with Dad, I was carting food pellets from the National Feed Company’s mill in Katherine across to Karumba, which is in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria, in Queensland. When we got to the Karumba port we’d unload the pellets at the export yards there, to feed all the cattle that were being shipped over to Indonesia or wherever. On a run like that I’d go from Katherine, down the Stuart Highway to Threeways, which is just short of Tennant Creek. Then I’d go across the Barkly Highway to Cloncurry and up through Normanton and on to Karumba. The road from Cloncurry to Karumba was a shocker. It was only a single-lane bitumen road and some of the edges had a bloody six-inch drop off them. And that makes for a pretty hairy ride, especially when you’re pulling a triple road-train, which is the prime mover and three trailers.

For a return load we’d come back down to Normanton and head east through Georgetown, then down to Charters Towers and across to Townsville. From Townsville we’d sometimes bring back lick blocks and stock feed. Other times we might’ve brought back decommissioned Chep pallets that had to go back to the pelleting mill in Katherine, to be reloaded with food pellets. And then we’d start all over again. A round trip like that would’ve taken about six and a half days and in all I would’ve covered somewhere between 5500–6000 kilometres. As to the amount of trips I done, it all depended on how many export boats were going out from Karumba and how much feed they needed. In the less busy times I might only do one trip a month, but during the more busy times, we might’ve had two or three triples doing two or three trips a month. So we carted a hell of a lot of pellets.

I guess the other long trips I done was carting hay from South Australia up to the Territory.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.