ROADBOSS was launched with a simple but important mission: to tell cracking yarns about the icons, leaders, innovators and colourful characters that form the backbone of Australia’s vital road transport industry.
The unsung heroes who take the risks and work the long hours to ensure there’s food on the supermarket shelves, petrol in the service station bowsers, life-saving equipment and supplies at our hospitals, parts to keep our machinery operating, and construction materials to build our roads, schools and shelter. Their stories deserve to be told – and told well!
Our Winter Issue truly delivers on this objective – and then some!
Not only do we showcase characters who deliver consumables vital to everyday Australians’ lives – including Airlie Beach Hotel publican Mick McFie and driver Brad Gallagher who run a Kenworth T909 to ensure Australia’s busiest pub is kept stocked with beer, and Paul Cootes, whose Cootes Quarry Products provides construction materials for critical infrastructure projects in Melbourne, we also share stories highlighting the under-appreciated role trucks play in key social and cultural events.
Leading the issue is Cobey Bartels’ road trip with country music superstar Brad Cox as they head to the last-ever Bluesfest in Byron Bay in his Mack Anthem.
What’s a Golden Guitar-winning country music superstar doing heading to a blues festival, in a Mack truck?
While a truck might feel like an unusual place to get to know a rockstar, Brad’s no stranger to the cabin of a Mack – introduced to trucks on rural properties around Australia. That truck – a V8-powered 1987 Mack Super-Liner – featured in the video clip for ‘Water on the Ground’, a song about life on the land and the toll a drought can take.
So when the team at Mack Trucks Australia reached out with a partnership offer Brad couldn’t refuse, he grabbed it with both hands – launching his wildly popular ‘Everything I’ve Got’ tour which saw him pack up his life, leave his beloved patch of dirt in Yeppoon, and take to the roads in the Mack.
Trucks also play a huge behind-the-scenes role in some of Australia’s biggest sporting events, including the Melbourne Grand Prix. Long before the city’s esteemed Grand Prix can scream into action each year, a trendy inner-city oasis must be transformed into a world-class racing circuit.
Just the thing to fuel two of Charlie Schwerkolt’s prime passions – a buoyant business and very quick cars. It is, says the sole owner and lone director of Waverley Forklifts – which nowadays has around 7,000 forklifts and associated equipment out on hire, hauled far and wide by a top-shelf fleet of Hino and Kenworth trucks in every mainland state plus the Northern Territory – his busiest week of the year.
In the lead up to the event Waverley Forklifts will supply more than 200 pieces of equipment to the companies erecting and supplying the seemingly endless array of supporting infrastructure; everything from a wide range of on and off-road forklifts and heavy-duty handling equipment to vans for transporting work crews around various parts of the circuit.
Lifting, loading, moving and manoeuvring everything into place; the concrete barriers, safety fences, tyre stacks, seating stands, signage and every other piece of paraphernalia that it takes to create a twisted theatre for fans of the fast and the furious.
Not only that, it’s Waverley machinery unloading the F1 cars and all their equipment from planes onto trucks and trailers, and again offloading at the business end of the event.
Then, when it’s all done and dusted, when the races have been run and won, the punters and celebrities have shuffled off and the racing elite have headed to the next lap on the map either here or overseas, the whole process starts again – this time in reverse.
For a nation with a population of 340 million spread across almost 10 million square kilometres, trucks are also vital to the lives and livelihoods of North Americans.
For some they’re more than just a way to make a crust, as Harrison Hunkin found on a recent trip state-side. There he met couple Daniel and Phylis Snow at a truckstop on the Louisiana-Arkansas border, who have lived a life on the road for the best part of three decades.
As Harry writes, “God is their guidance, a Freightliner is their home, and the Ruger on their hips, their protector”.
“Of the three million trucks on the road in American, these were the American ‘truckers’ I’d dreamt of meeting. Gold-fearing, arms-bearing, self-confessed rednecks who live their life on the road, they’re a snapshot of a lifestyle that as helped build their nation, but a lifestyle they feel is dying.”
It’s a cracking yarn. Enjoy the read!
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