Howard Shanks•21 Dec 2017

REVIEW

Way out west

Name: Way out west
Brand: Kenworth

It's a damn long haul from Perth to Kununurra, but the run up the Great Northern Highway also serves up a slice of the best of the Aussie trucking lifestyle…

The aptly named Great Northern Highway stretches from Perth, the capital of Western Australia situated at the southern end of the state, northwards for 3216 kilometres to Wyndham, in the top end of the Kimberley. For the most part it's a damn good road – bitumen all the way with wide shoulders – but the further north you go, the rougher the road gets.

Shortly after midday in the little town of Wubin (roughly three hours north of Perth), a large cloud of red dust bellows out above the trees shielding a large parking bay. Here trucks are shuffling trailers, their drivers making final checks. Then, emerging from the lingering dust like surreal, red-tinged shadows, comes Kylie TeWhaiti and his mate, Kent Hunt.

"You travel up with this scruffy-looking bloke did you, bro?" says Kylie with a smile, as he introduces himself and gestures towards his mate.

"Won't be long now ol' mate, just a couple of lights on the dogs to check and a dolly plug to replace," says Kent, as he pulls a red toolbox from the left-hand locker of his bunk.

As it turned out, the male electrical plug on the second dolly of Kent's road train had seen better days: a short through the earth wire was causing the main lights on the second dog (the third trailer in line) to flick in unison with the indicators. Repairs quickly made, Kylie and Kent packed up the tools.

The normally half-an-hour hook-up is taking a little longer than planned, and out on the road a school bus trundled by as Kylie glances at his watch.

"We'd better get going; we've lost a good hour," he says. Both Kylie and Kent want to get in a few hundred kilometres before stopping for the night and Kununurra was still a long way off.

It wasn't long before the deep punchy notes of the two big-bore diesels had settled to a steady beat on the open road, their 115-tonne rigs in tow.

On the road

Kylie has a load of pelletised grain he had loaded in Perth which, according to the mud map scribbled on the back of the consignment note, is bound for a cattle station 80 kilometres west of Kununurra.

"I simply tip the product into a heap in a paddock," Kylie explains.

"Then I'll load river stone and take that back to Broome, and from there I'll head back to Perth empty unless something else turns up.

"Station owners typically use this type of pellet feed to get their cattle ready for live export," he continues.

"The cattle are placed on this pellet diet about three to four weeks before they are due to be loaded onto the ship."

Meanwhile, Kent was heading for the port at Broome, some 1000 kays closer than Kununurra. His lead trailer has been custom built specifically for this job – loading pelletised grain onto ships through a blower system. As this was its maiden voyage, Kent was keen to see if the design would work and deliver the efficiencies he was expecting.

"We used to have to tow up a special blower unit," Kent says.

"But now, with this new system, I simply park the trailer next to the ship where they receive the grain, connect the hoses and fire it up. Once I've tipped the lead trailer I unhook it, reconnect the lines to a gob-hopper with a rotary valve in the line, and back up the other two trailers.

"These tip their loads into the gob-hopper and the blower unit on the lead trailer pumps it into the ship. If there are a couple of trucks to unload we just keep backing in trailers until they are all unloaded – it's that simple!"

Radio contact

A while later the CB crackled into life with Kylie's casual enquiry: "How you going back there, bro?"

"All's well!" crackled the return.

And so it went; as the miles rolled by the two mates checked in on each other and occasionally a southbound truck would join the conversation as it passed.

It was well after dark when the two trucks finally idled through the tiny town of Karalundi. Lights from the local-pub-cum-general-store spilled out onto the street and promised cool ale and a relaxing atmosphere.

"Sure looks inviting," Kent volunteers.

"We'll pull up at the big parking bay about 20 kays out," Kylie calls.

"Sounds good," Kent replies. "I'm getting a bit hungry."

Their speedos had rolled over roughly 800 kilometres since leaving Perth that morning. Unlike the eastern states, where regimented driving hours and logbooks are closely monitored, Western Australia has an extremely practical fatigue management system and no logbooks. Basically, trucking companies and drivers are responsible for their own fatigue management and this parking bay was a good spot to pull up for a feed and camp.

Outback dining

Kent and Kylie both agree that the price of roadhouse tucker is far too expensive and so they prefer to cook for themselves. By the time the dust has settled Kent had the gas BBQ set up on the side step of the T904 and Kylie was operating on a couple of steaks about an inch-and-a-half thick.

"My missus got a couple of kilos of steak for us," Kylie says. "They were on special for about $11 a kilo."

"Here, put that bloody camera down and peel some spuds," Kent orders, passing over a handful of baseball-sized potatoes.

There's nothing like a good feed after a hard day's work and with the brilliantly moonlit western sky as a backdrop, those thick steaks and vegies sure did the job…

"When you're supporting a family at home you can't go up and down the road eating out of roadhouses," Kent explains, as he settled back into his canvas chair. "You'll end up giving all your wages to them."

"And you don't get a feed like this in a roadhouse," Kylie adds.

Up and at 'em

"Yeah, it's not a bad sight, is it?" remarks Kylie the next morning, as the eastern sky fills with a spectacular deep orange as the sun slowly appears over the horizon. This is the eastern Pilbara and it's one of the most isolated and inhospitable regions in Australia. Temperatures in summer hover around 40 degrees C and hot winds blow in off the Great Sandy Desert. It's hardly surprising that the indigenous population living here didn't have to contend with the advance of Europeans until the twentieth century…

The lush green pastures and long golden fields of the wheat-belt are now far behind us; here the colours reflect the rich red ochre of the Australian outback and, in the early morning light, the sight is nothing short of awe-inspiring.

Gold prospectors, encouraged by the finds at Nullagine and Marble Bar in the north and Meekatharra and Cue in the south, scoured this area but had no success. The east Pilbara remained a marginal pastoral area until the early 1960s but, in 1957, the prospector Stan Hilditch discovered huge iron ore deposits at a mountain located five kilometres south-east of Mount Newman (which he named Mount Whaleback). Today it's the largest open-cut iron ore mine in the world.

Kylie explains that he came over to 'Aussie' in 1993 to visit his aunt and uncle in Perth. "I started working abattoirs and learnt to drive road trains on the weekends carting sheep," he recalls. Kylie reckons that the best part of this job is getting to travel all over Australia. "You're a paid tourist," he laughs.

This northern run is by far the one he prefers, however. "It's getting away, coming up here," he says. "There isn't the traffic volume you get going east… it's just heaps better than driving around in those mad cities."

The western way

Kylie and Kent both believe the general motoring public has little respect for trucks, especially road trains. "But you don't get hassled by the police or stitched up with bogus fines like the drivers in the east do," Kent says. "Here in the northwest the entire community, including the trucking industry, police and main roads, all work together. Hell, you need to up here, just to survive."

Kent drives for Marley's Transport, based out of Meriden roughly two hours east of Perth; Kylie for Russell's of Perth. Both companies have a long tradition in transport and maintain fleets of a reasonable size.

Kent has topped up his fuel tanks at the Shell in Wubin but Kylie, who has a BP card, needs to top up his at the Capricorn Roadhouse near Newman. That would get both trucks through to Port Hedland, the next major stop on the way north and a further 450 kilometres down the road.

This was proving to be a good run; even though the temperature outside the air-conditioned cabs was well into the forties, everything was running reasonably cool and neither truck suffered a flat. No-one likes having to change tyres at the best of times, but in this heat it becomes an extremely unattractive proposition.

It's just on dusk when Kent pulls into the Shell on the southern outskirts of Port Hedland and Kylie heads for the BP roadhouse a little further on. There would be time to check over the trucks, have a shower and a coffee before again heading off into the night. In a few hours they will reach yet another parking bay, this time on the northern side of Sandfire, and that's where they would camp for the night.

Kent would be in Broome by midday the following day while it would take Kylie yet another day of travelling before he’d arrive at his destination. And that's where we'll leave our intrepid truckies, because 600 kilometres further north in Broome, a ship has just dropped anchor and five big Kenworths – each coupled to three double-deck livestock trailers – are quietly rolling eastward, bull-lights peering into the darkness before them. But that's another story, for another time…

Way out west

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