Owner Driver – August 2019

74 AUGUST 2019 ownerdriver.com.au

FIELD OF DREAMS

M

Y FIRST JOB out of school was unloading wheat

trucks and loading wheat trains at the silos at

The Rock, a lovely small town between Wagga

Wagga and Albury in southern NSW.

It was 1980 and nearly every farm truck

which trundled in was a small rigid built in

the 1960s, with a grain bin perched on the back.

Unloading involved opening usually very stiff

old side chute doors.

So it was quite a novelty and a relief when the very

occasional semi-trailer tipper turned up.

Fast forward several decades and of course the grain game

has got much bigger in every way, but on country roads you

can still see the occasional ancient old rigid with a grain bin

or livestock crate on the back, usually poking along much

slower than everybody else would like. And of course there

are plenty of them to be seen nicely restored at vintage truck

shows and hot rod meets.

But it’s rare to see a single collection in “original” condition

like these 20 old classics. Owner//Driver spotted a group of

old trucks in a paddock while on the move between Wagga

and Melbourne in May and went back for a closer look more

recently. Ironically this truck “graveyard” is bounded by the

highway and a local road which leads to the local cemetery.

The aspect that stands out is the absence of Japanese

trucks – they didn’t start their domination of the rigid

market in Australia until the late 1970s or so.

Instead there are long-gone American truck brands such

as Dodge, Fargo and Ford; and extinct Brits such as Austin,

Commer and Bedford.

There were no air bag suspensions to be seen on any of

these old bangers, which were often horribly overloaded

in their heyday. And there were even a couple with spider

wheels, something you never see on rigids these days.

Works of art

This set of vintage trucks has already been sold to a single

buyer for parts by Wagga and Uranquinty general antiques

dealer John Gilfillan, with a new batch expected to arrive

from farms and clearance sales soon after the time of

truckingheritage

For many truckies traversing the Olympic

Highway on one of the main tracks

between Melbourne and Brisbane, these

old workhorses would have evoked some

fond memories, writes Steve Skinner