From the farm to the wheel of a road train

In her four decades of experience behind the wheel, 60-year-old Lisa Lloyd has driven trucks of all shapes and sizes, including some of the biggest there is.

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While she’s starting to take a step back now, if you can call driving triple road trains across South Australia every weekend a ‘step back’, it’s just another part of a transport journey that has taken her all over Australia.

“I’m a grandma now and I’m still doing it!” she laughs.

Lloyd currently works casually for Qube, taking loads of copper concentrate from the mine in Carrapateena down to Whyalla Wharf in a fully loaded triple road train.

“I’m just doing one trip in the day, then night shift do the other,” she says.

“After we get to the port, we hop on a stacker ourselves and unload it, put some empties on and run it back.

“I’m driving geared trucks, autos, Volvos, Macks, a couple of Kenworth T909s. It’s anything really, whatever’s sitting there. It gives you a bit of variety.

“We go up and stay on the mine. It’s an everyday thing. We jump on forklifts and take the boxes off, get the lids off.

“I quite enjoy reach stackers and loaders. They break it up a bit for the day.”

Lloyd has settled back down in SA now, back where she started in the Clare Valley.

Her father used to own a vineyard in the area, and she’s come back now to take care of him as she herself moves closer to retirement.

While she originally intended to find something smaller and more local, the call of the open road was too great to ignore.

“I’ve tried to come home and get a local job, but a weekend doing mining work is just nothing,” Lloyd says.

It was on the farm that her transport career started, as she explains. Lloyd is a self-described petrolhead, with “diesel in her veins”.

Driving road trains isn’t for everyone, but Lisa can’t get enough, even at 60

“Dad used to take me out before kindy and threw me on the tractor,” she says.

“I couldn’t reach the pedals, so he’d do it and I’d just steer it. He’d stand on the trailer feeding sheep or throwing posts out in the vineyard. That was my first whiff of diesel.”

That was the start of a great thing, as Lloyd was determined to get on the road as soon as she possibly could, whether that be by car, truck or otherwise.

“I was always mad keen to get a car licence, went for my Ls on my 16th.

“I had the opportunity a little bit later to get a HC licence. I was renting a house that belonged to a farmer down on the plains and he asked me to start the truck up.

“He had an old White Roadboss out in the shed. I asked if I could take it for a lap of the paddock. I ventured out on the roads after that.

“I taught myself how to back it. I had horses so I knew how to back a horse float.

“Then I convinced him to let me go for my licence, which only took a drive around town with a policeman back then. That was back in 1987.”

After that, the truck licence didn’t much of a workout other than around the farm.

“I was married to a station manager so I hopped in the old station truck with cows, just rigids,” Lloyd says.

Off to the top end

Lloyd’s career in transport really began to take off when she made the move to the Northern Territory after her marriage ended.

It didn’t come straight away though — she dabbled in baking and tour guiding before being approached by a friend desperately looking for an extra pair of hands.

“The wet season came and a friend in a roadworks crew who were screaming for a water cart driver, but I didn’t know about that,” she says.

“But I didn’t know what else I’d do in the wet season. They put me in a prime mover with a water tank where a sleeper cab would be.

“We’d be out patching roads and the thing was horrible, all the boys refused to drive it. I copped it and put up with it for a while. It went from there.

“The more I stuck my head under the truck when the mechanics were working on it and got underneath it and got dirty, I showed them I was keen and wanted to learn the job.

“A couple of the blokes took me under my wing and helped me along. They threw me along in loaders. We were all over the territory, it was so much fun.

“One of the guys said ‘you’ve been nagging, get in this grader and do the next 5km’. That’s what it was like. Their faith in me built me up to where I am.

“It got all the way up to triple side tippers up there carting the aggregate stone for the tipping crew. It was so much variety.”

After enjoying her time in the top end, Lloyd returned home for a brief stint before her next adventure.

Finding herself out of work, a chance phone call once again led her to a completely different side of the country.

“I had a random phone call and took months to find out where it came from,” Lloyd says.

“A bloke called up and said ‘I believe you can drive triple side tippers. Would you come over to Kalgoorlie?’ I thought it was a prank!

“They put me through a medical two days later and then I was on a plane to WA.

“It took me age, but I found out that a lady I’d worked with before was a chef in the mines, and she’d mentioned to the HR guy that she had a friend who could drive.

“People ask me how I got in the mines, and I said they rang me up and asked! Once you’re in there you can go anywhere.”

Just like in the NT, Lloyd says she made some of her fondest memories working in Kalgoorlie, building camaraderie with her co-workers and fellow drivers.

While she says she’s faced challenges working in transport, with even fewer women working in the industry back in the 2000s compared to now, she was never made to feel more than welcome.

“With the guys in WA, we had missions to get so many loads in 12 hours and you were flat out,” Lloyd says.

“The chase, the adrenaline, keeping in front of the other guy, I loved it all.

It’s the people you meet along the way – Lisa says the camaraderie has kept her in the trucking world

“Once I proved to them I could keep up and I could load clear, they considered me one of the blokes. I was part of the team.

“Even back then there weren’t many women around doing it. I find it’s a whole different world now, the way I got into it compared to now for young girls.

“But there’s plenty of girls from years gone by that have done it the hard way.

“Without the guys I worked with, I wouldn’t be where I am. They’ll teach you anything. The people make it and break it. All the boys I worked with were a really close knit family.

Moving up the ranks

Going up from smaller rigids all the way to triple road trains is a very different process now than when Lloyd was learning how to drive.

She was able to learn on the job, with all different kinds of trucks and for significantly cheaper, while she believes there are more barriers for entry for drivers nowadays.

“It’s harder to move your licence up now,” she says.

“I had to train a bloke to drive and it did his head in. I was very lucky learning when I did.

“With the roadworks crew, they gave me a rigid watercart that had an 18 speed Road Ranger in it. They let me go with that for 10 months. I could get the hang of the gearbox without worrying about trailers or weight. I had a ball with it.

“I could step into the trailers and not worry about missing gears, I just had to get used to weights and going up hills. I learned when not to use a clutch and how they’re supposed to feel. It was a really smooth transition.

“I was driving a 300 ton with a big powerful engine, and it came natural. To have to sit and do it, to logbook it, and go step by step now, that would be hard.”

Reflecting on her career now, Lloyd says that the two most important things to have if you’re considering getting into trucking is knowledge and passion.

“I think you’ve got to have a bit of mechanical knowledge and a bit of diesel running through your veins to be successful,” she says.

“If you don’t understand how the truck works, you won’t be as good at it. Just go by your heart. If you don’t put your heart in, it’s not worth trying. I’m old school, and I think the way I learned was great.

“My nephew is looking to up his car licence, and he was thinking of getting a truck licence. I told him to not just go to heavy rigid, go as high as you can get. Even if you never use it, just get it.

“I went and got a truck licence because it was sitting in front of me and I had no plans to use it, but now it’s been my life for
40 years. It’s harder to get out of them than into them!”

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