Trucking in the blood for Nathan Fyfe

Star AFL footballer says he wants to return to Fyfe Transport in rural WA when his footy days are over

 

Champion Aussie Rules player Nathan Fyfe says he intends to return to the family trucking business when he retires from football.

Fyfe, 23, is a current Australian Football League (AFL) All-Australian and was last season awarded the Leigh Mathews Trophy by his peers as the AFL’s most valuable player.

Fyfe Transport was founded in Lake Grace, a tiny town 350 kilometres south-east of Perth, by David and Christine Fyfe nearly 30 years ago. The company specialises in sheep and grain cartage.

Son Nathan is a handy casual road train driver who helps out with the six-truck operation when he comes home from the Fremantle Dockers two or three times a year.

Younger sister Sheridan is training as a social worker in Perth, and isn’t too interested in transport, but Nathan says he and older brother Liam have been mad about the trucking game “since we were babies”.

“Something that I find hard to explain to my friends and people I come into contact with in my life is how we have such fascination and affiliation with trucks and transport,” he says.

“The traits that we learnt from working with the trucks such as working for your keep, and that hard work ethic, and doing what’s fair, and looking after the local farmers, is something that’s bred into us and resonates in our morals and the way we go about our life.

“It comes out in my footy as well.”

Nathan says he’s thrilled that Liam now has his own truck, and adds that he has a trucking investment of his own, in the form of a set of trailers used by Fyfe Transport.

“I’m keen to get back involved once I finish my journey with footy,” he says. I’ve always done what I’ve loved and that’s footy and trucks.”

It sounds like Nathan learnt a lot about both teamwork and competitiveness as a younger sibling.

“I was always 18 months behind Liam and he was a good trailblazer as far as the learning of everything was concerned, and I’d try to learn from him or he would teach me as we’d go,” he says.

“Liam got an extraordinary license when he was really young (for road trains at age 19) and that made me really jealous; so he was legally driving out on the road two years before I could get there.

“We’d often have a load of wool tarped up beautifully, and then go and untie each other’s ropes so we could tie them up again. We were pests and got in a lot of scraps along the way; spent a lot of time in the sin bin.

“But it did breed a competitive spirit and drove us to learn how to do things really quickly.”

Nathan says getting back to Lake Grace helps keep life in perspective.

“It does give you a grounding, a greater appreciation of what else is going on in the world, outside of the metropolitan bubble and the bubble of footy.”

Check out our feature on Fyfe Transport in the September issue of ATN.

 

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