What were you doing when you were 16 years old? For many, getting up to no good with friends seems to be a common answer.
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Back in the early 1960s, David Findlay wasn’t your normal 16-year-old. Instead of spending his days either between school or with friends, David and his brother Robert bought a truck and hired a driver.
“Our dad helped us buy the International truck for $1200 and employ a driver,” David tells Deals on Wheels.
“We didn’t make money out of it, but that truck was ours.”
This set the scene for a career in trucking that spanned the best part of four decades and ended with David being inducted into the Road Transport Hall of Fame in 2011.
In the years that followed David’s first truck at age 16, he became a popular transport industry figure as he carted everything from potatoes to steel around Australia’s eastern seaboard.
Like many who became truck drivers at that time, hopping behind the wheel was already in David’s blood.
His father Jock Findlay had already established Findlay’s Livestock Transport by the time David was born in 1946 in the Victorian country town of Mirboo North. This meant David’s career options never strayed from trucks.
“I grew up in the industry, courtesy of my father’s livestock transport business in Leongatha – I had a lot to do,” he says.
“We had a depot with half a dozen cattle trucks, so by 16 I was racing cars and had a truck.
“I thought it was all normal, but as I get older, I realise how lucky I was to have that upbringing and introduction to trucks.”
Two years after his first official foray into the trucking industry, David was behind the wheel of his own truck.
With Jock handing over the tray truck side of Findlay’s Livestock Transport to David to focus on the semi-trailer side, David also had his own business. It was quite a rapid journey for an 18-year-old to be on.
“I started by carting livestock to Dandenong and Newmarket in my own truck with a 20-foot rigid stock crate,” he says.
“I had no money at the time, but I had work, so that’s how I started on my own two feet in the industry.”
A year later he was married and his career was well underway. Add on a couple more years and David felt confident enough to graduate from local work and begin interstate trips.
With an International ACCO also part of his fleet after he had bought out Peter Devine Transport and built a dog trailer, David traded it in for a MAN model.
Exchanging livestock for potatoes, David stepped out of his dad’s shadows and began making a name for himself.
“I had just a dog trailer on a MAN that carted potatoes out of Leongatha,” he says.
“I also started backloading various freight out of Sydney for the trip back to Melbourne.”
A clear theme of David’s career is his penchant for always being on the move. While constantly on the road, he soon realised he could make his operations more efficient if he moved his young family to Sydney. With his wife and daughters in tow, David pulled up roots in Leongatha and headed to Sydney to expand his operations.
“We bought our first house in Campbelltown because it was easier to live in Sydney due to the days I spent waiting to get a load home,” he says.
“Getting out of Sydney to go home was hard, so by instead switching it around, it was easier to leave Melbourne and Leongatha and get to Sydney on the same day to spend more time with my family rather than remaining interstate for a couple of weeks.”
The move proved fortuitous, but not for the reasons David may have predicted.
The house in Campbelltown happened to be next door to the sales manager of B&D Garage Doors. After striking a rapport with him, David had his first major contract running garage and roller doors between Sydney and Melbourne.
The contract allowed David and his company to take off. By also buying an extra tri-axle to leave in the dock, David could also complete rapid turn arounds and maximise his runs between the two cities.
“Getting on well with my neighbour was the best thing that happened to me,” David says.
“I only had the one truck then, but getting that contract soon allowed me to buy my first Kenworth. It was a second-hand silver truck with a sleeper cab on it, and I quickly painted it in my colours so it was familiar to everyone.”
Over the next 11 years, David kept upgrading until he could buy his first new Kenworth in 1978 in the form of an 892GM.
The journey to the new model involved plenty of roller door runs from Sydney and Melbourne to other cities such as Adelaide and Brisbane. After reaching each destination he’d take a few hours to unload and lock, usually all done by hand, one at a time, before heading back to his home base.
“It was a good job and allowed me to buy an extra trailer,” he says.
“It got going because, while in Melbourne, they’d load the next one up for you to make it quicker. It was a great highlight in my career and I made some great friends out of it in the form of my drivers who worked for me.”
Over the years, B&D’s operations began to decrease in Sydney, meaning David ended up carting steel out of Melbourne and potatoes from Leongatha to Sydney, Brisbane and North Queensland.
At that time David was carting plenty of produce, reaching as far north as Atherton and the Tablelands Region of Queensland. It all changed when David landed another major contract, this time with State Express.
With two trucks and three drivers, David was part of a clever rotating roster that saw two drivers working at all times while the third rested between runs. With one driver in Melbourne and the other in Adelaide doing overnights, the third would rest and prepare to relieve one of the others and keep the trucks constantly on the road.
“This allowed me to buy a lot of other stuff along the way, and I soon shifted from Sydney and bought a little 360-acre farm in Bungonia in 1983,” he says.
“It was along the Melbourne route, so I’d come in on Friday, do my unloading and loading and then head home for the weekend. I made enough to pay for the farm, and that’s what mattered.”
With his brother-in-law in Sydney helping him buy the cattle to fill the farm, David soon had another venture in his life at Bungonia.
Roughly a decade later, this approach led David to head further out to Griffith, where he bought a few farms.
On the trucking side, it was at this time that he peaked when he ‘downgraded’ to a special Kenworth model that has become a cult figure in Australian trucking history.
“That was when I got a Gold Nugget series Kenworth and drove it from Sydney to Melbourne and to North Queensland,” he says.
“It was beautiful and had a big plate on the dash saying it was custom-built for me,” he says.
“It was one of only 30 and was wonderful. I had all the great Kenworths in my career, but the Gold Nugget was something different.”
Despite the fond memories David has of the Gold Nugget, he only had it for a few years. While it was his, it carted steel and returned with produce from the Atherton Tablelands.
In 1989, David pivoted yet again, selling his farm at Bungonia and then offloading the special truck to Len Hilder Transport.
In the years since, David’s grandson Tommy Carr still feels the impact of David’s love for Kenworth. Nowadays, Tommy has his own T401, following in the footsteps of his father and uncle, and most famously his grandfather.
“Tommy is mad on trucks and is a clone of me, he wanted to find out where the Gold Nugget went after I sold it,” David says.
“A couple are now on display, but Tommy found mine a little while ago. It was at a driving school out at Broken Hill, but it had everything taken off it, such as the motor and sleeper cab.”
After selling the Gold Nugget, David turned to broad-acre farming in the Riverina. He soon bought another Kenworth and two farm rigids to enable him to market and sell his own grain interstate and locally. His career in transport came to an end in 2001, when he sold up the truck a year after the passing of his wife Helen.
Now retired on the Sunshine Coast, he has plenty of glowing memories of his time in the trucking landscape.
“Being in trucks for 39 years and doing lots of interstate work, I have lots of wonderful stories, but I only had the one accident,” he says.
“I was 19 and in the tray truck business, going through different farms around Leongatha. Coming back one morning after working all night, the back of my truck got cleaned up by a train. It didn’t hurt the cabin or the livestock, but it put the truck out of action for a while so they could fix the tray.”
Another defining moment of David’s career was the 1979 Razorback Blockade.
With convictions of drivers rising in the ‘70s, stand-offs with the union and a lack of government meetings meant approximately 500 truckies drove up to and around Sydney’s Parliament House before five drivers parked across the Hume Highway at the top of Razorback Mountain.
With international recognition soon arriving and interstate blockades occurring in Queensland, Victoria and South Australia, it took some discussions before a vote was taken that saw truckies return to work with changed rules and no road tax.
Nowadays, David reflects on his career with plenty of pride. Being inducted into the Road Transport Hall of Fame in 2011 was a highlight of his time in the industry, but he now has another factor bidding for his attention.
“I view my career really positively, being inducted was fantastic,” he says.
“I’m so glad to see Tommy do so well nowadays, buying his own house and trucks. I had a lot of women in my life and 12 grandkids, so it’s nice to have Tom following in my footsteps.”
Nowadays, David lives on the Sunshine Coast with his partner Maureen. When it comes to family and his time in trucking, David now realises how much he owes to his parents for nearly 40 years of fun behind the wheel.
“It’s only now, when I’m older, that I realise how large of a role my parents played in my career,” he says. “Jock and Mabel were both wonderful. I wouldn’t have gotten a truck at such a young age if it wasn’t for dad, and mum used to have a shed out the back that would feed drivers. I used to take it all for granted, but now I’m so grateful.”
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