Brisbane to Perth

In 1978 a friend Marvin and his Wife Julie and I decided to go over to Western Australia. We both had caravans and we had to stop in at a transport yard in Narrabri and spend a week helping weld up cracks on trailers. A bloke from home had been staying with me in my caravan in Brisbane and he came along also.

We spent about two weeks driving with only one small issue when I had a wheel bearing on my caravan fail at Broken Hill. With Marvin’s help as a self taught mechanice we fixed that fairly quickly but the hardest thing had been sourcing the correct size wheel bearing. That stop cost us about half a day.

Neither car had roo bars so we avoided driving at night and with the big open roads across from South Australia to Perth was easy going. We did have a quick stop and a look around Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie but had no plans to work or stay there.

The trip over we managed to cook in the caravans and stop in various rest areas and managed to have the odd shower at roadhouses along the way.

When we got to Perth we stayed at the camp ground and each day made enquiries about getting jobs up in the mines in the North West. After a few weeks we had all managed to secure jobs in three different locations.

My first Job was at Wittenoom and at the time I did not know it but it was home to an old Asbestos Mine which had recently been closed down. My job was driving a loader and a truck at times working on covering up areas that had asbestos dust.
NOTE: Wittenoom has now been removed from most maps and signposts removed and in theory no longer exists.

I lasted there a few weeks then went to Tom Price and got a job there on a Cat D9H dozer with Bell Bros. I walked into Bell’s office and the guy was on the phone looking for a D9H operator. I had driven a small D4 a bit at home and thought how hard could it be? So when he was finished on the phone I told him I had operated a D9G and a 631 Cat scraper and he gave me a job.

I was taken up to the dozer by the fitter and it was all a bit of a mystery at first. I spent a whle looking around it and checking the oils and water etc then got in and soon figured out how to start it, a lot easier than the old D4. All I had to do was rip and push rock ofer a rock face all day, a nice easy job indeed. My job in New Zealand I had driven lots of different loaders and machines but nothing this big apart from a scraper at Twizel for a few weeks.

They had a contract at Tom Price and it was slowly coming to an end. A few weeks after I began there my dozer got shipped off to another job and I moved onto a Hough loader loading ballast railway wagons for Hammersley Iron, then that got shipped off to Perth. I was then on a smaller Cat loader doing the same job until that also got shipped away. My final job was in the workshop building a bullbar for the bosses Toyota Landcruiser, after that the job at Tom Price ended. My boss got me transferred to another job on a Cat scraper on a 50 mile section of a roading job north of Port Hedland at Wallal Downs, about halfway between Port Hedland and Broome.

Mine was the only scraper on site that was not Air Conditioned and in the hot temperatures I did manage well. I later went onto a dozer when it’s operator left and a few months after that I told them I was going to Europe. A few days after I told them a brand new dozer arrived which was a bit bigger and my old D9 was off to another job. At the time they asked me to stay and by then I had everything booked. I was given a letter of reference stating that there would always be a job for me and they would fly me back from anywhere in the world.