BIG RIVER BENZ
THERE WAS A TIME, Graeme Cromack casually reflects, when Mercedes-Benz came close, very close in fact, to being a major part of the family trucking business. But that time was more than 50 years ago and since then, for one reason or another, Benz has largely missed the boat. Until now!
It’s a long story and as Graeme sits watching company driver Ben ‘BJ’ Jacobs reverse the meticulously maintained 2658 prime mover under a similarly sleek curtain-sided trailer, he recalls stories from the early days of a family which, like most families in the district, actually relied on boats for many things. Specifically, the boats which once plied products and produce to and from Grafton along the broad and occasionally flooded expanse of the Clarence River in northern NSW.
“It all goes back to sometime around the early 1900s,” Graeme explains, when the local Cromack and Tranter families were typical of a generation that toiled long and hard in the logging and agricultural industries of the northern rivers region.
“Back then, people just did what was needed or what was available and really, it was probably as simple as
