KENWORTH & THE Cameron CONNECTION
It’s early July and the half-yearly sales figures for 2021 have just been issued.
In the heavy-duty class, Kenworth is king by a country mile. Again! Still!
Yet, in many ways, and despite the seemingly unrelenting interruptions and difficulties of a bludgeoning pandemic, Kenworth’s latest figures are just another notch in a year of notable notches. A year, for instance, celebrating 50 years of manufacturing Kenworth trucks – more than 70,000 of them – at Paccar Australia’s Bayswater (Vic) headquarters.
In another part of Melbourne, though, July 2021 is a sad and solemn time for one particular family. Sure, the sadness and solemnity are soothed somewhat by feelings of immense gratitude and pride, but it’s a month that nonetheless marks the passing five years earlier – on July 16 – of family patriarch and Kenworth founding father Ed Cameron at the grand age of 93.
There was, however, far more to Ed than being the instigator of the first import of Kenworth trucks to Australia. Much more!
For starters, he was the father of Glen Cameron, whose high profile transport and logistics operation is widely regarded as being among the most professional in Australia. Like his father, though, Glen’s start in the trucking industry in 1975, at just 22 years of age, was both modest and unspectacular, built on little more than
