Roiling Dust

By Herm Zandman

After working line haul along the Australian roads, former teacher Herm Zandman decided to switch gears hauling grain and fertilizer across Outback Australia. It turned out to be a trucking experience vastly different from the one which he described in his two books Blood, Sweat and Gears and Its Not a Truck! Its a B-Double!

This story takes the reader through the vastness of the Outback in a bulk tipper B-Double. The common theme running through the book is the puniness of human scratches on the vast expanse. Roiling dust, created by Outback travelers like road trains and B-Doubles, settles quickly once the rigs have traveled through and serenity returns as if nothing had ever stirred the landscape.

In the book, the author relates first hand experiences with the land, the people, the flora and fauna, plus a number of unique Outback activities and touristic attractions that can be found by the discerning tourist and the roaming truck driver. Dr Zandman and his wife currently reside in South Australia. He is still trucking at the time of writing, this time on a milk haulage B-Double, the target of his next childrens book Tanker 80.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Dec 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479760879

Herm Zandman

I am a former school teacher, currently on sabbatical. I have already written and published an adult book about interstate trucking called Blood, Sweat and Gears (Eloquent Books; http://www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title:BloodSweatAndGears.html). The book has received excellent reviews in our local news paper (The Border Watch) and in the national trucking magazine Owner Driver.

Book preview

Copyright © 2012 by Herm Zandman.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-800-618-969

www.xlibris.com.au

502316

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter One

Majestic Outback

Chapter Two

A Trail of Cotton

Chapter Three

Dust to Mud

Chapter Four

Outback-Fashion Road Rage

Chapter Five

Empty Houses on the Hill

Chapter Six

Inventive and Humorous Outback Fashion

Chapter Seven

Dumb, Clever, Cute and Imperial

Chapter Eight

Dramas in the Dust

Epilogue

With thanks to God

and

my supportive wife Lammy

and children Ruben, Teresa, Jason, and Esther

Introduction

Have a nice weekend, mate! the voice kindly wishes the other driver through the UHF channel. What is a weekend? comes the dry reply. And the two B-Doubles pass each other, their huge clouds of red dust mingling in the space left behind.

photo%201%20Road%20Train%20in%20Walgett.JPG

Road Train in Walgett

When I saw the Australian film Crocodile Dundee, I noticed with interest how a road train thundered through the main street of town with dust billowing around it. People, houses, the local pub, the gum trees, all of them were covered in a hue of red. A bit of an exaggeration, I thought, but staged to good effect. After driving several hundreds of kilometers on dirt roads in the Australian outback I now have changed my mind. The film scene was no exaggeration. Actually, it was quite mild when compared to the reality in much of the outback on a dry day (the days are usually dry, as most people would know). It does not matter with which color trucks drivers enter the outback and start negotiating the dirt roads, at the end of the journey all trucks look the same dusty red. Usually, most certainly in summer, they are also caked in yellow-brown protein, the result of almost-constant collisions with huge clouds of locusts! Drivers who lack experience driving the outback soon grow wise to the idea of keeping the cab windows shut and switching the air conditioning on. Failure to shut windows will definitely lead to dusty red inside and out. In summer you will also entertain unwanted visitors as locusts varying in size from two to thirty centimeters in length play lap dog or dash board decoration in your home away from home.

Most of the trucks that are spotted in the outback are fuel tankers, cattle trucks or bulk tippers. Bulk tippers are semi-trailers or B-Doubles which cart all sorts of bulk loads, from barley to coal, to lime, and whatever else needs to be transported in the big containers that make up the one or two trailers that are being towed by the prime mover (the tractor part of the rig). They are big entities and very long. A B-double will be up to twenty-six meters long, a road train may well be over fifty meters in length. One farmer advised me to make sure to take lunch when walking around one of those behemoths! As I work a bulk tipper now, I roam many areas of Australia with well-nigh unpronounceable names, many of which my GPS unit cannot even locate.

Before working on the bulk tipper, I was a B-Double driver on line haul (see my books Blood, Sweat and Gears and It’s Not a Truck! It’s a B-Double!). Line haul gets you into many different, but mainly urbanized areas. That means that there are facilities readily available for acquiring a meal, ablution blocks, Laundromats, and whatever else you wish to avail yourself of to live as a human being with certain modern conveniences at hand. Line haul drivers do travel through the Outback, making tremendous distances (e.g. Adelaide to Perth covers a distance of 3500 kilometers, and that is considered average). They will stop at distribution centers from where local trucks will distribute the wares to the various locations in the region.

In terms of looking after ones’ well being, the situation is different when working the bulk tipper. In that sector of heavy haulage the truck driver is directed to all kinds of out-of-the-way places, with modern conveniences often absent. This means that the man on the rig is to be much more self-reliant when it comes to meal times, ablutions, insect combating, and any other aspect of life. Instead of having readymade sandwiches I now take a loaf, butter, and spreads. Boiling water in the thermos tends to run out without having a refill handy in the foreseeable future. I have now a gas cooker, dishwashing tools, and—with a uniquely egalitarian change of attitude—a mindset to wash my own clothes from time to time when I happen to reach a roadhouse with a truckers’ laundry available. I am still one of the drivers who are at the receiving end of comparatively mild treatment, because the dispatch officers in our office manage to maneuver me toward home approximately every two to four weeks. There are a good many drivers who do not return to base for months on end. One New Zealand driver came over to drive a bulk tipper and is now driving everywhere for two years on end without leaving his truck; it really is his home for the entire two years! After that long stint he plans to return to his home country. He says he loves to have this kind of life for a while, as it gives him a unique taste of trucking in Australia and it affords him to see the country without any expense to himself. In fact, given the low cost of living, he will return home a fairly wealthy man.

This kind of life certainly exposes a person to a range of experiences that cannot be bought as a holiday. The places you visit are more often than not well off the beaten holiday planners’ tracks. Yet, they are unique in their own right and many carry a good story.

In what follows I will share my joys and trials of running a B-Double across the red dust rising. The uniqueness of many different settlements will be painted alternatively under the blazing sun, under