The years 1946 to present

In March 1946 I was discharged from the Royal Australian Air Force and started a one man auto repair business, using the facilities at my Uncle Clarry Sweet's old garage on Morphett Road, Warradale, South Australia. This was the site of my original apprenticeship in 1936-37 that terminated when Clarry closed down and went into the quarrying Industry as a maintenance engineer.

A few weeks later, I decided that motor mechanics, climbing up and down out of a service pit and being covered in engine oil, no longer appealed to me! So I started work with Tuck and Diener on motorcycle repairs one week before I joined the motorcyclists going over to Ballarat for the Easter TT meeting. Sadly, it was on this journey over, that Frank Tuck met his untimely death when his small Morris 8/40 tourer overturned near Nhill. Frank's wife and children survived OK, but without Frank, the motorcycle business lacked the working expertise that he had provided. I was married with 2 young children, had just built a new home, and was prepared to continue working on motorcycles which I enjoyed – but my uncle had approached me several times with offers of the job of maintenance with his company. The thought of getting involved in dirt, dust and grease again held me back.

By early 1947, Tuck and Diener had closed, and Les Diener, now married, had transferred some of the equipment and the goodwill of the business to an old timber shed in the backyard of his mother's home where he only carried out specialised machining work, mostly for the racing fraternity. So, now being unemployed, I soon took up the job of maintenance engineer with JH Leverington's Slape's Gully quarry, where Clarry had been engineering boss for some time, but needed a full time working assistant. The pay was twice as much as I had been used to, but as my uncle had always said, 'The job is dirty – but the money is clean!'. Later in the year when I had the plant running well after many modifications, I was given the job of re-commissioning a partly dismantled ex Army Ruston Bucyrus RB19 excavator. From memory, Des Toohey, who I was to be involved with for many years later on, was taken on as a dump truck driver around this time. We became good friends. He had bought a new 600cc Panther motorcycle as soon as he turned 18, and learned to ride it on the trip down from his home in the back blocks of Queensland – he had been born and raised in a tent and was determined to see the world! He was a big strong lad, well used to hard work and quarrying suited him well – together with me, he remained in the business all his life and became a millionaire to boot as a Managing Director. But now he was virtually penniless, and took up residence in the company's vacant watchman's hut at the main gate, together with a newly employed excavator driver and his small son, which suited Des's bachelor ways.

One of our employees Johan Lange, lived in an old house in the gully just above the quarry with his 2 young sons and 16 year old daughter. Doris was a well built athletic girl, whose long blond hair and attitude, left no one in doubt as to her Germanic Lutheran heritage, and as she and her brothers walked or ran through the quarry premises every day to and from school, it was only a matter of time till she spotted Des who was decidedly girl shy. From then on she would linger in the area on her way home, asking as to his whereabouts, while he would busy himself well out of sight! Around this time, Des and I rebuilt the saddle of the excavator which had failed in service from a hidden fault – this over the Easter break in 1948. Des and Doris were now a steady item, with her parent's approval, and they spent quite some time at my new home, Des helping me with fencing and other projects, and together occasionally baby sitting our 2 children (from my first marriage).

A short time later, the 40 hour week became law, and through the Winter of 48, I worked on the graveyard shift at T.J. Richards motor body builders on Anzac Highway in Keswick, (Chrysler, Dodge, Plymouth, Fargo). This was an 8 hour inclusive shift on the body panels press line, with free hot drinks and food served from a trolley, from 11pm until 7am, at which time I would ride to the quarry and do another 8 hour shift from 7.30am until 4.30pm (9 hours inclusive). Weekends were free but mostly spent sleeping! This was extremely hard going, but money was a bit short at this time. I was accompanied during this time on the press line by another quarry labourer, who I used to pick up from his home, go to our night time job, and then take him with me to work the next morning – picking him up again the next night around 10.30 for the next night's shift.

I was riding the 16 H Norton at this time (previously the Tuck and Diener work hack) with a De Luxe Sports Dusting sidecar, that I had bought from an ex RAAF mate in Melbourne when we went over to Ballarat for the TT at the 1947 Easter break. It was riding in the Winter elements at this time that gave me the idea of building a 3 wheeled car, and construction began shortly afterwards.

Christmas 48 – and Des had found an excellent new job with V.P. Keane – a rival quarrying company, starting immediately. I had also been offered a job, starting immediately, to assemble a new excavator for the same company, which was due to arrive in crates shortly from England. But I had undertaken the obligation to rebuild the plant's loading chute over the Christmas New Year holiday break, and this was already being prepared. So it was that I worked through Christmas, finished the job and left immediately (Uncle Clarry Sweet was still boss there), starting work with Vin Keane first week in January 1949. I had by now finished the basic construction of the 'HOLDON' 3 wheeler, and it was road registered just before the Christmas break.

My first job with Vin Keane was to be the erection of the brand new Ruston Bucyrus RB19 in the company's tiny base workshop in Ackland Street in the Adelaide East End, but the crated parts were still on a ship somewhere. Instead I was put to work constructing conveyor frames for the new plant being erected at Cannawigra, some 14 miles West of Bordertown on the main Adelaide/Melbourne highway. Des had married Doris early in the new year, and moved to Cannawigra as a company truck driver and general hand, Doris becoming the camp cook.

In a few weeks the crates were delivered and I began the task of assembly in the restricted space available. I had ascertained that the finished excavator would just barely pass out of the workshop, through the large door in the solid brick wall with a couple of inches to spare on each side, and without the roof silencer box and exhaust pipe fitted. So passed several weeks during which I assembled the RB19, with occasional help from Vin himself, and the workers in the engineering shop next door with whom Vin had a working relationship. They carried out many engineering jobs for the company – the wall between the the workshops having been torn down to facilitate this arrangement.

My original arrangement with Vin was that after building the excavator, I was to be the driver on a piecework basis at the new Cannawigra crushing plant. This suited me as I had had enough of dirt and grease, long hours and hard work at the previous job – even though the pay was very good. I was on staff at 15 pounds per week, quite a high wage at the time when the basic rate was around half that amount. Vin on the other hand had started me off at 20 pounds a week, with the piecework rates offering even greater rewards.

The RB19 duly passed out of the workshop without incident, and was immediately taken by road on one of the Company's ex WW2 Mack trucks on a purpose built trailer. I drove the 3 wheeler and joined it at Canawigra the following Monday, where a temporary arrangement had seen the use of a local front end loader to supply the plant with stone for the previous weeks of operation. It was now early Winter and extremely cold, and I enjoyed the comfort of the warm cabin of the RB19 – but there was a lot of problems with the new plant. Production had been very small to date and way below expectations – there were mechanical problems and breakdowns were ongoing, but I stuck rigidly to my job of driving the excavator, even though the financial returns at that point were dismal!

So it was that soon I, like all the other non plant workers and private truck owners, were pitching in to somehow sort out the breakdowns, but the real problem was the fact that the plant crew were inexperienced and thought more of knocking off early and going into Bordertown and drinking beer! One morning Vin arrived on the job – in the middle of a major stoppage! With everyone trying to get production under way, he took me to one side, and offered me the job of plant boss at a very good piecework rate that I really couldn't refuse, and so I took over. The excavator and a new driver was moved to another job where it was more suitable. It was actully no longer needed, as the stone supply at this time was no longer the original stacks at the crushing plant, but huge stacks of limestone on the farms in the surrounding areas, where a small front end loader and man power was more suitable. The farmers themselves were responsible to deliver stone to the plant, with no help from our company, they being paid a set price per cubic yard delivered. This was a good arrangement for them as they were being paid to remove unwanted stone from their land, and soon we had truck loads of stone arriving from miles around, to supply the raw material for a contract that had been now been greatly extended.

I was given a reliable senior helper for my first week in charge of the plant, and I had recruited two of my own employees – one my brother in law, and the other a mate who was a mountain of a man and strong as an ox! Together we laboured at fixing the obvious mechanical problems, and soon had the plant running without breakdowns – our first week's tally was more than double anything previously achieved at 1400 tons! The next week was better, we were by now fully organised, and working long uninterrupted days with no drinking on the job! The next week's tally was over 2000 tons, at which point my helper left me to my own devices. From then on we had good tallies until the job finished some weeks later, and we made excellent money all around.

At the end of this contract, I was offered a job back at the Adelaide maintenance depot, which was now in a disused quarry hole in the Adelaide foothills – my pay to be on a basis of the overall profit margin on all the company's country stone crushing operations. Quite apart from the ongoing maintenance and building of a new plant, my job now included the driving of the company Mack prime mover with an ex WW2 tank carrier low loader, and with this I was continually moving plant and loaders and bull dozers around the state, mostly on weekends. This meant even more money, as Vin was an appreciative generous hands-on managing director with his brother Kevin.

I still had the odd week away on country plants that were experiencing production problems – almost always related to heavy drinking and lack of normal maintenance. This was always a problem with the workers that Vin recruited – a lot of them fugitives from the South Australian prison system, where he was considered something of a good natured paternal figure, giving work to paroled prisoners. But a lot of the workers took advantage of his generosity and kindness, and this led to all sorts of problems on the jobs. A lot of the mechanical problems sprang from lack of any sort of proper interest, and a breakdown usually saw a private truck head for the nearest pub – sometimes with the company employees along! Gradually I managed to implement a system of dedicated non drinking workers and production always improved. Good production meant good money and lazy workers were soon eliminated. In fact, we finished up with a few good ex-prison workers!

Early on a big problem was the weekends back in Adelaide. A company truck would leave the job at the end of the working week on Friday afternoon, and head for home with employees travelling in the back of the truck. The first hotel that was passed there would be a stop for a well earned drink, and the buying of a few bottles of beer for the rest of the journey, and everyone would be dropped off at their Adelaide homes. OK so far! But the job of collecting them all on Sunday evening for the ride back to the job, meant being directed to out of the way drinking spots and private houses where parties were in progress and no one was happy to leave. So you could find yourself the only one sober and driving a strange truck for 3 hours in the early hours of the morning, arriving back at the job exhausted to tip the drunks into their camp beds and grab a couple of hours sleep. The plant was usually started at daybreak with at least a 10 hour day ahead. I was glad to be away from all this and have a steady job with good money back at the Adelaide depot!

It was now Christmas again, and there had been one weekend where I delivered a 'Cat' D7 dozer from the Adelaide depot to a contract site at Kingston on the Murray. I loaded a redundant D6 front end loader, and proceeded to Berri where I crossed the Murray on the local punt, then on south to Lucindale near Mount Gambier, where the loader was delivered. Then there was the long trip back home to Adelaide on Sunday evening, after picking up some machinery at a job at Naracoorte – a total of some 960 miles. All this in a prime mover that was governed at a speed of a little over 40 miles per hour, representing 24 hours driving at least! Driving alone in a tattered canvas cab with little weather protection, but rugged up in an Army greatcoat, the journey sometimes ending back at the depot in the early hours of Monday morning. You'd grab a few hours sleep in the blacksmith's shop because you were usually needed on the job pretty much straight away, to tackle the maintenance jobs that had come in over the weekend. In those days a boss's job was 100% hands on, and there was always plenty to do!

The weekend jobs were always challenging! On one occasion I drove a huge ex US Army truck mounted excavator up to Murraytown in the mid North, road registration (and insurance) was completely non existent! The journey from the quarry depot usually starting around 2am on Saturday, when all the police were home in bed in those far off times! It was always a nervous journey through the outskirts of Adelaide, and across the Torrens River Bridge in the heart of Adelaide, but by now it would be 3am or later and Adelaide would be a dead darkened city, and I would rumble on, hoping to be well clear of the suburbs by daylight.

There was no back up, you were strictly on your own, sometimes driving a vehicle that had done no miles on the road since it had been rescued from a Pacific atoll – rusted, neglected and only had a rudimentary check over! On one occasion I had a complete clutch failure on the northern outskirts of Adelaide on the first steep rise that I encountered, and so set to work to get the clutch working. Somehow I managed to get out of the suburbs using the lowest gears at little more than a walking pace, then stopping and readjusting the clutch again – repeating the process until finally grip was attained. The journey North continued but I found myself negotiating the back streets of major towns en route with the streets full of farmers and football crowds. This journey was one of the most harrowing that I ever experienced!

The flouting of the road laws was somehow ignored. Vin and his brother were real down to earth do-gooders in Adelaide, part of a 'club' who were forever helping the poor and disadvantaged, and fanatic followers and financial 'uncles' of Adelaide's struggling football teams. Their mates in these schemes were magistrates and people in high places, and so Vin and his brother who were always being called upon to help find employment for the less fortunate, could rely on someone to 'pull a few strings' if by some chance an infringement was discovered by the police. In those days the police were restricted to walking and riding pushbikes, and only worked a normal working day like everyone else and there were certainly no road patrols – so, as far as I know, we were never caught in the act as it were! But that never stopped me worrying when I was out on the road – overloaded, over width (possibly unroadworthy, but no such demeanor existed in those days) and unregistered!

On one occasion I carried a load that was more than 4 metres wide, weighing more than 10 tons, and completely illegal. The only consolation being that the Mack low loader unit was at least registered! This machinery was taken to Stansbury on Yorke's Peninsula, and arriving there on Saturday afternoon, I found that everyone had gone fishing after erecting a large 'sheer leg' gantry and 5 ton chain block, and I was left to unload on my own – I did this by lifting one end of the machinery on the block and tackle, then chaining the machinery to a nearby tree, then driving the low loader out from underneath, throwing some old timbers and truck tires at the back of the loader for the machinery to drop down on to. This sort of operation was not considered unusual – I remember Vin checking with me the next week, and saying, 'I believe the boys left you with a bit of a problem last Saturday – obviously you managed OK!'. This would be followed by him putting his hand in his pocket and fishing out a 20 pound note with a grin! Vin was one of nature's gentlemen!

During the Winter, driving the truck could get so cold, and I would be so tired, that by midnight, I would pull the rig over in the middle of nowhere, but always on a down hill run, as the batteries in the Mack were old and notoriously unreliable – especially under cold conditions! I would then lift the side panels of the bonnet over the engine up on to the fenders, then wrap myself up in my army greatcoat and any old bags or blankets that we may have on board, and lay down above the heat of the engine. But in an hour or so, the engine would have cooled, and I would wake up frozen stiff, quick to get the motor going and on the way again. Sometimes I'd stop several times through the night to stretch my legs and get an hour's sleep, but dawn would usually see me close to my destination with willing hands ready to unload what ever I might be delivering, and if I was lucky, I could be home again before nightfall.

Soon it was Christmas 1950 and once more we were bringing back ex WW2 crushing equipment that had been abandoned in the Pacific Islands by the American Forces, and shipped to Sydney. But now the company's operations had come to an end in South Australia, and we were renovating equipment to set up in Melbourne, Victoria, and my job was about to move interstate some time during the next few months. However the new home and marriage problems induced me to stay in Adelaide no matter what. My life was changing and I found myself spending most of 1951 at the VP Keane depot sorting out gear for the interstate move and servicing a couple of plants that were finishing out contracts, one at Keith, and another north of Gawler.

October, and the depot was now closed for good, and though still employed by VP Keane, I was attached to a local welding company that was carrying out a major cast iron repair job on a part of the company's equipment. There I remained until the end of a very happy stint with the company, which by then had moved the entire operation to Melbourne – but Vin and Kevin remained in Adelaide. The new operation in Victoria having now passed into the hands of my old mate Des, where it remained until the company was sold in 1974.

Soon it was November – I was divorced, and my home had been sold, and my ex wife had quite by chance introduced me to Barbara. A visit to Kangaroo Island saw me negotiating a crushing contract there which I started in January 1952, living in a caravan on my own, and really enjoying the friendly Island lifestyle. But by June, I was back in Adelaide getting married again, and a couple of months later Barbara and I were settled in to the Kangaroo Island community, where we remained for 10 years and 5 children.

Then suddenly in late 1960, a trip to Melbourne to research the educational possibilities for our two youngest deaf children, and a visit to Des and Doris and their three children, and of course, the VP Keane operations, resulted in us packing up and leaving our Kangaroo Island properties, and a return to my old job with VP Keane. I was finishing the erection of a new crushing operation at Bundoora to the north of the outer Melbourne city limits, living in a new home three miles away in the Melbourne suburbs, with our two youngest deaf children learning to speak at a local world renowned speech therapy schooling facility.

By 1964 I had completed the ongoing construction, and moved on to the company's new specialised truck building project, where I designed and built several new lightweight construction road going vehicles, to take advantage of the new lightweight prime mover developments, and thus gain extra legal payloads. At this point the company had decided to build a completely new 'super plant' using technologies that we had developed ourselves. This was to be erected near a stone deposit about a mile from the existing operation, and so I set to work to design and build two new impact crushers, right there on the ground with no shelter or facilities of any kind. Most of the design work was done at my home in the evenings and translated into steel from sketches the next day with the help of two experienced welders, and one young labourer that I trained to do the layouts and use the oxy cutting equipment.

The first major task was to build a crane, using a no longer used diesel steel rope operation excavator as the base. This was modified and constructed with a sliding extensible boom, and was capable of heavy normal lifts – but lighter lifts to a height of some 50 feet when fully extended. Soon the steelwork was rising, and I was farming out engineering work in the construction of unobtainable bearing housings, and the manufacture of shafts and steel bosses. The main parts were made out in the open, using 2 and 4 inch steel plate which I cut to the finished shape myself, and were then welded together back at the main workshop, and then sent to a major Melbourne engineering company for the finish machining.

My design called for the main crusher bodies to be built in situ from 1 inch plate, and be built as an integrated unit. As part of this design, an overhead travelling crane was called for, and a disused one was found, and modified to run on overhead rails that were being fabricated on the ground together with the roof supporting structure. These eventually being lifted into place in four sections, by a heavy duty crane later hired in to do several major lifts at the one time. The main steelwork was going up well, with myself driving the crane, which I couldn't really entrust to anyone else, because of the numerous peculiarities that the conversion had involved.
By now we had a carpenter on the job to take care of the boxing of foundations, and other odd work – later we had to have further carpenters when the roofing and wall cladding was being carried out. One way and another, problems were overcome, and one year later – almost to the day, on the 28th January 1966, the power was turned on for the first time. Machinery was tested and the first truckload of basalt went down the chute! This was not the end! I immediately set to work to build a new concrete batching plant, as well as a dry mix batching plant. This was followed by further crusher installations and the building of a wet screen washing plant for quality washed stone. By 1968 I had moved on to other things with the whole operation no longer needing my input, and my time was taken up doing left to right hand steering and control conversions on luxury Cadillac and Chrysler Imperial cars for the old owner and senior company members back in Adelaide.

As part of these duties, cars that had been imported in previous years after being converted in the USA, were handed down to our local senior staff. Some of these conversions had proved less than satisfactory, and so I found myself, modifying and improving, and having a company 1959 Cadillac of my own, which was used by my wife as was the case with other company wives. The men were content with a vehicle more suited to the rough work involved with the general day to day running of the machinery!

So it was that the time went by until 1974, when the company sold it's entire assets and operations to Readymix (Australia), and our lives changed again! I suddenly became an unwilling member of the Readymix Company as an engineering liason man but this lasted only a short time.

By a quirk of fate, I found myself in a good working relationship with one Laurie McMahon, another unhappy senior engineering executive – both of us now being considered loose cannons. We were given the job of running Readymix country areas, where we were completely away from company politics which we both detested. Our friendship grew – eventually seeing me spend the last years of my working life with him, as a trouble shooter and fixer in South East Asia, based in Hong Kong and Singapore, he being the pencil-man, and I the field guy. As a two man team we started a company for his previous employer where he had done his engineering drafting apprenticeship – Jaques International, Hong Kong. This lasted a couple of years, and was quite successful.

Inevitably we once again found ourselves contracted to Readymix in Singapore, this time trying to recover a failed company operation from complete disaster. It lasted almost a year, during which time we brought the operation into full production, but once again, company politics intervened. We went our separate ways – me into retirement and Laurie going from one company to the next, until he finished up with an international copper mining operation in Chile. He cajoled me out of my cosy retirement for a few months, and Barb and I were preparing for a two year sojourn in South America, when suddenly the price of copper dropped. Laurie moved to a related operation in California where he remains to this day, a self employed engineering consultant working at this point in time somewhere down in Texas, and commuting to his home at Tucson, Arizona, while I am finally retired in Gippsland, Victoria, Australia.