Outback Heroines

by Sue Williams

  12

  A DRIVING FORCE

  Heather Jones, Karratha, Western Australia

  The heavy-duty Volvo prime mover rumbles onto a truck repair yard in an industrial estate somewhere in the Pilbara region of the Western Australian Outback. It pulls up with a hiss of brakes as the engine’s throaty roar drops to a pulsating purr. The door creaks open and slams shut. There are footsteps up to the entrance. ‘Morning!’ the driver calls over to a man in orange, diesel-stained overalls who looks as though he’ll be the one in charge. ‘Have you got a jackshaft for a Volvo?’

  The mechanic looks up, looks down and then looks up again in almost a parody of a classic double-take. He stares at the driver as if he can hardly believe his eyes. He glances over at the parked truck and then back at the driver, taking in her neat frame, lustrous shoulder-length dark hair and perfectly made-up face. He says nothing. ‘Excuse me,’ she prompts him, sweetly. ‘Do you supply those?’

  He blinks, then finally seems to gather his senses. He smiles at her. ‘Are you sure it’s a jackshaft you want?’ he asks patronisingly. ‘The big one or the bubby one?’

  She looks at him, disappointed yet unsurprised, then collects herself. ‘The bubby one,’ she answers coldly, ‘in between the diffs.’

  Heather Jones has been in this position more times than she cares to remember. She’s been driving trucks for 27 years now and knows their workings intimately. No job with them is too big or too small for her, too heavy or too complex. Despite standing at just 1.67 metres tall, she’s equally at home in a regular truck as in a 100-tonne dump truck or a 50-metre-long road train, and is just as comfortable fixing a fanbelt as she is changing a flat tyre that weighs 80 kilos by the side of the road in 40-degree heat. The work can be tough, but she finds it manageable. Some of the men she meets in the course of her work, rather less so.

  Every so often, she simply despairs. ‘I used to get irritated and angry at some of their attitudes,’ she says, shaking her head in disbelief. ‘But I try not to any more. I try to stay calm and just be polite. I’ll think, Poor, sad little man . . . It just amazes me that they’ll treat another human like that, as though they’re absolutely stupid when they so plainly are not. But these days I smile and think, Oh well, another man with issues . . .’

  In her time in the business, Heather’s pretty much seen it all, and heard plenty more about why trucking’s no place for a woman. She begs to differ.

  At one time, she had the only multi-truck, solely female-owned and -operated company in Australia, running 23 trucks and employing 16 drivers. She’s won countless awards for her business acumen, including being named the Telstra WA Westpac Business Woman of the Year, and on two occasions the Western Australian Road Transport Woman of the Year. She’s also twice reached the finals of the Australian Trucking Association Australian Transport Woman of the Year awards. She’s started from nothing, built up a thriving business from scratch, brought up her two daughters as a single mum, mostly in the cab of a semi-trailer, worked tirelessly to improve the lot of the nation’s truck drivers as one of the industry’s leading advocates, and endured hard times following the global financial crisis.

  But after every knockback, she’s picked herself up, climbed back behind the wheel and just kept on trucking. The work may be hard, driving in extreme isolation in blistering heat for long hours in the dirt and red dust of the rugged West Australian Outback, but she wouldn’t have it any other way.

  ‘She really is a remarkable woman,’ says Ray Pratt, a fellow long-distance truck driver. ‘She’s a dynamo, she never stops. She has such a passion for this industry and, despite all the hardships, she keeps on going. She’s one of the most amazing women I’ve ever met.’

  At the age of four, Heather Jones was given a beautiful doll in a box for Christmas from her grandmother. She unwrapped the gift, took the doll out and carefully placed it on the carpet. Then she took the box and pushed it along the ground. ‘Brrrmmm . . . brrrmmm . . .’ she said happily as she crawled beside it, steering it all over the lounge room. ‘Brrrmmm . . . brrrmmm . . .’ She played with that box all afternoon and didn’t give the doll another thought.

  ‘I guess I was always keen on trucks,’ she says. ‘I’d always liked them. Dad worked in the forestry department, in a pine plantation and mill, so he was always working on heavy machinery. I was a tomboy and I used to hop in the crane with him, or sit on Dad’s lap when he was driving, and I’d often jump into the truck if he had to go and do something. It felt very familiar to me – second nature.’

  Heather was brought up in the small dairy farming town of Harvey in south-west Western Australia, 140 kilometres south of Perth. She had a brother, Gavin, two years older, but her parents Connie and Ron had always wanted more than two children even though after Heather’s birth Connie was told she could never have another baby. So instead, the couple decided to foster children. Adoption was difficult in those days, and the procedures for fostering, by comparison, were much less complicated. Heather was delighted; she’d always longed for a sister.

  The first one she received was extremely disturbed and only lasted a few weeks with the family. The second had been terribly abused, treated like a dog – caged and fed dog biscuits by her heartless parents. ‘I think these children were the foundation for the person I became,’ says Heather now. ‘Often they were troubled and traumatised and needed a quiet, peaceful environment, so I developed a calm personality that I was to have for the rest of my life. I realised these children needed looking after, so I developed into a very caring person.’

  Over the next 14 years, the family took in a total of 57 foster children. To add to the brood, despite the doctor’s prediction, Connie ended up having two more children of her own – two real sisters for Heather, named Terina and Kiara. At the time, five children were being fostered in their house, so they ended up being nine kids altogether. ‘It was fantastic!’ says Heather. ‘I always had a friend and someone to play with. We were never bored. And it was never loud and chaotic. Mum and Dad had a strong work ethic and they were quite disciplined, so it all worked very well.’

  In 1971, when Heather was five years old, the family moved to northern Queensland. Her dad had developed Raynaud’s disease in his fingers, a disorder of the blood vessels sometimes caused by vibrating heavy machinery that can destroy the capillaries in the hand, and doctors suggested a warmer climate would be better for him. They went first to Charters Towers, inland from the coast, then to Townsville, and finally to Cairns, all places where he could find work with cranes on construction sites. Two years later, when the work died down, the family returned to Harvey and he went back to his old job. In 1975, they uprooted again and moved north to Port Hedland in the Pilbara region, 615 kilometres south-west of Broome, where he worked with heavy machinery on the docks. For the kids, it was exciting being on the move and in new places so often. Travel and long distances meant little.

  Three years later, when it was time for Heather to go to high school, they all went back south to Bunbury, which was known to have a good school and was only 45 kilometres away from their hometown. She was an A-grade student, but she wasn’t really that interested in study. She had a friend who was a stuntman, performing a highwire act and doing turns on wet bikes and motorbikes, and emulating him became her overriding ambition. She left school in Year 10 and the family shifted yet again, back north this time to Karratha, 240 kilometres west of Port Hedland. The next year, she had a bad motorbike accident, damaging her spine, breaking nine bones in her foot and injuring a knee, for which she had two knee reconstruction operations. It sounded the final death knell to her hopes of becoming a stuntwoman; instead she started working as a secretary for a foam insulation company. She was bored to tears.

  When she was offered another job as a legal secretary, she jumped at it, thinking it would offer more excitement and challenge. It didn’t take long to realise that wasn’t a good fit, either. The lawyer she was working for often defended paedophiles and Heathe
r found typing up the victim impact statements incredibly distressing, since so many of the foster children she’d grown up with had suffered similar horrors. When the lawyer took on a case defending the father of two of the girls living at Heather’s, she finally quit.

  It was the early 1980s, and her parents had recently moved to the iron ore mining town of Wickham, an hour away from Karratha towards Port Hedland. They suggested Heather join them. She did, becoming one of only a handful of single females in town and, as a consequence, extremely popular. There were plenty of jobs there and she kept herself busy working as a secretary for the mining company during the day, and waitressing in the evenings and weekends at the restaurant of a holiday resort named Port Samson, nine kilometres away.

  The mines all around the Pilbara at that time were going through a difficult period, with an aggressive industrial relations culture and constant conflicts with the powerful unions, and were being plagued by frequent strike action. At one, there were almost 160 strikes in a single year, over issues as minor as the range of ice-cream flavours available in the canteen. The companies resorted to desperate measures to stay open. During one strike, with Heather employed as a secretary, she was redeployed to drive 100-tonne dump trucks to help keep the mine’s operations going. She found she loved the work and, when the strikes were over, resigned from her secretarial position and stayed on as a driver. ‘It was so much better being out driving, than sitting in an office getting stressed over paperwork,’ she says. ‘I’ve always been a bit of a workaholic and I earnt nearly double the money, driving. The conditions were great. You had a generous housing allowance, clothes, boots, a company bus to take us to work . . . It was fantastic!’

  It wasn’t long before Heather had saved enough to start buying a house as an investment in Perth, with her finances bolstered by the insurance payout she’d received as a result of the injuries sustained in the motorbike accident, which were so bad that doctors had said she would never be able to have children.

  Busy and happy, Heather proved a magnet for men, and was soon snapped up by one of her admiring colleagues. In 1987, at the age of 22, she married an electrical engineer from the mine. Just like her mum before her, against the odds, she then fell pregnant. Their first daughter, Kersti, was born in 1988 and their second, Chelsea, in 1989. ‘I did wonder if I should pay the insurance money back,’ says Heather. ‘But they were both very pleasant surprises!’

  The couple set up an electrical repair business back in Karratha and Heather did all the paperwork, looked after the children, starting to home-school them, and occasionally still drove trucks to supplement the family income. The marriage wasn’t, however, a happy one. Married twice before, her husband could be moody and unpredictable, and Heather, previously happy-go-lucky and upbeat, found herself becoming nervous and completely drained of confidence. On the outside, she tried to keep up the pretence that all was well, but at home, she felt she’d become a person she no long recognised. So when one night in 1993 her husband didn’t come home from work and she saw all his clothes were gone from the wardrobe and his tools from the garage, in some ways it felt an enormous relief. But it was hard in others. Their daughters were aged just four and five, they’d just signed up for a loan together for the business, they had mortgage repayments and, without an electrician, their company could no longer continue. Customers from all over the Pilbara started ringing to complain they hadn’t received their electrical goods back. ‘I used to call him the dearly departed one,’ says Heather. ‘He just upped and departed . . .’

  Desperate to keep it all together, Heather approached one of the businesses her husband had done work for, and asked if they had any jobs. They had a part-time opening in their warehouse, and another for someone to deliver heavy machinery all around the Outback. She took both and then started working out how she could juggle work with raising two young children. She came up with an unusual solution: her daughters would travel with her on her delivery runs, and she’d continue with their home-schooling in the cab of the trucks. Her boss said he was fine with that, as long as the children were safe, kept out of sight and never, ever got out of the truck on an industrial site.

  And so began one of the busiest, and most unconventional, periods of Heather’s life.

  Heather Jones behind the wheel.

  Heather is familiar with the ragged terrain of the Pilbara region in Western Australia. (Photo by Sue Williams)

  Everyone quickly adapted to the new routine. Whenever there was a road trip, six-year-old Kersti would make the sandwiches, with five-year-old Chelsea ‘helping’, and the three would pack all their provisions, including homemade biscuits, for the days ahead. Then they’d all climb aboard the truck and head off to whatever remote spot in Outback Western Australia they’d be delivering to, whether a mine, a port, a transport hub or a building site.

  Along the way, they’d spend their time doing lessons or talking about the animals, birds and scenery they passed, or having sing-alongs. They’d have regular rest stops and often have a chat with people they met. It would regularly take two to three days to drive to their destination and then the trio would either drive back or, if they’d actually been driving a vehicle that had been ordered for delivery, Heather would swap the airfare she’d been given for three bus tickets home.

  ‘Travelling together in the truck was actually a really fantastic opportunity,’ says Heather now. ‘We used to have tapes, we would sing the times tables and listen to stories and they’d look at story books and we’d talk. I actually feel quite blessed because parents normally don’t have that kind of time with their children because school takes them away, and then they’ve got chores or their school homework when they get home. So by the end, maybe you only have 20 minutes with your children, whereas I was with mine, 24/7.

  ‘Usually, if you’re working as a single parent you have to put your children in day care and pay a huge proportion of the money you’re earning to be able to do that. Not that I’m criticising anyone for putting kids in day care. Many people just don’t have the option. But for me, it was great being able to bring up my daughters, rather than leaving it to someone else.’

  Not all of Heather’s family and friends were convinced it was a good idea at first, and a number tried to change her mind. Some of them insisted that home-schooling didn’t give children the best start and that it would be far better for them to be in school, socialising with others. ‘But my kids were exposed to so many characters in the industry,’ argues Heather. ‘They were constantly meeting people from all different walks of life. Everyone wants to talk to a female with two kiddies in her truck: tourists, backpackers, other drivers, everyone. Those girls would have been exposed to more interesting and educational experiences in their first ten years than most people would encounter in a lifetime.’

  Looking back, her daughters Kersti and Chelsea both agree. ‘It was great fun and I do think we learnt a lot more with Mum than we would have done at school,’ says Kersti. ‘We got used to travelling in the trucks pretty quickly. It became normal to us; it was just what we did. It meant we could really concentrate on our schoolwork, and Mum was a great teacher, although we used to complain at the time she was too strict. A lot of people ask us now if we think we missed out on things, and our answer is always the same: “No way!” We experienced so much more, grew up faster and became a lot more mature. When we did later go to school, we learnt much less as the teacher was always busy looking after the naughty kids. In the truck, we had Mum’s undivided attention.’

  In their days back home, Heather would work at the warehouse and also had a job clearing sanitary bins in shopping centres and schools to earn enough money to live and pay off the debts she’d been left with. Her husband did call by, but only three months later. When he left, so did one of the vehicles she’d left parked outside. Two days later, it was recovered in the airport car park. Apparently he’d left for work in East Timor.

  By then, Heather and the children had moved to a house her
mum and dad had in Karratha, which she agreed to paint in lieu of paying the rent. ‘So there I was, home-schooling my children, holding down three jobs and painting a house!’ Heather laughs. ‘It would have been a darn sight easier to just pay rent! But I was working horrific hours because I knew it was up to me to educate, clothe, feed and house these two beautiful girls and, with a normal job, I knew I’d never get to see them. Looking back now, I think, How on earth did I do it? But I was super-organised, and that was my life – my girls and my work – and I didn’t have any other distractions.’

  Heather has rarely cried at setbacks in her life. But in 2003 she found herself sitting at the wheel of her car, sobbing as if her heart would break. She just couldn’t help it. After overcoming so many hurdles, she felt as though she’d finally hit a brick wall, and simply couldn’t see any way around it.

  In 1994, she’d moved down to Perth. She hadn’t wanted to leave the Outback and always saw herself as a country girl, but she thought it was finally time for her daughters to go to school, and for her not to spend every waking hour working. She had the house she’d bought there previously, so decided to go south and see how things would work out in a new setting. A neighbour’s brother owned a transport company, so she did some work for him, as well as running trucks the 3200 kilometres up to Kununurra in the Kimberley for other people in the business.

  Kersti and Chelsea started school, and found they didn’t much like it. At first, they begged their mum to drop them off around the corner from the school gates so no one would see them arriving in an eight-wheel tipper. ‘We were pretty embarrassed and thought everyone would tease us for not being like the other kids with a mum who dropped them off in a car,’ says Kersti. ‘That worked for a while, but one day Mum had to drop us at the front of the school. We both cringed, but all the boys came running up and were so impressed and started asking us questions. It turned out they all thought we were so cool travelling in a truck, and having a mum who was a truck driver.’