Outback Heroines

by Sue Williams

  Heather had moved on to work for another contractor who, happily, would also allow her to take her daughters in the truck during their school holidays and the periods the girls persuaded her to allow them to return to home-schooling. It was tricky – a job could change 15 times in one day and you never knew in advance where you were going to – but they adapted, and it worked well for them. On mine sites, she’d close the curtains to the back section and the girls would stay as quiet as mice, playing board games, so no one would know they were there. She worked hard for her boss and while he had only three trucks when she started, by 2004, he had six.

  ‘That was a very valuable experience for me,’ she says. ‘I could see so many ways in which the job wasn’t done right, and so many ways I could improve things. One day, I was talking about it to my sister Terina and she said I should just start my own company. Why not have a truck company run by a woman? I thought that was a damn good idea! If the men didn’t like it, I could employ other women. I thought, Yes, I can change everyone’s mindset. I can do my own thing.’

  She hadn’t taken into account the attitudes of banks, however. Time after time, her application to mortgage her house to buy a truck was knocked back. The rejections ranged from blunt refusals – single mums simply didn’t do things like that – to imposing impossible conditions. It was one particularly galling rejection that proved the final blow that had left her sitting in her car, weeping with frustration and dismay.

  She’d written business plans and had graphs of her projected income drawn up. She had a detailed CV showing how many years of experience she had in the transport industry, with references from people she’d worked for in the past. In an industry where contracts were always word of mouth, with nothing written on paper, she’d even managed to have some offers written down – precious pieces of paper she later decided to frame, they were so rare. One contract was for a new run for an astounding ten trucks over four years.

  Yet even as one bank seemed to be softening in the face of that pledge, the manager had called her in and asked her to write a list of all her competitors. ‘My competitors?’ she asked him, stunned. ‘That would be everyone in Australia who owns a truck!’ He smiled and spoke to her as if to a child. ‘Yes, dear,’ he replied. ‘Now go away and make me that list.’

  Heather was completely stumped. ‘I only ever cry when someone dies,’ she says. ‘But I came out of that bank and bawled my eyes out. I thought, How the bloody hell am I going to do this? Still, I went to the last bank. I didn’t hold out much hope, but the man there said I couldn’t take out a mortgage for my house for a business but . . . I could take out a mortgage on my house for ‘home improvements’. So then I got my money within about 48 hours and bought my first truck and started my business in 2004. It was a great feeling.’

  Everything went well from day one for Heather’s new venture, Success Transport. She found she rarely had to advertise for drivers – they came to her. Very soon, she had a waiting list. Many of them, like her, were women drivers, who’d worked for years in the traditionally macho industry, enduring years of discrimination. By the same token, a number of men vowed they’d never work for a female boss. She, in turn, was happy not to have them.

  ‘My goal was to provide an educational, nurturing environment for women to learn how to drive trucks because, believe me, male chauvinism is alive and well in this industry,’ she says. ‘The things said and done to females! Most people would be shocked. I’ve been accused of stealing men’s jobs, been passed over for work when the bosses realised I was a woman and some men refused to speak to me. And as for a female managing a transport company, some men viewed that as almost a crime. I’d sometimes accompany a new male driver on a job and, even though people knew who I was, they’d direct all their questions to him, rather than to me. Male employees would also constantly question what I told them. I’d give them their instructions and they’d ask, “Are you sure?” That’s something they’d never say to a male boss!’

  As a result, she’d go out of her way to employ women drivers, especially since they often weren’t given a fair go elsewhere. She found many of them keen, conscientious, multi-skilled, consistent, willing to talk about any problems, gentler on the gears and brakes of their vehicles, and often more in-tune with what they were driving. They might tell her there was a noise in the engine that hadn’t been there the day before, whereas men, in her experience, might simply turn the radio up a bit louder. That way, the truck could go straight into the mechanic before anything major went wrong.

  ‘Also, they were in a big truck already, so they didn’t have to go round a corner at 300 miles per hour,’ says Heather, ‘or want to overload floats by 50 tonnes like tough men. And they were really good with the gear and the clients. One time it was raining and one of my female drivers in the tipper truck in front of me got bogged in a sand paddock. The guys on the block were furious she’d got stuck. But she was pretty cute and when they saw her, it was all, “Oh love, how can we help?” With a man, it would have been, “Call yourself a truck driver!”’

  More women in the transport industry also helped create marginally more of a balance in the working environment. Heather often found that having a woman present improved the atmosphere markedly. The men would swear less, not act as aggressively and become a great deal more civil and well behaved. ‘In a place like Karratha, there were 200 men to one female, which is a pretty horrific statistic. It’s not normal,’ says Heather. ‘So you put a couple of women in the environment – the right sort of women – and the men tend to calm down and start behaving themselves and go out of their way to show the female what to do and how to do it, and that’s all good.’

  She also tried to take a lead in the industry in employing people with disabilities or drivers who’d been injured in work accidents, while participating in a government work-training scheme to encourage others into the industry.

  In addition, Heather began another crusade: to help improve the industry generally for truck drivers.

  Truck driving is the most dangerous industry in Australia – and by a factor of at least 10, according to the federal government. Hundreds of people are killed in truck crashes every year and thousands more are injured.

  The Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, Anthony Albanese, later to become deputy to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, said that those tragic deaths also cost the country about $2 billion per year.

  Tony Sheldon, the President of the Transport Workers Union, describes the situation bluntly. ‘Every day across Australia, truck drivers and transport companies are forced to meet unrealistic demands and impossible deadlines set by major clients, no matter what,’ he says. ‘These pressures and demands have made driving a truck the most dangerous job you can do in Australia, with a death rate that is 11 times the industrial average.’

  As well as the actual dangers, deaths and injuries, however, there’s also the huge problem of the many thousands of drivers suffering stress and post-traumatic stress disorders. With over 85 per cent of drivers working as owner-operators or working for very small firms, there’s also the persistent difficulty of actually getting paid for work done. It’s all so complex that there have been countless parliamentary inquiries over the last 10 years into the industry and those who serve it.

  Still, about 30 per cent of owner-drivers are paid below the award rate, which means that they are more likely to compromise on costly repairs and maintenance. Time is another factor. A recent survey of drivers in the Coles supply chain, for example, saw 40 per cent admitting they’ve had to delay vehicle maintenance because of economic pressures from clients.

  Drivers all over Australia often feel compelled to work excessive hours and drive huge distances, breaking speed limits, to meet impossible deadlines. Many, as a result, drive for long periods overnight, can be ordered to carry illegal oversized loads, and resort to drugs to keep going. A number are also told to load their own vehicles, a process that can take around six hours, without pay, while wa
iting times to load or unload can total up to 10 hours, again unpaid. Many also fiddle their speed limiters, or interfere with their truck’s gearing ratio, in order to satisfy the demands on them.

  The results make tragic reading. Despite accounting for only 2.5 per cent of all vehicle registrations, heavy trucks drive 7.5 per cent of all kilometres travelled and are involved in 15 per cent of all fatal crashes, with speed, drugs, alcohol and fatigue often to blame. One industry study has found that the drivers most likely to operate dangerously are the newest to the industry, and paid the least. Other research has discovered that stimulant drug use is two to three times more likely for drivers paid by results.

  For Heather, the issues have been clear for years: over-long hours; unrealistic delivery times; a lack of regulation on those contracting owner-drivers and transport companies; the lack of rest areas, decent facilities and food at parking bays; health issues like stress, obesity and diabetes; and a popular culture that vilifies drivers.

  Despite facing such tough challenges, truck drivers have never been properly understood by the general public, she believes. Although they make up the backbone of our country, driving the length and breadth of it to deliver food and drink, manufacturing equipment, vehicles and every type of raw material and finished goods we need to keep going, they’re still never appreciated.

  In the US, truckers are revered, with films about them, songs and TV shows. In Australia, however, Heather feels it’s quite the opposite and they’re often blamed for problems even when they’re not at fault. Whenever there’s a collision involving a truck and a car, it’s usually reported as a truck hitting a car, even if the car driver was later found to have a high blood-alcohol reading and maybe veered into the path of an oncoming truck. A number of car drivers are also known to commit suicide every year by driving into trucks.

  ‘Back when I started driving, whenever you pulled into a cafe, the boys would sit down and come and join you to have a meal, and talk over the same horrific work conditions,’ Heather says. ‘Those same issues would come up again and again. For instance, what other occupation in the world can you be legally employed in, and not have showers, toilets and food? Shell partnered with Coles and closed down most of the restaurants and facilities for truck drivers at all their outlets throughout Australia, even though the number of truck movements on the roads have doubled every 10 years to handle the increase in freight. So more and more of us are in the truck for seven days and nights, and we can’t go without a shower that long when we’re working and changing tyres, and we need to eat a meal every night. It’s impossible to pack enough food for a week ahead, and in a road train, it’s not like you can just pull up in the high street and go into a supermarket.

  ‘But no one was presenting our arguments to parliament. Whenever there’s a truck issue in the media, who do they interview? A fuzzy-haired, tattooed, dirty-shirted, foul-mouthed truck driver. Why? I know truck drivers who’ve been doctors or engineers or business people . . . but they’re never the ones the press talk to. So I started phoning people in authority and talking to them and emailing MPs. I became a person they’d see as someone who’d harass them until the issues were addressed. More and more people agreed to have meetings with me, and finally it felt we were getting some progress.’

  One of those people was Alyssa Hayden, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Deputy Premier in the Western Australian legislative council. She first encountered Heather at a transport forum and was taken aback at how passionate she was about the industry. Heather invited Alyssa to accompany her on her truck on a five-day trip to experience conditions first-hand. Alyssa accepted. ‘I was pretty bloody impressed by her, to be honest,’ Alyssa says. ‘I was blown away by her determination. She raised two daughters as a single mum, mortgaged her house to buy her first truck and was now making great headway in a male-dominated industry. Her courage and focus were amazing.’

  Alyssa’s regard for Heather only grew during their trip when the pair had to tiptoe through a group of Gypsy Joker bikies sleeping outside the women’s toilet at one truck stop, with the gang members threatening to break in to help the politician wash. ‘Heather came with me, and helped me there, and handled them beautifully,’ says Alyssa. ‘You feel vulnerable in a bathroom with a door that doesn’t shut, but with Heather guarding the door, I knew I’d be OK!’

  Heather raised the issues at every opportunity too, including with other drivers within range of her CB radio, to demonstrate the strength of feeling. ‘She reminded me constantly what to focus on,’ Alyssa says. ‘She’s so popular and is such an incredible advocate for the industry.’ Through their working relationship, much was done to improve rest areas for truckies in WA and to provide toilets and showers in a number of bays.

  Heather’s profile in the industry was growing exponentially. By this time, newspapers, radio and TV began to interview her regularly on any story involving truck drivers and she used every opportunity to fight their corner. She wanted the public to be better educated about truck drivers and road safety too, and to understand about stopping distances and the importance of making allowances for their weight and speed. The best investment any regular car driver embarking on a long Outback journey could ever make, she said, was the purchase of the $40 hand-held radio, so they could actually ask truck drivers when it was safe to pass them, or inquire about driving conditions ahead.

  She also started working towards a long-cherished ambition of her own. Travelling around each state to talk to roads departments, she’d been pushing for each of them to provide a large acreage site for a complex to be built for truckies, containing a motel, a restaurant serving healthy food, a laundromat and internet cafe. In Western Australia, she kept a careful eye out constantly for a suitable area.

  In the meantime, her own business was booming and, within two years, she had 16 drivers and 23 trucks on the road. Her daughters both worked in the business and they ran deliveries for all industries, from mining and farming to shipping. The awards started coming too, including a WA Business News 40under40 Award, to mark the state’s top 40 entrepreneurs under 40 years of age, as well as those various ‘woman of the year’ titles.

  But still one of her proudest achievements was helping push an Act through the Western Australian Parliament that would offer owner-drivers assistance in extracting their money from defaulting companies.

  Unfortunately, it was passed just a year too late for her.

  Everything for Heather Jones started to come crashing down in 2008.

  The GFC hit her business hard, and all the other companies who’d hired her services. Almost overnight, it became harder and harder to get paid for work she’d done, which made it more and more difficult to pay her own bills. The industry became steadily more competitive, with big companies undercutting the rates of the smaller ones, including Heather’s. Then came the rows over the mining tax, which created uncertainty in the Western Australian resources sector, the main source of so much of the transport industry’s business, and meant contracts were delayed and payments deferred.

  On the plus side, however, Heather finally found a site she thought would be perfect for her dream to build that complex for truck drivers. ‘I thought it could be a home away from home for them,’ she says. ‘It could be a place where drivers could go and stay and feel comfortable, wash their clothes, get a haircut, get a health check. It could be a one-stop shop for all their needs, with an insurance office, a gym and maybe even a lap pool, because there can be so much stress on your body from sitting in a truck all day.’ She had backers and sponsors and everything was going well until the owners of the land changed their mind and decided to put it out for tender. All the big companies then came in to compete for it – and Heather’s consortium couldn’t match the sums they were offering.

  Instead, she found a smaller piece of land in another area and started making all the arrangements. She spent $340 000 on commissioning plans, environmental studies and drawing up planning applications and, with eve
rything looking promising, laid out $2.5 million for it, together with a couple of partners. After lengthy negotiations, however, the local council suddenly backed off and decided not to approve its change of use after all. ‘So this place I bought so our truck drivers would have somewhere to go was an absolute white elephant,’ she says. ‘It was absolutely devastating. I was gutted. For 20 years my girls and I had worked so hard to achieve something for other people as well, not just for ourselves, and to have it all go so horribly wrong through no fault of our own . . . I was absolutely gut-wrenched.’

  With debts mounting, other companies not paying her invoices, and the crumbling demand for transport services, she spent months trying to balance the books. ‘You just needed that $20 000 or $50 000 then you could pay all your commitments and buy more fuel to earn more money,’ she says. ‘But I had to scale down the company, sell trucks, lay off drivers and then start trying to pay off the debts in earnest.’

  In a bid to raise more money, she strata-ed her house in Perth and sold one side of it to her brother, and then started driving trucks again for other companies. All she did for the next year was drive, sleep, eat, and drive again. It was the only way she could see out of her quandary.

  A friend of hers, Steve Post, a risk surveyor with National Transport Insurance, says most people in her position may have taken the easy way out. ‘Many people would have just declared bankruptcy and then started another company and carried on where they left off,’ he says. ‘But not Heather. She wanted to fight her way out of it. She just worked really, really hard to pay back her debts and get back in front. She never throws in the towel. She just rolls up her sleeves, works 80 hours a week, and gets on with it. She’s an incredible woman. It was typical of Heather, though, that she’d worry about other people’s problems, when they were pretty insignificant compared to hers!’