Chapter 12 — Work, Roads and Country

Coach driving became an education of its own: vehicles, roads, landscapes, people and the knowledge that came through movement, observation and responsibility rather than a classroom.

The road gave me a way of learning that was very different from the education I had received as a child. Country was never merely the distance between one town and another. It had structure, history and character, and it changed as we moved through it.

Driving coaches required more than taking people safely from one place to the next. It required attention: to the vehicle, the road, the weather, the country outside the windows and the people inside. Commentary meant finding a way to make what I could see available to other people.

Learning the Work ↑

At Blue Riband Coaches in Werribee I began with local school services and city charters. Teddy Holsgrieve had been impressed by the way I handled the vehicle. That ability gave me an opening which formal qualifications might not have provided.

For almost six months I learned the daily discipline of the work. A coach driver carried responsibility for far more than the timetable. Children, charter passengers, other road users and the machine itself all depended on decisions made from behind the wheel. Smoothness mattered. Anticipation mattered. Knowing what a large vehicle was doing beneath you mattered.

Then I was sent to spend several months taking groups into the snow. They stayed at Noonameena Lodge, at the foot of Mount Buffalo, and travelled during the day to ski at Falls Creek, Mount Buffalo or Mount Hotham.

Coming Down Mount Buffalo ↑

On one descent from Mount Buffalo I was driving a coach that was getting old. There were passengers aboard when the brakes failed.

What followed was a fast and difficult ride. On a mountain descent there is no room to wait and see whether a problem will correct itself. I had to work with the vehicle I still had, manage its speed and keep it on the road until I could bring it to a stop.

The incident led to a police investigation. The examination found that a brake cylinder in the air-over-hydraulic system had collapsed. It also found that the front axle was flexing. Those were mechanical failures, not failures in my driving, and I was exonerated.

It was a frightening event, but it also demonstrated the distinction between appearance and evidence. A coach had come down a mountain without functioning brakes. The easiest story might have been to blame the young driver. Inspection of the machinery established what had actually happened.

The Tour Nobody Wanted ↑

After another trip to Noonameena Lodge, I returned the coach to the Werribee yard. The manager told me to go home and be back at half past five the following morning. I was being sent on tour with a coachload of geologists.

There was plenty of conversation in the yard about the assignment. Most of the experienced drivers preferred the public camping tours. I was the youngest and newest driver, so the tour that nobody seemed to want came to me.

That journey with approximately forty-five scientists and specialists became one of the best classrooms I ever experienced. Its fuller story belongs earlier in this book, in Chapter 2, Forty-Five Geologists. What matters here is what the tour did to my working life.

The group must have been pleased with my work because they gave me an excellent recommendation. The assignment other drivers had avoided became the opportunity that moved me forward.

Across Australia ↑

My next major tour was as the driver of the second coach on a public camping safari. We travelled through outback New South Wales into Queensland, continued to Darwin by way of Mount Isa, and then turned south towards Alice Springs, Uluru and the Olgas.

The work brought together many abilities which had developed outside formal education. I needed to understand the coach, judge roads and conditions, manage passengers and remain aware of where we were in a country of enormous distances.

I was also in the right place at the right time because George Tull had taught me how to move sheep, cattle and horses. Reading the movement of animals, anticipating where they would go and positioning yourself properly were lessons in attention and control. Those lessons travelled with me even when the animals were replaced by a coach, passengers and a long road.

The Kindergarten Thirds Leftovers ↑

I have sometimes shortened another memory by saying that I played polocrosse at the Ballarat Championships. That makes it sound grander and more formal than it was, and this book is an attempt to make the record more accurate.

Someone had the idea of giving the strappers and others around the event an opportunity to play. We were billed as the Kindergarten Thirds Leftovers.

It was fun. I rode a fine little polo pony which Jimmy Ramage had bought and spent time training. The pony worked beautifully from the knees and kept a keen eye on the ball.

I was playing at number two when I had an opportunity to gather the ball and rode hard towards it with my attention fixed ahead. The ball struck rough ground and shot sideways. The pony followed the ball exactly as it had been trained to do. I continued forward without it.

There is a lesson in that small correction. The shorter version—playing at the Ballarat Championships—was not entirely false, but it concealed the character of what happened. The true version is better. It contains the humour, the generosity of being given a turn, the quality of Jimmy's pony and the sudden separation between a well-trained horse and its less accomplished rider.

The Big Wheel ↑

Blue Riband also had a depot in North Melbourne. As I travelled to and from work, I regularly passed Greyhound. After a year or two I decided that I wanted to drive for them.

I stopped and asked about a job. I was told that I was far too young. Greyhound had a policy of not employing drivers until they were twenty-five. I was not deterred.

On Friday evenings Brian Connolly, known as “the Big Wheel,” would have a few drinks at a nearby hotel. I made time to stop by and ask again about working for Greyhound. His refusals were firm but friendly. I kept returning.

One evening the Canberra manager was present and heard another of these exchanges. He turned to the Big Wheel and told him to give me a driving test; otherwise, I was simply going to keep coming back.

Brian agreed. I drove an Ambassador coach out towards the Tullamarine Freeway. He and the Canberra manager sat towards the rear while I handled the vehicle. After a time he called out that they had seen enough and told me to return to the depot.

Back at the depot, Brian said that he was going to give me a job. I could drive properly. My handling of the gearbox was excellent and I had maintained a good position on the roadway. He would need special approval because of the minimum-age policy. I was only twenty-three or twenty-four.

I began with Greyhound soon afterwards.

The journeys, the work and the people I met enlarged my world. They showed me that knowledge did not belong only to institutions, qualifications or those who claimed authority over others. Some of the most important opportunities in my life came because somebody watched what I could actually do.