Brolga Healing Journeys

Before last weekend, I’d never considered a truck to be a thing of beauty.  Sure, I’ve looked on some of the enormous outback road-trains with a sense of awe, or should I say terror, as they loom towards you in an all-engulfing cloud of dust along a rough dirt road.  But the enormous gathering of trucks, old and new, large and small, in Alice Springs for the National Road Transport Hall of Fame re-union changed all that.  I’m now in love with trucks.  I want to be a truck-driver when I grow up!

A gathering of trucks takes place here every year, but every five years heralds a major get-together.  And we were lucky enough to be here for one of those.

I have never seen some many trucks in one place.  The earliest, I think, dated from the 1920s – Vintage Chevrolets and Fords, while at the other end of the scale were the enormous, modern Kenworths and Macks.  In between were Bedfords, Internationals, and many others, from the 40s, 50s and 60s, providing a real trip down memory lane (well, partly at least for me, I’m not that old).

What did unite all the trucks was their immaculate presentation.  It was obvious that many, many hours had gone into the restoration and presentation of the trucks.  Having watched my father restore a vintage car while I was a boy, I have some appreciation of the amount of work involved. The trucks were simply beautiful, sparkling in the sunshine on a late August day.

To give you some idea of the numbers involved, a parade took place along the Stuart Highway from north of town, through the town and continuing south through the Gap to the Hall of Fame.  Apparently it took almost two hours for all the vehicles to pass, at a steady pace.  There were, by all accounts, over 700 vehicles involved, with many having travelled from far and wide across Australia to take part.

People lined the roadway to watch the procession pass.  Many onlookers were well prepared, with deckchairs, tables, even barbeques.  I was able to watch for twenty minutes or so, getting a good hit of diesel fumes in the process, before I had to drag myself off to take Nirbeeja to work.  To get her to work, we had to join the end of the parade for a while, taking the opportunity to wave to the crowd like a couple of frauds (actually, they started the waving, so we joined in with a sense of fun)!  After dropping off Nirbeeja, I had a lovely time wandering among the trucks in the grounds surrounding the National Road Transport Hall of Fame.

The event was just another example of the wonderful range of activities held here in the Alice.

August 2010

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