Mail for the Back of Beyond

Description

This is the story of the motor truck pioneers who contributed as much to Australia’s transport history as the mail coaches, riverboats and railways.
Unlike the romance associated with the mail runs of Cobb & Co., the task of the early mail truck drivers in outback areas was lonely and monotonous, at times dangerous.
Making a clutch plate from the base of a 44-gallon drum in the desert … trapped in mud bogs for nearly a fortnight … digging trucks out of sand drifts in 50°C heat … twenty-four hours huddled in a truck cab waiting for sand and dust storms to abate … unloading freight and mail into boats to cross flooded rivers … charging over sandhills after getting up speed by racing around a claypan … these and other experiences were shrugged off by the early mail drivers as ‘just part of the job.’
John Maddock knows trucks and the men who handle them. He steps back in time from the job he was doing, writing about the road transport industry of today, to relate some ofthe experiences, the courage and ingenuity of the men who in the 1930s took their vehicles over unmarked bush tracks to some of the loneliest places in Australia.
The author, who was editor of the national publication Truck & Bus Transportation for 26 years, has written this book based on interviews with the people who were
involved in carrying mails and supplies to the remote, isolated stations and settlements in the arid Corner Country in the north-east of South Australia, and who carted their wool, wheat and livestock in all seasons and in all conditions.

Written by John Maddock, a past editor of Truck and Bus magazine, it is an easy to read book about the mail runs in the corner country and about Harry Ding’s (H.E. Ding of Yunta South Australia) and trucks which contributed so much to those living in isolated areas of Australia in the 1930’s. This book and “Thirty Years with Men” compliments one another.