Wheel Tracks

In Outback Australia

The story of the first truck transport in the outback north west of Western Australia, whose drivers took to the tracks just after World War I when camel teams were the major means of transport, makes fas

cinating and unusual reading.

IN Wheel Tracks, W. W. Ammon, one of the pioneers, reveals a fine gift for observing nature and his fel low man as he relates epic journeys through above-century heat in the days when the internal combustion engine needed a lot of encouragement to keep it going.

His fellow men included such characters as Gus the Swede, Terrible Bill Cridland, Brumby Pete and The Musical Bogger.

In those days a driver was expected to stay behind the wheel for 18 hours a day, sometimes for days on end, dig his truck out of bogs, unloading by himself the 3 cwt. bales of wool and reloading before travelling only a few yards to bog and begin again.

Mechanical repairs, swimming flooded rivers, and searching for san dalwood stands to provide loads, were all included in the flat rate of 3d per mile travelled, with a bonus of 1/for each tyre-destroying stump

grubbed out of the track.

The toll that the north-west took of its pioneers is sensitively chroni cled in Ammon’s account of the death of Gus the Swede, of whom he says, “I saw the drought kill Gus the Swede as surely as if it was some uncon trollable element that had held the gun to his head.”

The Swede is trampled to death by a mob of thirst-crazed cattle, and: “Deserted, his shack soon fell into dis repair. The hessian rotted and ripped away in the wind; the door, left un latched, fell off one hinge to hang drunkenly for a year or so from the mulga framework. By that time the rains had come and the grass grew right up to the door where it bloomed, seeded, and dried. Lonesome and dreary the shack stood by the roadside, the last, forlorn crumbling relic of a strong man’s dreams.”

But tragedy, back-breaking work and long hours did not dim the author’s sense of humour. In an ac count of a visit to a bush cafe, where the choice of lunch lay between goat and galah, with dry bread, he asked the woman for pickles.

“Pickles!” she grunted and flounced out the back again, where we heard her shout, “Hey Mick! Dig out that bottle of pickles, will you? There’s a bastard in here thinks it’s Christmas!”

Rob W.

(WHEEL TRACKS; Angus & Robertson. $3.50.)