Randolph Covich - Life on the Road

If a clairvoyant had told me seven or eight years ago that I would be putting together a book of truck yarns or editing a transport and machinery magazine as a career, Im sure I would have laughed it off, and climbed back into the cab of my truck. However, remembering back, I do recall a time when a mystical-looking family friend told an 11-year-old me that writing would be my calling in life.

Growing up with a truck-driving father, who eventually migrated into an earthmoving and civil construction business, where else would a young person with those influences find themselves but driving trucks and machinery? It was certainly where two of Mum and Dads three kids found themselves, and it was a place we were happy to be.

At least thats how I found things went, and was loving it for the most part, until a left-field opportunity presented itself when I was in my mid-forties; one so foreign to me and my world that I had to phone up a friend to ask him if he knew what an editor did. Fortunately, he did; and as it turned out, apparently I did also.

So a few years after settling in as the editor of a trucking and construction magazine, I was contacted by Penguin Random House New Zealand and asked whether I could help them put together a book of trucking yarns. Funnily enough, I had already been collecting a few stories and ideas during my frequent travels around the country.

The problem was, all of my stories werent quite ready to hit the street, and I felt we needed a broader scope of writing, too. It was for this reason that I decided to bring together a range of writers. A lot of their names will be recognisable. They range from editors and writers for well-known trucking and motoring magazines (including my brother, who writes for an Australian magazine), to a well-known historian, to observers of the industry. The one thing they have in common, though, is their ability to spin a good yarn.

Like any story told to a group of people, the yarn often gets embellished the more it is told. The tales you are about to read are no exception, as I suspect there has been a little colour added here and there to keep your attention. Still, every story has a factual basis, and in some cases they are entirely factual.

In some books I have read, a lot of focus has been on the long-haul trucker, because they drive the big, shiny rigs, and look kind of cool as they cruise along surrounded by acres of gleaming paint and chrome. With this read, however, we have provided a wider range of tales, including those about urban, rural and historical trucking. There will be places and people you may know. I certainly hope so, because these stories are about us. They are about the truckies of New Zealand.

Randolph Covich

Titirangi, 2018

Theres never been a moment of my life that hasnt had a truck in the background, I reckon.

When I was a kid, my dad started a waste-disposal business in Ponsonby, central Auckland. He was an owner-operator, so we had plenty of old trucks around. Well, they werent old then, of course, but he ran all the usual models for that time: Leylands, TK Bedfords, D Series Fords, that sort of thing,

As soon as I could, I got involved in trucking, although I decided to go in on the mechanical side of things rather than driving. I did a diesel apprenticeship with International Harvester in Penrose. This would have been in the early 1980s. It wasnt long before the desire to drive took over, though. I could see being an owner-operator was a pretty good way to make a living, rather than fixing up trucks all the time, so I set a goal to own my own truck.

Before that and in order to get some cash together I went back and worked for Dads company. By this stage he had diversified his operation a bit. He was still doing the waste-collection stuff with his trucks, but he was also supplying jumbo bins and had a pretty decent market-garden operation running, too.

I think I inherited a bit of that desire to diversify. These days with Kukutai Transport we specialise in over-dimension loads; the really big stuff. Most of our work is carting long-run roofing on-site, using specialised Hiab equipment to place it at height. Back when we started doing this type of work, a really long load would be 25 metres, but we routinely go up to 30 metres these days. The bigger the Hiab the better, I reckon.