It was a love of working with animals which got the 2024 Rural Rising Star runner-up into the livestock transport game.

Coming in a commendable second in the rankings for the Rural Transport Rising Star Award, presented earlier this year in Toowoomba at the Australian Livestock and Rural Transporters Association annual conference, was 21-year-old Padraig (or ‘Paddy’) Carey.

Paddy works as a HC truck driver for T & M Smyth Transport, a stock carting business in Wagga Wagga. His love of animals began when growing up on his family’s small farm.

A farm boy at heart, Paddy is at home carting livestock to and from the Wagga sale-yards, with the occasional longer journey, and is the designated drover on sale days. It’s a job that suits him perfectly, having grown up around animals on his family’s farm.

“Livestock’s just been my thing over the years,” says Paddy. “We lived on the old farm when I was about five or six. I used to go get all the sheep and draft the rams out, just because I could and then put them all back together and put them back out in the paddock. That was just for fun, it’s always been the same for me.”

Throughout his youth, Paddy says he was also fascinated by trucks and couldn’t wait until he was old enough to get behind the wheel of one. He joined Tim Smyth in the cab for the first time on a job when he was 14 and knew that working in livestock transport was going to be his career path.

Paddy got his medium rigid licence as early as he was able to, and started working for T & M Smyth from then on. He recently upgraded his licence, in January, to HC to start driving semis.

Working in Wagga Wagga and working for Tim Smyth, Paddy is driving a semi, carting sheep, cattle and goats. From his Wagga base, Paddy can travel as far south as Melbourne, and then also north, as far as Roma in Queensland.

“I started working for Tim when I was 14, I was working out in the yards, just helping unloading, loading, droving, just getting everything organised for when the trucks came in,” says Paddy. “I was able to get my license when I was 17, and I was straight into a medium rigid truck and had that for the two and a half years. Then I stepped up to driving the semi.”

Unlike many in the industry, Paddy’s family have no connection with trucks and livestock. His father is a paramedic and his mother is a doctor.

Paddy reckons Smyth’s is a good company to work for, running about six trucks handling sheep, goats and a bit of cattle.

“Obviously you get your bad days where they don’t always do what you need,” says Paddy. “There’s always one mad one, but all that kind of stuff, it’s just part of the job.”

Going forward, the obvious next step is to move up to a B double license with the same boss, and in the future, Paddy says he can see himself taking on road trains in Queensland for a couple of seasons.