Ian Porter was just 17 when his cousin introduced him to interstate haulage – and has now spent 60 years in the transport sector.
But he’s decided that’s now the time to take a step back.
Ian currently works as a Lowes Petroleum driver trainer. As he heads into semi retirement, he reflected back on the early days of his career.
As Ian tells it, there was no real training, instead the newest bloke working for the company would be in charge of training the new guy.
“So, you had two people in a vehicle who both had no idea what they were doing,” Ian laughed. “It was all good fun for them. There were no protocols and virtually no rules and regulations.
“It was just ‘out you go’ and if it worked, it worked and if it didn’t work – well it didn’t work.
“It went from a situation where you basically taught yourself. Preservation naturally is on everyone’s minds, but what we did back in older days compared with what is required now by law, and expected by the transport sector, is entirely different.”
Of his six decades in the game, Ian has spent around 50 years working in the fuel industry.
He says he’s loved his time at Lowes Petroleum where “everyone knows everyone, you’re not just a number in the bunch”.
“They have been a marvellous mob to work with,” he revealed. “It is corporate but still family and that’s what I love. Whether you are in depot-land or on the road or even the owners, everyone knows each other.”
As Ian looked back on his career, he said he’s also seen huge leaps in truck technology. With no air-conditioning or heating, he says it was quite common, in his era, for truck drivers to suffer frostbite driving in freezing conditions one week, then nearly passing out from heat stroke, from high temperatures the next.
Those conditions caused him great angst in the early days, especially when he was working for Tropical Fruit Interstate and they became the first transport company taking pineapples from the Sunshine Coast to the Melbourne Markets by road.
“It was a real worry when we then started transporting beans as they were packed in hessian bags, and you’d always worry you’d be delivering frozen beans,” he laughed. “Today’s vehicles virtually drive themselves. The rattlers I used to drive were fuel guzzlers and incredibly rough. Today, the systems of control, the braking systems are all amazing.”
He says his biggest take home in training drivers is around safety and compliance: “I tell them to stick to the rules and regulations: don’t be creative – pretty simple rules to live by.”
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