After a long driving career spanning 43 years on the highway, Dave Sullivan said he had retired five years ago.
But you can never keep a good man with the road transport industry in his blood down, and since then Dave has driven part-time on at least five occasions for various periods. I saw Dave, 73, who works for Melcrest, in the driver’s seat of his Volvo parked at a Townsville roadhouse recently.
“I have brought up cars from Brisbane to drop off in Cairns and am heading to Rockhampton to get some more for Brisbane,” he said.
Dave was highly critical of the Bruce Highway with an emphasis on the 350km Cairns to Townsville stretch.
“There are potholes everywhere and I saw so many cars beside the road with damaged tyres,” he said.
An enthusiastic AFL fan, Dave barracks for the Melbourne Demons. Dave said he only stops at rest areas where he can get a good night’s sleep, but added, “There are not enough of them.”
As for when he will finally call an end to his long and successful career as a driver, Dave could not be certain when the curtain would fall on his long spell behind the wheel.
“I tried to retire, but here I am,” he said.
Dave mentioned that he had appeared in Big Rigs about 20 years ago when I had snapped his pic and yarned to him just north of Townsville.
So, when I got home and did a search of his name on my computer, it revealed it was back in 2004 when he was aged 53. Back then when we met, he had been checking out a minor mechanical problem on a Scania 143H V8 and was preparing to cart watermelons from Charters Towers for the Brisbane markets.
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