12
A DRIVING FORCE

Heather Jones, Karratha, Western Australia

The heavy-duty Volvo prime mover rumbles onto a truck repair yard in an industrial estate somewhere in the Pilbara region of the Western Australian Outback. It pulls up with a hiss of brakes as the engine’s throaty roar drops to a pulsating purr. The door creaks open and slams shut. There are footsteps up to the entrance. ‘Morning!’ the driver calls over to a man in orange, diesel-stained overalls who looks as though he’ll be the one in charge. ‘Have you got a jackshaft for a Volvo?’

The mechanic looks up, looks down and then looks up again in almost a parody of a classic double-take. He stares at the driver as if he can hardly believe his eyes. He glances over at the parked truck and then back at the driver, taking in her neat frame, lustrous shoulder-length dark hair and perfectly made-up face. He says nothing. ‘Excuse me,’ she prompts him, sweetly. ‘Do you supply those?’

He blinks, then finally seems to gather his senses. He smiles at her. ‘Are you sure it’s a jackshaft you want?’ he asks patronisingly. ‘The big one or the bubby one?’

She looks at him, disappointed yet unsurprised, then collects herself. ‘The bubby one,’ she answers coldly, ‘in between the diffs.’

Heather Jones has been in this position more times than she cares to remember. She’s been driving trucks for 27 years now and knows their workings intimately. No job with them is too big or too small for her, too heavy or too complex. Despite standing at just 1.67 metres tall, she’s equally at home in a regular truck as in a 100-tonne dump truck or a 50-metre-long road train, and is just as comfortable fixing a fanbelt as she is changing a flat tyre that weighs 80 kilos by the side of the road in 40-degree heat. The work can be tough, but she finds it manageable. Some of the men she meets in the course of her work, rather less so.

Every so often, she simply despairs. ‘I used to get irritated and angry at some of their attitudes,’ she says, shaking her head in disbelief. ‘But I try not to any more. I try to stay calm and just be polite. I’ll think, Poor, sad little man . . . It just amazes me that they’ll treat another human like that, as though they’re absolutely stupid when they so plainly are not. But these days I smile and think, Oh well, another man with issues . . .’

In her time in the business, Heather’s pretty much seen it all, and heard plenty more about why trucking’s no place for a woman. She begs to differ.

At one time, she had the only multi-truck, solely female-owned and -operated company in Australia, running 23 trucks and employing 16 drivers. She’s won countless awards for her business acumen, including being named the Telstra WA Westpac Business Woman of the Year, and on two occasions the Western Australian Road Transport Woman of the Year. She’s also twice reached the finals of the Australian Trucking Association Australian Transport Woman of the Year awards. She’s started from nothing, built up a thriving business from scratch, brought up her two daughters as a single mum, mostly in the cab of a semi-trailer, worked tirelessly to improve the lot of the nation’s truck drivers as one of the industry’s leading advocates, and endured hard times following the global financial crisis.

But after every knockback, she’s picked herself up, climbed back behind the wheel and just kept on trucking. The work may be hard, driving in extreme isolation in blistering heat for long hours in the dirt and red dust of the rugged West Australian Outback, but she wouldn’t have it any other way.

‘She really is a remarkable woman,’ says Ray Pratt, a fellow long-distance truck driver. ‘She’s a dynamo, she never stops. She has such a passion for this industry and, despite all the hardships, she keeps on going. She’s one of the most amazing women I’ve ever met.’

At the age of four, Heather Jones was given a beautiful doll in a box for Christmas from her grandmother. She unwrapped the gift, took the doll out and carefully placed it on the carpet. Then she took the box and pushed it along the ground. ‘Brrrmmm . . . brrrmmm . . .’ she said happily as she crawled beside it, steering it all over the lounge room. ‘Brrrmmm . . . brrrmmm . . .’ She played with that box all afternoon and didn’t give the doll another thought.

‘I guess I was always keen on trucks,’ she says. ‘I’d always liked them. Dad worked in the forestry department, in a pine plantation and mill, so he was always working on heavy machinery. I was a tomboy and I used to hop in the crane with him, or sit on Dad’s lap when he was driving, and I’d often jump into the truck if he had to go and do something. It felt very familiar to me – second nature.’

Heather was brought up in the small dairy farming town of Harvey in south-west Western Australia, 140 kilometres south of Perth. She had a brother, Gavin, two years older, but her parents Connie and Ron had always wanted more than two children even though after Heather’s birth Connie was told she could never have another baby. So instead, the couple decided to foster children. Adoption was difficult in those days, and the procedures for fostering, by comparison, were much less complicated. Heather was delighted; she’d always longed for a sister.

The first one she received was extremely disturbed and only lasted a few weeks with the family. The second had been terribly abused, treated like a dog – caged and fed dog biscuits by her heartless parents. ‘I think these children were the foundation for the person I became,’ says Heather now. ‘Often they were troubled and traumatised and needed a quiet, peaceful environment, so I developed a calm personality that I was to have for the rest of my life. I realised these children needed looking after, so I developed into a very caring person.’

Over the next 14 years, the family took in a total of 57 foster children. To add to the brood, despite the doctor’s prediction, Connie ended up having two more children of her own – two real sisters for Heather, named Terina and Kiara. At the time, five children were being fostered in their house, so they ended up being nine kids altogether. ‘It was fantastic!’ says Heather. ‘I always had a friend and someone to play with. We were never bored. And it was never loud and chaotic. Mum and Dad had a strong work ethic and they were quite disciplined, so it all worked very well.’

In 1971, when Heather was five years old, the family moved to northern Queensland. Her dad had developed Raynaud’s disease in his fingers, a disorder of the blood vessels sometimes caused by vibrating heavy machinery that can destroy the capillaries in the hand, and doctors suggested a warmer climate would be better for him. They went first to Charters Towers, inland from the coast, then to Townsville, and finally to Cairns, all places where he could find work with cranes on construction sites. Two years later, when the work died down, the family returned to Harvey and he went back to his old job. In 1975, they uprooted again and moved north to Port Hedland in the Pilbara region, 615 kilometres south-west of Broome, where he worked with heavy machinery on the docks. For the kids, it was exciting being on the move and in new places so often. Travel and long distances meant little.

Three years later, when it was time for Heather to go to high school, they all went back south to Bunbury, which was known to have a good school and was only 45 kilometres away from their hometown. She was an A-grade student, but she wasn’t really that interested in study. She had a friend who was a stuntman, performing a highwire act and doing turns on wet bikes and motorbikes, and emulating him became her overriding ambition. She left school in Year 10 and the family shifted yet again, back north this time to Karratha, 240 kilometres west of Port Hedland. The next year, she had a bad motorbike accident, damaging her spine, breaking nine bones in her foot and injuring a knee, for which she had two knee reconstruction operations. It sounded the final death knell to her hopes of becoming a stuntwoman; instead she started working as a secretary for a foam insulation company. She was bored to tears.

When she was offered another job as a legal secretary, she jumped at it, thinking it would offer more excitement and challenge. It didn’t take long to realise that wasn’t a good fit, either. The lawyer she was working for often defended paedophiles and Heather found typing up the victim impact statements incredibly distressing, since so many of the foster children she’d grown up with had suffered similar horrors. When the lawyer took on a case defending the father of two of the girls living at Heather’s, she finally quit.

It was the early 1980s, and her parents had recently moved to the iron ore mining town of Wickham, an hour away from Karratha towards Port Hedland. They suggested Heather join them. She did, becoming one of only a handful of single females in town and, as a consequence, extremely popular. There were plenty of jobs there and she kept herself busy working as a secretary for the mining company during the day, and waitressing in the evenings and weekends at the restaurant of a holiday resort named Port Samson, nine kilometres away.

The mines all around the Pilbara at that time were going through a difficult period, with an aggressive industrial relations culture and constant conflicts with the powerful unions, and were being plagued by frequent strike action. At one, there were almost 160 strikes in a single year, over issues as minor as the range of ice-cream flavours available in the canteen. The companies resorted to desperate measures to stay open. During one strike, with Heather employed as a secretary, she was redeployed to drive 100-tonne dump trucks to help keep the mine’s operations going. She found she loved the work and, when the strikes were over, resigned from her secretarial position and stayed on as a driver. ‘It was so much better being out driving, than sitting in an office getting stressed over paperwork,’ she says. ‘I’ve always been a bit of a workaholic and I earnt nearly double the money, driving. The conditions were great. You had a generous housing allowance, clothes, boots, a company bus to take us to work . . . It was fantastic!’

It wasn’t long before Heather had saved enough to start buying a house as an investment in Perth, with her finances bolstered by the insurance payout she’d received as a result of the injuries sustained in the motorbike accident, which were so bad that doctors had said she would never be able to have children.

Busy and happy, Heather proved a magnet for men, and was soon snapped up by one of her admiring colleagues. In 1987, at the age of 22, she married an electrical engineer from the mine. Just like her mum before her, against the odds, she then fell pregnant. Their first daughter, Kersti, was born in 1988 and their second, Chelsea, in 1989. ‘I did wonder if I should pay the insurance money back,’ says Heather. ‘But they were both very pleasant surprises!’

The couple set up an electrical repair business back in Karratha and Heather did all the paperwork, looked after the children, starting to home-school them, and occasionally still drove trucks to supplement the family income. The marriage wasn’t, however, a happy one. Married twice before, her husband could be moody and unpredictable, and Heather, previously happy-go-lucky and upbeat, found herself becoming nervous and completely drained of confidence. On the outside, she tried to keep up the pretence that all was well, but at home, she felt she’d become a person she no long recognised. So when one night in 1993 her husband didn’t come home from work and she saw all his clothes were gone from the wardrobe and his tools from the garage, in some ways it felt an enormous relief. But it was hard in others. Their daughters were aged just four and five, they’d just signed up for a loan together for the business, they had mortgage repayments and, without an electrician, their company could no longer continue. Customers from all over the Pilbara started ringing to complain they hadn’t received their electrical goods back. ‘I used to call him the dearly departed one,’ says Heather. ‘He just upped and departed . . .’

Desperate to keep it all together, Heather approached one of the businesses her husband had done work for, and asked if they had any jobs. They had a part-time opening in their warehouse, and another for someone to deliver heavy machinery all around the Outback. She took both and then started working out how she could juggle work with raising two young children. She came up with an unusual solution: her daughters would travel with her on her delivery runs, and she’d continue with their home-schooling in the cab of the trucks. Her boss said he was fine with that, as long as the children were safe, kept out of sight and never, ever got out of the truck on an industrial site.

And so began one of the busiest, and most unconventional, periods of Heather’s life.

Heather Jones behind the wheel.

Heather is familiar with the ragged terrain of the Pilbara region in Western Australia. (Photo by Sue Williams)

Everyone quickly adapted to the new routine. Whenever there was a road trip, six-year-old Kersti would make the sandwiches, with five-year-old Chelsea ‘helping’, and the three would pack all their provisions, including homemade biscuits, for the days ahead. Then they’d all climb aboard the truck and head off to whatever remote spot in Outback Western Australia they’d be delivering to, whether a mine, a port, a transport hub or a building site.

Along the way, they’d spend their time doing lessons or talking about the animals, birds and scenery they passed, or having sing-alongs. They’d have regular rest stops and often have a chat with people they met. It would regularly take two to three days to drive to their destination and then the trio would either drive back or, if they’d actually been driving a vehicle that had been ordered for delivery, Heather would swap the airfare she’d been given for three bus tickets home.

‘Travelling together in the truck was actually a really fantastic opportunity,’ says Heather now. ‘We used to have tapes, we would sing the times tables and listen to stories and they’d look at story books and we’d talk. I actually feel quite blessed because parents normally don’t have that kind of time with their children because school takes them away, and then they’ve got chores or their school homework when they get home. So by the end, maybe you only have 20 minutes with your children, whereas I was with mine, 24/7.

‘Usually, if you’re working as a single parent you have to put your children in day care and pay a huge proportion of the money you’re earning to be able to do that. Not that I’m criticising anyone for putting kids in day care. Many people just don’t have the option. But for me, it was great being able to bring up my daughters, rather than leaving it to someone else.’

Not all of Heather’s family and friends were convinced it was a good idea at first, and a number tried to change her mind. Some of them insisted that home-schooling didn’t give children the best start and that it would be far better for them to be in school, socialising with others. ‘But my kids were exposed to so many characters in the industry,’ argues Heather. ‘They were constantly meeting people from all different walks of life. Everyone wants to talk to a female with two kiddies in her truck: tourists, backpackers, other drivers, everyone. Those girls would have been exposed to more interesting and educational experiences in their first ten years than most people would encounter in a lifetime.’

Looking back, her daughters Kersti and Chelsea both agree. ‘It was great fun and I do think we learnt a lot more with Mum than we would have done at school,’ says Kersti. ‘We got used to travelling in the trucks pretty quickly. It became normal to us; it was just what we did. It meant we could really concentrate on our schoolwork, and Mum was a great teacher, although we used to complain at the time she was too strict. A lot of people ask us now if we think we missed out on things, and our answer is always the same: “No way!” We experienced so much more, grew up faster and became a lot more mature. When we did later go to school, we learnt much less as the teacher was always busy looking after the naughty kids. In the truck, we had Mum’s undivided attention.’

In their days back home, Heather would work at the warehouse and also had a job clearing sanitary bins in shopping centres and schools to earn enough money to live and pay off the debts she’d been left with. Her husband did call by, but only three months later. When he left, so did one of the vehicles she’d left parked outside. Two days later, it was recovered in the airport car park. Apparently he’d left for work in East Timor.

By then, Heather and the children had moved to a house her mum and dad had in Karratha, which she agreed to paint in lieu of paying the rent. ‘So there I was, home-schooling my children, holding down three jobs and painting a house!’ Heather laughs. ‘It would have been a darn sight easier to just pay rent! But I was working horrific hours because I knew it was up to me to educate, clothe, feed and house these two beautiful girls and, with a normal job, I knew I’d never get to see them. Looking back now, I think, How on earth did I do it? But I was super-organised, and that was my life – my girls and my work – and I didn’t have any other distractions.’

Heather has rarely cried at setbacks in her life. But in 2003 she found herself sitting at the wheel of her car, sobbing as if her heart would break. She just couldn’t help it. After overcoming so many hurdles, she felt as though she’d finally hit a brick wall, and simply couldn’t see any way around it.

In 1994, she’d moved down to Perth. She hadn’t wanted to leave the Outback and always saw herself as a country girl, but she thought it was finally time for her daughters to go to school, and for her not to spend every waking hour working. She had the house she’d bought there previously, so decided to go south and see how things would work out in a new setting. A neighbour’s brother owned a transport company, so she did some work for him, as well as running trucks the 3200 kilometres up to Kununurra in the Kimberley for other people in the business.

Kersti and Chelsea started school, and found they didn’t much like it. At first, they begged their mum to drop them off around the corner from the school gates so no one would see them arriving in an eight-wheel tipper. ‘We were pretty embarrassed and thought everyone would tease us for not being like the other kids with a mum who dropped them off in a car,’ says Kersti. ‘That worked for a while, but one day Mum had to drop us at the front of the school. We both cringed, but all the boys came running up and were so impressed and started asking us questions. It turned out they all thought we were so cool travelling in a truck, and having a mum who was a truck driver.’

Heather had moved on to work for another contractor who, happily, would also allow her to take her daughters in the truck during their school holidays and the periods the girls persuaded her to allow them to return to home-schooling. It was tricky – a job could change 15 times in one day and you never knew in advance where you were going to – but they adapted, and it worked well for them. On mine sites, she’d close the curtains to the back section and the girls would stay as quiet as mice, playing board games, so no one would know they were there. She worked hard for her boss and while he had only three trucks when she started, by 2004, he had six.

‘That was a very valuable experience for me,’ she says. ‘I could see so many ways in which the job wasn’t done right, and so many ways I could improve things. One day, I was talking about it to my sister Terina and she said I should just start my own company. Why not have a truck company run by a woman? I thought that was a damn good idea! If the men didn’t like it, I could employ other women. I thought, Yes, I can change everyone’s mindset. I can do my own thing.’

She hadn’t taken into account the attitudes of banks, however. Time after time, her application to mortgage her house to buy a truck was knocked back. The rejections ranged from blunt refusals – single mums simply didn’t do things like that – to imposing impossible conditions. It was one particularly galling rejection that proved the final blow that had left her sitting in her car, weeping with frustration and dismay.

She’d written business plans and had graphs of her projected income drawn up. She had a detailed CV showing how many years of experience she had in the transport industry, with references from people she’d worked for in the past. In an industry where contracts were always word of mouth, with nothing written on paper, she’d even managed to have some offers written down – precious pieces of paper she later decided to frame, they were so rare. One contract was for a new run for an astounding ten trucks over four years.

Yet even as one bank seemed to be softening in the face of that pledge, the manager had called her in and asked her to write a list of all her competitors. ‘My competitors?’ she asked him, stunned. ‘That would be everyone in Australia who owns a truck!’ He smiled and spoke to her as if to a child. ‘Yes, dear,’ he replied. ‘Now go away and make me that list.’

Heather was completely stumped. ‘I only ever cry when someone dies,’ she says. ‘But I came out of that bank and bawled my eyes out. I thought, How the bloody hell am I going to do this? Still, I went to the last bank. I didn’t hold out much hope, but the man there said I couldn’t take out a mortgage for my house for a business but . . . I could take out a mortgage on my house for ‘home improvements’. So then I got my money within about 48 hours and bought my first truck and started my business in 2004. It was a great feeling.’

Everything went well from day one for Heather’s new venture, Success Transport. She found she rarely had to advertise for drivers – they came to her. Very soon, she had a waiting list. Many of them, like her, were women drivers, who’d worked for years in the traditionally macho industry, enduring years of discrimination. By the same token, a number of men vowed they’d never work for a female boss. She, in turn, was happy not to have them.

‘My goal was to provide an educational, nurturing environment for women to learn how to drive trucks because, believe me, male chauvinism is alive and well in this industry,’ she says. ‘The things said and done to females! Most people would be shocked. I’ve been accused of stealing men’s jobs, been passed over for work when the bosses realised I was a woman and some men refused to speak to me. And as for a female managing a transport company, some men viewed that as almost a crime. I’d sometimes accompany a new male driver on a job and, even though people knew who I was, they’d direct all their questions to him, rather than to me. Male employees would also constantly question what I told them. I’d give them their instructions and they’d ask, “Are you sure?” That’s something they’d never say to a male boss!’

As a result, she’d go out of her way to employ women drivers, especially since they often weren’t given a fair go elsewhere. She found many of them keen, conscientious, multi-skilled, consistent, willing to talk about any problems, gentler on the gears and brakes of their vehicles, and often more in-tune with what they were driving. They might tell her there was a noise in the engine that hadn’t been there the day before, whereas men, in her experience, might simply turn the radio up a bit louder. That way, the truck could go straight into the mechanic before anything major went wrong.

‘Also, they were in a big truck already, so they didn’t have to go round a corner at 300 miles per hour,’ says Heather, ‘or want to overload floats by 50 tonnes like tough men. And they were really good with the gear and the clients. One time it was raining and one of my female drivers in the tipper truck in front of me got bogged in a sand paddock. The guys on the block were furious she’d got stuck. But she was pretty cute and when they saw her, it was all, “Oh love, how can we help?” With a man, it would have been, “Call yourself a truck driver!”’

More women in the transport industry also helped create marginally more of a balance in the working environment. Heather often found that having a woman present improved the atmosphere markedly. The men would swear less, not act as aggressively and become a great deal more civil and well behaved. ‘In a place like Karratha, there were 200 men to one female, which is a pretty horrific statistic. It’s not normal,’ says Heather. ‘So you put a couple of women in the environment – the right sort of women – and the men tend to calm down and start behaving themselves and go out of their way to show the female what to do and how to do it, and that’s all good.’

She also tried to take a lead in the industry in employing people with disabilities or drivers who’d been injured in work accidents, while participating in a government work-training scheme to encourage others into the industry.

In addition, Heather began another crusade: to help improve the industry generally for truck drivers.

Truck driving is the most dangerous industry in Australia – and by a factor of at least 10, according to the federal government. Hundreds of people are killed in truck crashes every year and thousands more are injured.

The Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, Anthony Albanese, later to become deputy to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, said that those tragic deaths also cost the country about $2 billion per year.

Tony Sheldon, the President of the Transport Workers Union, describes the situation bluntly. ‘Every day across Australia, truck drivers and transport companies are forced to meet unrealistic demands and impossible deadlines set by major clients, no matter what,’ he says. ‘These pressures and demands have made driving a truck the most dangerous job you can do in Australia, with a death rate that is 11 times the industrial average.’

As well as the actual dangers, deaths and injuries, however, there’s also the huge problem of the many thousands of drivers suffering stress and post-traumatic stress disorders. With over 85 per cent of drivers working as owner-operators or working for very small firms, there’s also the persistent difficulty of actually getting paid for work done. It’s all so complex that there have been countless parliamentary inquiries over the last 10 years into the industry and those who serve it.

Still, about 30 per cent of owner-drivers are paid below the award rate, which means that they are more likely to compromise on costly repairs and maintenance. Time is another factor. A recent survey of drivers in the Coles supply chain, for example, saw 40 per cent admitting they’ve had to delay vehicle maintenance because of economic pressures from clients.

Drivers all over Australia often feel compelled to work excessive hours and drive huge distances, breaking speed limits, to meet impossible deadlines. Many, as a result, drive for long periods overnight, can be ordered to carry illegal oversized loads, and resort to drugs to keep going. A number are also told to load their own vehicles, a process that can take around six hours, without pay, while waiting times to load or unload can total up to 10 hours, again unpaid. Many also fiddle their speed limiters, or interfere with their truck’s gearing ratio, in order to satisfy the demands on them.

The results make tragic reading. Despite accounting for only 2.5 per cent of all vehicle registrations, heavy trucks drive 7.5 per cent of all kilometres travelled and are involved in 15 per cent of all fatal crashes, with speed, drugs, alcohol and fatigue often to blame. One industry study has found that the drivers most likely to operate dangerously are the newest to the industry, and paid the least. Other research has discovered that stimulant drug use is two to three times more likely for drivers paid by results.

For Heather, the issues have been clear for years: over-long hours; unrealistic delivery times; a lack of regulation on those contracting owner-drivers and transport companies; the lack of rest areas, decent facilities and food at parking bays; health issues like stress, obesity and diabetes; and a popular culture that vilifies drivers.

Despite facing such tough challenges, truck drivers have never been properly understood by the general public, she believes. Although they make up the backbone of our country, driving the length and breadth of it to deliver food and drink, manufacturing equipment, vehicles and every type of raw material and finished goods we need to keep going, they’re still never appreciated.

In the US, truckers are revered, with films about them, songs and TV shows. In Australia, however, Heather feels it’s quite the opposite and they’re often blamed for problems even when they’re not at fault. Whenever there’s a collision involving a truck and a car, it’s usually reported as a truck hitting a car, even if the car driver was later found to have a high blood-alcohol reading and maybe veered into the path of an oncoming truck. A number of car drivers are also known to commit suicide every year by driving into trucks.

‘Back when I started driving, whenever you pulled into a cafe, the boys would sit down and come and join you to have a meal, and talk over the same horrific work conditions,’ Heather says. ‘Those same issues would come up again and again. For instance, what other occupation in the world can you be legally employed in, and not have showers, toilets and food? Shell partnered with Coles and closed down most of the restaurants and facilities for truck drivers at all their outlets throughout Australia, even though the number of truck movements on the roads have doubled every 10 years to handle the increase in freight. So more and more of us are in the truck for seven days and nights, and we can’t go without a shower that long when we’re working and changing tyres, and we need to eat a meal every night. It’s impossible to pack enough food for a week ahead, and in a road train, it’s not like you can just pull up in the high street and go into a supermarket.

‘But no one was presenting our arguments to parliament. Whenever there’s a truck issue in the media, who do they interview? A fuzzy-haired, tattooed, dirty-shirted, foul-mouthed truck driver. Why? I know truck drivers who’ve been doctors or engineers or business people . . . but they’re never the ones the press talk to. So I started phoning people in authority and talking to them and emailing MPs. I became a person they’d see as someone who’d harass them until the issues were addressed. More and more people agreed to have meetings with me, and finally it felt we were getting some progress.’

One of those people was Alyssa Hayden, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Deputy Premier in the Western Australian legislative council. She first encountered Heather at a transport forum and was taken aback at how passionate she was about the industry. Heather invited Alyssa to accompany her on her truck on a five-day trip to experience conditions first-hand. Alyssa accepted. ‘I was pretty bloody impressed by her, to be honest,’ Alyssa says. ‘I was blown away by her determination. She raised two daughters as a single mum, mortgaged her house to buy her first truck and was now making great headway in a male-dominated industry. Her courage and focus were amazing.’

Alyssa’s regard for Heather only grew during their trip when the pair had to tiptoe through a group of Gypsy Joker bikies sleeping outside the women’s toilet at one truck stop, with the gang members threatening to break in to help the politician wash. ‘Heather came with me, and helped me there, and handled them beautifully,’ says Alyssa. ‘You feel vulnerable in a bathroom with a door that doesn’t shut, but with Heather guarding the door, I knew I’d be OK!’

Heather raised the issues at every opportunity too, including with other drivers within range of her CB radio, to demonstrate the strength of feeling. ‘She reminded me constantly what to focus on,’ Alyssa says. ‘She’s so popular and is such an incredible advocate for the industry.’ Through their working relationship, much was done to improve rest areas for truckies in WA and to provide toilets and showers in a number of bays.

Heather’s profile in the industry was growing exponentially. By this time, newspapers, radio and TV began to interview her regularly on any story involving truck drivers and she used every opportunity to fight their corner. She wanted the public to be better educated about truck drivers and road safety too, and to understand about stopping distances and the importance of making allowances for their weight and speed. The best investment any regular car driver embarking on a long Outback journey could ever make, she said, was the purchase of the $40 hand-held radio, so they could actually ask truck drivers when it was safe to pass them, or inquire about driving conditions ahead.

She also started working towards a long-cherished ambition of her own. Travelling around each state to talk to roads departments, she’d been pushing for each of them to provide a large acreage site for a complex to be built for truckies, containing a motel, a restaurant serving healthy food, a laundromat and internet cafe. In Western Australia, she kept a careful eye out constantly for a suitable area.

In the meantime, her own business was booming and, within two years, she had 16 drivers and 23 trucks on the road. Her daughters both worked in the business and they ran deliveries for all industries, from mining and farming to shipping. The awards started coming too, including a WA Business News 40under40 Award, to mark the state’s top 40 entrepreneurs under 40 years of age, as well as those various ‘woman of the year’ titles.

But still one of her proudest achievements was helping push an Act through the Western Australian Parliament that would offer owner-drivers assistance in extracting their money from defaulting companies.

Unfortunately, it was passed just a year too late for her.

Everything for Heather Jones started to come crashing down in 2008.

The GFC hit her business hard, and all the other companies who’d hired her services. Almost overnight, it became harder and harder to get paid for work she’d done, which made it more and more difficult to pay her own bills. The industry became steadily more competitive, with big companies undercutting the rates of the smaller ones, including Heather’s. Then came the rows over the mining tax, which created uncertainty in the Western Australian resources sector, the main source of so much of the transport industry’s business, and meant contracts were delayed and payments deferred.

On the plus side, however, Heather finally found a site she thought would be perfect for her dream to build that complex for truck drivers. ‘I thought it could be a home away from home for them,’ she says. ‘It could be a place where drivers could go and stay and feel comfortable, wash their clothes, get a haircut, get a health check. It could be a one-stop shop for all their needs, with an insurance office, a gym and maybe even a lap pool, because there can be so much stress on your body from sitting in a truck all day.’ She had backers and sponsors and everything was going well until the owners of the land changed their mind and decided to put it out for tender. All the big companies then came in to compete for it – and Heather’s consortium couldn’t match the sums they were offering.

Instead, she found a smaller piece of land in another area and started making all the arrangements. She spent $340 000 on commissioning plans, environmental studies and drawing up planning applications and, with everything looking promising, laid out $2.5 million for it, together with a couple of partners. After lengthy negotiations, however, the local council suddenly backed off and decided not to approve its change of use after all. ‘So this place I bought so our truck drivers would have somewhere to go was an absolute white elephant,’ she says. ‘It was absolutely devastating. I was gutted. For 20 years my girls and I had worked so hard to achieve something for other people as well, not just for ourselves, and to have it all go so horribly wrong through no fault of our own . . . I was absolutely gut-wrenched.’

With debts mounting, other companies not paying her invoices, and the crumbling demand for transport services, she spent months trying to balance the books. ‘You just needed that $20 000 or $50 000 then you could pay all your commitments and buy more fuel to earn more money,’ she says. ‘But I had to scale down the company, sell trucks, lay off drivers and then start trying to pay off the debts in earnest.’

In a bid to raise more money, she strata-ed her house in Perth and sold one side of it to her brother, and then started driving trucks again for other companies. All she did for the next year was drive, sleep, eat, and drive again. It was the only way she could see out of her quandary.

A friend of hers, Steve Post, a risk surveyor with National Transport Insurance, says most people in her position may have taken the easy way out. ‘Many people would have just declared bankruptcy and then started another company and carried on where they left off,’ he says. ‘But not Heather. She wanted to fight her way out of it. She just worked really, really hard to pay back her debts and get back in front. She never throws in the towel. She just rolls up her sleeves, works 80 hours a week, and gets on with it. She’s an incredible woman. It was typical of Heather, though, that she’d worry about other people’s problems, when they were pretty insignificant compared to hers!’

For Heather, it became a huge life lesson. She had known tough times before, but nothing compared to this. ‘I’ve always been able to pull things out of a hat when I needed to, and I’m a pretty strong person,’ she says. ‘But when you’re looking down the barrel and you can’t see anything but a bullet . . . you really do think, What can I do next?

‘I can see, looking back now, why banks are so horrified by the thought of lending money for trucks. You can start a transport company and lose everything you own, your house, everything, because in the transport industry there are so many rogues who just don’t pay. You do all this work, all your costs are upfront, all your payments, all your fuel, all your tyres, all your wages – and at the end of the month when you expect your cheque it never comes!’

Heather Jones is doing what she loves most in the world: thundering through the Pilbara at the wheel of a massive road train, a smile on her face as she powers past the burnt ochre gorges, scattered with wildflowers.

Her nails are manicured and polished, her hair straightener is stored in the back, and she has a pair of high-heeled shoes to change into later. But while she likes to express her femininity, the gently spoken woman never lets that get in the way of doing her job as well as she can. Putting up a full set of gates on the road train – with five gates to each side of the three 45-foot trailers to hold the load in – and then chaining and strapping it down has this morning left her soaked in sweat and it’ll be at least another 12 hours until she can have a shower, if she’s lucky. But she doesn’t mind. She has a foil packet of ready-to-go curry in her bag, enough water to keep her going for a week, and a clear conscience. Based in Karratha once more, she’s managed to pay off most of her debts, she still has one truck left and she’s back driving for herself.

‘She’s a bugger of a lady,’ says Wally Campbell, the owner of a heavy haulage transport company in Perth for whom she once worked. ‘She works bloody hard and she’s always on a big crusade to help other people. I’ve got a hell of a lot of respect for her. She has very high morals.’

Things are now settling down after a turbulent few years. Her daughter Kersti, now aged 25, is a trained beauty therapist and working as an office manager, while Chelsea, 24, is a part-time model and works in a Perth boutique. ‘We’re all very, very close,’ says Kersti. ‘We’re both really proud of our mum. She’s faced some tough times, but she’s always come through. Other women might have given up and moped around and felt sorry for themselves when they had setbacks, but she’s always managed to move on – without ever becoming bitter – and do her best both for us and for others who’ve needed a helping hand.’

There are many who’ve benefitted from her efforts. Lyndal Denny, a woman who once campaigned against ‘aggressive’ truckies through her CoastToCoast100 organisation, was so impressed by Heather and her arguments on behalf of the drivers, she took her licence to drive a heavy rigid vehicle, upgraded it to road train status and got a job as a truck driver herself. She’s now working with Heather on a new road safety campaign. Lyndal says she will forever be grateful to Heather. ‘She took the time to come and visit me, to sit down, to talk rationally, to educate,’ she says. ‘We pondered together the possibility of finding a way to build a bridge between motorists and truck drivers with a view to reducing the road toll, changing all driver attitudes and stopping the carnage. She’s a woman not afraid to stand up for her industry, looking to save lives and prepared to come together with others coming from alternative perspectives. She is truly an inspiration to women everywhere,’ she says.

Heather’s mum, Connie, has also joined the industry. At 60 years old, she found herself at a loose end after her 37-year marriage finally broke down, and came to stay with Heather, who put her to work driving the pilot vehicles that precede over-sized trucks. She’s now embraced it as a whole new lease on life and now, at 70, is busy travelling all over Australia in her new career. In the meantime, Heather’s constantly being visited by all manner of truckies, calling in to say thanks for her efforts at improving the industry.

‘Sometimes difficult things can happen to you in life, but it’s how you get through them that defines you as a person,’ says Heather, now aged 47. ‘I’ve woken up to some of the values my parents taught me all those years ago. They used to say, “Just be happy with what you’ve got.” These days I may only drive one truck, but I love it, and do I really need any more? I look out through the windscreen and I can see the world out there, and a stunning place it is, too.

‘And there are all these beautiful people who are out there too, on the road seven days a week for the community. Without them, there’d be no mines, no food, no roads, no houses, no clothes. You need trucks to survive in this world, especially here in the Outback, and we’re all so much richer for them.’