great collection of characters and trucks Trevor, really interesting, studied them all, wouldn't mind a sausage! thanks for puting them up, Ron.

Great story and picture, that's what I love about this forum, any more?

Couple I restored, petrol engines, beautiful air horns!!

What a great story Pat, Oz ingenuity at it's finest, the pictures were fascinating, these are yarns that make this forum so great, will follow your progress with great interest, Ron.

Poor Ernie, he didn't want to die

Thousands of these cyclone wire beds were left over from the war and just about everyone used them, we used to carry them outside in the summer as we lived in a Sydney-Williams shed. Jimmy O'Mullane welded a couple of pram wheels on his to make it easier to move, Asleep one night when the lads came home from the pub, they hooked Jim's bed to the towbar of the old Packard and took off down the road with him!

These pictures from a mate Ron Moody who used to drive a Fowler crane loading our trucks, showing how thin the Alice-Darwin road was, when the Military used it they were small trucks with light loads so stood up to their use, we always parked on a hill during the wet season to avoid sinking into the bitumen, I broke a stub axle one night in heavy rain as a break was hard to see, as the trucks were speed limited no damage was done, just dived off the road settling into the mud.

Thanks bugly for clearing that up, I did have scars on my ankles for yonks so that must have been it, maybe lucky!

Thought I would throw this in while I got lucky with the bucket, a 4LK Gardner diesel fitted in a Lagonda car, they made a 6LK for Lagonda to use but it didn't fly.

People were not allowed to swim in the ocean during the wet season in Darwin, the POlice would order you out if seen, this due to creatures coming down from the tropics. Not being the sharpest knife in the drawer and wanting a swim I hopped on my old Indian and rode out to a deserted beach called Casurina on a dirt track a few miles out of town. Swimming and romping in the surf I felt a very painful stinging around my ankles, I ran out on top of the water I think and rode back to town to a chemist who gave me lotion to put on it, told me the pain would go away when the tide returned to the same spot, (he lied!) said it looked like a Portugese man o' war. To take my mind of the pain I went to the pictures at the Star theatre above, the only one in Darwin, halfway through the film it cut out and an anouncement came up that King George had fallen off the perch, we all stood up while they played God save the Queen, I noticed in England they didn't stand up at the end of a movie like we had to, small town as they had 1 theatre and 3 pubs, there was the Don on Cavanagh St, pretty rough, usually a fight going on for entertainment, walk through to Smith St where there was one opposite the Star, little better though when I was drinking with a mate Mike Miller (Mad Mick) the Irishman who would always ask me to hold his glasses and teeth (teet) while he got into it. The creme de la creme was the Darwin Hotel where we mostly drank in the peace and quiet, the main reason was we could park our trucks on the football oval across the street and if we got wasted we could walk to camp, no driving, pictured below, right on the cliff's to get a breeze. Strange how you remember clearly where you were at a major event, I was hauling pipe out of Newcastle to Brisse when I heard Kennedy was shot on the radio.