Maria and Robert Small looking back on the highs and challenges of operating a busy transport company that included in their peak years seven prime movers and about 10 trailers and four table-top trucks. Photo: John Thistleton.
One night on the Hume Highway near Mittagong in the 1980s a serial killer knocked on Robert Small’s truck window.
Robert had been driving his truck from Goulburn to Sydney and back twice a day establishing his and his wife Maria’s transport company.
“I was pretty tired at Mittagong and at the Wombeyan Caves turn-off I pulled in, driving past what I thought was just a bit of a party going on,” he said, recounting several young women and a man standing around.
“I bedded Jeremy (his four-year-old son) down, I lay down and would not have been down five minutes when there was knocking on the window,” he said.
Full of malevolence, the man outside his window said: “If you know what’s good for you son, p*** off.”
Robert didn’t ask questions. He left immediately. The intruder remained a mystery for several years until photographs began appearing in the media of Ivan Milat. The road worker had terrorised hitchhikers along the highway and years later was convicted of murdering seven people. Recognising him instantly, Rob realised he and Jeremy had probably narrowly escaped a serious confrontation.
The son of Crookwell dairyman and prolific businessman Doug Small, Robert was driving from his early teenage years and later bought an AB International truck and began carting hay, spuds and groceries.
He married Maria in 1972 and worked for several other people before the couple took up an invitation in 1986 from Ian and Maureen Fife to acquire their transport business in Goulburn.
Moving up a gear, they acquired Fifes’ trucks and a veteran driver, Harry Lawrence who came loaded with valuable industry experience. Maureen Fife taught Maria the administration side of the operation.
They had to learn quickly after a relative of Robert’s, Clarrie Friend who was the Goulburn principal of Farmers and Graziers, suggested the young truckie apply for the NSW Railway wool contract carting bales to Yennora Wool Centre in Sydney. Robert did just that and won the contract.
The business exploded. All of a sudden the Smalls needed more trucks and drivers. “I’ve seen Maria start work at six in the morning and still be there 9, 10, 11 o’clock at night,” Robert said.
“It set us up because we were assured of a load to Sydney and a load back,” he said.
Rob did two trips to Sydney a day. “I used to start work at 1:30 to 2 o’clock in the morning. I had my truck loaded with wool, then down to Sydney to get unloaded first at Yennora.” He would finish about 9 pm, sometimes 11 pm.
Smalls were also delivering regular loads of steel to Canberra and beer from Sydney’s two breweries with little profit margin in the highly competitive market.
Ken Wray, Robert Small and Ray Haynes in front of the Small trucks with the distinctive Big Merino theme. Photo: Darryl Fernance.
While carting wool, the Smalls handed Goulburn an extraordinary marketing coup.
Buying a trailer from Freighter Trailers in Sydney to cart the bales, Robert and the company’s owner Brian Lee designed its special requirements.
“In those days the transport height restriction allowed three wool bales high, so we designed this low loader trailer with tautliner curtains on either side,” Robert said.
Maria said: “Brian said, ‘Why don’t you guys paint the curtains? You have the perfect theme, the Big Merino’. So Robert and I sat down and thought we will put the bale of wool on, the Big Merino and ‘Wool Capital of the World’ on it.”
Engaging Goulburn signwriter Michael Adams, the theme came to life in ocean blue and fire engine red, with the mighty Big Merino gazing out across the countryside. All along the Hume Highway the scene excited motorists and even fellow truck drivers who hooted their appreciation.
In their peak years Smalls employed 17 staff, including for a time their daughter Rachael. Unable to expand at their location on Goulburn’s southern edge, they began looking elsewhere in 1996 when the wool store in Hume Street came onto the market.
In the aftermath of the wool industry restructure that saw the floor price for wool removed and gradual dispersal of the wool stockpile, Elders IXL was keen to unload the massive warehouse, which Robert and Maria bought.
They could load and unload into the late night and employed a multi-skilled mechanic, Les Reid, who solved all the breakdowns overnight to keep the trucks rolling the following day.
But rising business costs eventually enticed Maria and Robert to call it a day and they closed the business in 2000 and sold their huge shed and three-acre site in subsequent years.
