Vale: Terence Joseph Moss 1941-2016

Terence Joseph Moss

We buried my dad today. Dad had been battling for a long time and finally gave up the fight a few days ago. Now this wasn't totally unexpected as for the last few years of his life he'd been hooked up to an oxygen machine 24/7. Still knowing it was going to happen and it actually happening are two different things, we got an email from my sister to tell us that he had passed away a few hours into a three day sea journey between Port Villa and Brisbane so there wasn't a lot I could do, which unfortunately meant that my mum and my sister had to deal with a lot of things on their own.

Dad was born in 1941 in Gippsland in southern Victoria before moving to Rochester in northern Victoria in his mid teens, from what I could tell his early life was largely typical of the time, football, cars, hanging out with his mates and generally raising hell until the local coppers would kick him up the arse and tell him to pull his head in a bit. Dad was always a bit of a battler, but I mean that in a good way as he was an honest blue collar worker, there were no airs and graces with my old man (well that's how I referred to him so that's what I'm going to use here). After finishing Tech School dad started an apprenticeship as a motor mechanic and things were going well until one day in thick fog he had an altercation with train, coming off second best he was in a coma for over a week and wasn't expected to live. Battling through though he regained consciousness and then had to endure months of rehab before eventually being allowed home. His bad luck didn't stop there though, once back at work he got his hand caught in a grinder which severed all the fingers and half the thumb on his right hand. Picking up the severed fingers he drove to hospital but unfortunately the doctors couldn't save his fingers and his hand was sown to his abdomen to allow the skin to grow back.

It was around this time that he married my mum and it was also around his time that he decided on a career change that would shape his life for many years to come. With only one hand with fingers and a full thumb it was obviously hard trying to work as a mechanic so the old man decided to try his luck with trucks. About this time I came on the scene and a couple of years later my sister arrived and the family was complete. My overriding recollections of that time almost inevitably involve trucks, my earliest memory of my dad involve him giving me a piece of paper to colour in to get my mind off the drop as we descended the old road down Mt Lofty into Adelaide. Growing up there was always another adventure on the horizon with dad in the truck.

Truck driving was a hard life, particularly back in those days. The highways were rough, the trucks hot, rough and noisy and the days away from home were long, but that was dads world. We didn't get to spend a lot of time together until the school holidays rolled around and then we were together day and night. Now I'm not looking back at this through rose coloured glasses, with dad being away so much I grew up quick as I had to deal with some hard times at home, and I think not having had the old man around too much when I was young is probably the reason that I seem to get on better with females than males for most of my life. Even when we were together travelling Australia in trucks it wasn't exactly parenting 101, there were nights spent on my own, wandering around various dodgy districts in different cities while dad was with his mates having a drink. There were days of really hard work as I helped load and unload more trucks than I can remember (it was a different era when it came to OH+S laws), but at least I could crawl into the bunk after all the sweat and hard work, dad would inevitably have to drive all night to the next city where we'd do it all over again.

Apart from the truck driving dad was very handy on the tools, he made us numerous trailers over the years, in my later years would help me and my mates changing clutches, diffs and all sort of stuff as we tinkered with our hot cars.

Instead of being exposed to alcohol and drugs in my teenage years I was already street smart after having seen and experienced the various vices on numerous trips with the old man, now that might not sound exactly politically correct now days but it has served me well over the years. There were numerous other character building occasions over the years I spent travelling with dad, bogged on the Silver City Highway in the desert with twenty tonnes of methanol in the tanker, after rain turned the red dirt to mud. Bogged in the sand of the Cobbler Desert (back when the Strezlecki Track was actually a track), once again with twenty tonne of methanol on, only this time it was leaking. The methanol was for the new Santos pipelines that was being built, the ones that now supply natural gas from the Moomba gas fields to Sydney and Adelaide. There were other big nation changing projects that dad was involved in too, including driving fully loaded semi trailers of cement up through the mountains to the new Thomson River Dam, the snow covered mountain tracks in complete contrast to the dusty desert roads.

We did occasionally spend a day without trucks, this was on a day out to the Royal Melbourne Show.

We also had the odd normal holiday, this was my first cruise.

I spent a bit of time with dad over the years either duck shooting or shooting rabbits on relative's farms.

It wasn't always big projects that dad was involved in though, most of the time it was run of the mill stuff, carting fruit to various markets, meat to various warehouses, beer, coke, washing powder, you get the idea. Now that may seem fairly boring but there was always something happening that would liven the trips up, running out of air for the brakes as we descended a hill called Riverlet on the Great Western Highway in the rain in the early hours of the morning, and having the dead man brakes slowly pull us up before the right angle bends at the bottom of the hill. Knowing that our next big descent would be down off the Blue Mountains into the outskirts of Penrith with our top heavy load of hanging meat, yeah what could go wrong...Carting water on the Nullarbour trying to avoid the portable scales as we went back and forth with the water for the tiny settlement of Balladonia. Maybe the old man is the reason for my healthy (I think) skepticism of authority, after all I seemed to spend half my child hood with him taking all sorts of bush tracks to avoid the scallies, police and road tax officers (yeah, back in the old days trucks used to pay a tax in relation to how many miles they drove).

The main game was trucks though.

Looks like the old mans just butting out a durrie, we had 20,000 kg of methanol in the tanker. That's me hangin out the window keen to get down in the mud!

Stuck on the Silver City Highway north of Packsaddle.

There wasn't a lot of firewood out here so we burnt the white roadside posts, our cooking was done on our old shovel.

These were my glory years with dad, later on in life we slowly grew apart a little as our politics and interests diverged a bit and we would never be as close again, but the times with him early on helped make me into the man that I would become today and for that I'm eternally grateful. It's been really hard to see the old man going down hill over these last few years and to be honest I was expecting that he would of passed away a few years ago, to see the independent proud man hooked up to oxygen and slowly losing his memory was hard to watch. So, with a truck easing down as he went past the cemetery today, his jacobs brake barking through the trees, I said goodbye to a hard working honest man, a man of his times who proudly fought to the end, go well.

Later on dad drove trucks around Victoria mostly.

And was never more happy than when his grand children were around.

Dad was inducted into the Road Transport Hall of Fame a couple of years ago, on my visit to Alice Springs last Christmas I went and checked out his plaque.