I’m 76 now; I should be lying on the couch!” laughs Arch Kennedy as we take a seat at the family dining table, and he serves up a hot cuppa and a batch of scones made earlier by matriarch Irene.

Theirs is a classic case of: ‘You don’t stop doing stuff because you get old; you get old because you stop doing stuff.’ While he’s a cabinet maker and joiner by trade, Arch’s life has been driving, farming and then driving again, and he still gets out there and loves it.

His interest in trucks was likely sparked by his father, Lex Kennedy, who drove for the railways in the mid-1950s onwards, but his entry into the industry was more by chance. Out push-biking one day in 1972, he rode past the yard of AJ Robertson Carriers and decided to ask if any jobs were going. Proprietor Alan Robinson took him on, and the pair would end up in partnership as A and A (Alan and Arch) Transport. “Alan put me on a two-axle Commer Knocker tractor unit in 1972, and I drove for him for quite a few years. Eventually, he said, ‘Well, you do most of the work here; you might as well have half the bloody outfit.’ So, he gave me half shares in it.

“He eventually built a boat and went to stay up in the Bay of Islands. I bought the business off him and I’m here still doing this, so he must’ve been the one with the brains between the two of us,” Arch says with a laugh.

Arch still fondly looks back at that Commer. “It was a good truck. Shit, yeah – a truck and a half in its day. A lot of drivers were just on them to drive them, so they rattled to death, but the secret was to go around with a spanner every fortnight or so and keep on top of it.”

In 1980, Arch put a Leyland Mastiff stock unit on the road. Picture it: a two-axle truck, two-axle trailer, hay bales atop the crates … “Bloody good truck in its day. No young bugger would want to drive something like that these days,” says Arch. “We did all rural stuff back then. I could go back carting stock tomorrow; I loved it.

“I could tell you some stories of what we got up to…” Arch says, before regaling us. “We did a lot of work with Road Metals when the Upper Waitaki project was being set up. We spent weeks carting 30ft pipes for them from Mossburn way up to Twizel with the Commer. The Lindis Pass was gravel and one-way bridges back then. We’d do it in a day – from Twizel to Mossburn and back, unload that night and do another the next day. We never took any notice back then; it’s just what it was,” he says.

“One time, we brought a big screening plant back up for Road Metals. It was over width, with big skids on each side, only just off the road when towing it. When we took it out, we had to go through a ford with a grader there to tow us, which was all right. Coming back weeks later at about 4pm on a Friday afternoon, the grader was meant to be there again.

“The wee bridges [at the ford] were arched with a concrete lip on each side, and we got back and there was no grader. Road Metals had a wee Thames Trader tractor unit, with 10hp or something, old John ‘Murph’ Murphy was driving it. Murray Francis was our pilot then. Murph said, ‘Forget the grader. I reckon if you get way up the road and go like the clappers, the skids will just skid over the concrete bits on the bridge.’

“I said, ‘I’m not doing that with my truck.’ I didn’t want to tear the turntable off it or something. So he said, ‘Okay, I’ll put the Trader on it.’ Well, he went way up the road and then down he came, he must’ve thought he was doing 100mph, but I think he was only doing about 30. Of course, he wasn’t going fast enough and once the skids hit the concrete, it lifted the drive wheels off the ground – so we’re sitting there with the whole road blocked, this thing hanging in the middle of the road!

“So, Murray went off and found the grader way up the road somewhere; the driver forgot he was meant to meet us there! He came and pulled us off the bridge, we changed over again, and off we went. That was all over-width, but there were no over-width signs or anything back then.”

Into the deep end

Despite having his start decades later, 47-year-old Jimmy reckons his early days driving were “such a fun, great time – and the worry and stress wasn’t there”.

“When I started driving in the early 1990s, I was about 15. I got my truck licence at 16 with an age exemption, but even before I got my licence, I was carting rock and gravel … I started at Heriot Earthmoving in a TK Bedford in the paddocks. I thought I was the coolest in the world. That’s where you started, and if they said to get out and wash the ute, it was done,” he says.

What began as some school work experience turned into seven years at Heriot Earthmoving and the start of Jimmy’s career in trucking.

“I expected to be sweeping the workshop or washing the digger or something, and I would’ve been happy as doing that. Anyway, I had a day on the dozer with Ian Achison and a day with Murray Young on the digger and Dean Russell in their Mercedes, who was carting rock from Heriot to Tapanui. So, I messed around with the loader, getting the hang of it, and then got to take the load over with Dean. I went to get in the passenger seat, and Dean’s there going ‘No, no, you drive’. I said, ‘F@$k no, I haven’t got a licence!’ He said, ‘Doesn’t matter’ …

“So he’s in the passenger seat and I’m carting the rock over from Heriot to Tapanui. We tip that off and coming back, here’s Ian the boss coming towards us in their White Road Boss 350 transporter. Dean’s like ‘Ooh, here’s the boss! And I’m shitting myself, like, ‘What’s he going to say?’ Anyway, Dean was having me on because Ian was the one who told him to make sure I have a drive. I didn’t know it at the time, but they wanted to see if I was worth training after a day on each job.” And, indeed, a job was offered to Jimmy on the condition he finished fifth form. “That was about halfway through the year, so I began getting dropped off the school bus part-way and climbing on the dozer. I worked weekends, holidays and, eventually, I just wanted to start.”

Much to mum Irene’s dismay, Jimmy left school before seeing out the fifth form. However, he wasted no time starting further education – getting his HT licence. I had to write a letter, and Ian and Murray had to prove hardship – that it wasn’t easy to get staff there and then.

“When I went to do my trailer licence over at Tapanui, I asked Ian if he could drive the Road Boss there, and he said, ‘You can drive it yourself.’ I was worried about the cop being there, but Ian’s solution was to get there first. So, I drove up and just as I was getting out of the bloody thing, the cop pulled in. He goes, ‘Did you drive that in?’ I responded no, I’d been sitting in it waiting for him.

“So we head off, and he says to me, ‘So, how long have you been driving this thing?’ I said, ‘I haven’t, just been practising in the yard.’ So, we turned the next corner, and he instructs me to go back to the start. I’m like ‘God, what have I done wrong?’ He said, ‘I have to go write out your licence.’

Ringing Ian to give him the good news, Jimmy immediately received his first official job. “He said head up way into the Blue Mountains, pick up a D7 and bring it into town to the workshop. I was like no way, it was like 35 tonne, I wasn’t confident enough to be shifting that around yet. ‘You got your licence, didn’t ya?’ he said. ‘If you’re not going to go shift that, you’re no use to us!’ So away I went! I was shit scared, took me all day to get that thing into town. I was shaking! But once I got the hang of it, I just loved it,” Jimmy recalls.

It didn’t take long for him to bond with the Road Boss. “In its day, that thing blew anything away – such a great truck! We’d shift 50- or 60-tonne haulers in the bush with it. You’d stop at the hills, throw it in deep reduction, select your gear and that was it, up you went.

“It was such a cool job. The shit you used to get away with, even then. I got pulled up once near Conical Hill sawmill, coming up from Riversdale with a big log forwarder and no pilot. Over-width, over-height; you used to just paint the tyres with that ‘razzle dazzle’ stuff…

“So, I come up the road and I could see this ute in the distance, and all of a sudden, the lights come on. I’m like, ‘Oh my f@$king God, it’s the god squad.’ So, I pulled up, and he goes, ‘How wide are you?’ Well, I didn’t know… And he’s like, ‘Shit, you’ll be over height, wouldn’t you?’ They measured it up: ‘Where’s all your permits and pilot?’

“I said, ‘Oh, look, I haven’t got one.’ And then he goes, ‘Where have you come from?’ So, I said, ‘Just a stone’s throw down the road – I don’t need any permits because I’m in the bush. It’s private roads, and I’ve just come out of that road, and I’m just going along here to get to that bush road over there…

“Of course, it was going to another place, but he bought it. So I drove way up that road into the bush, and I f@$king sat there for a while. I rang someone from the phone in the transporter, who went past to check they were gone, and I was off again!

“Shit like that, you would never, ever get away with anymore, would you?”