Liz Martin's museum at Port Pirie from 2020 salutes the Australian pre-World War II truck kings of the long road
Stories from the Road Museum's Liz Martin with its 1908 Daimler Renard truck. Inset: The truck as the Yudnamutana road train, loaded with supplies outside J. Napier & Co. general store at Farina in South Australia’s north in 1910.
Images courtesy ABC News and the State Library of South Australia
Australia's original outback road train truck has been rescued for a place in the Stories from the Road Museum opened in Port Pirie, in South Australia's mid north, in 2020.
Museum owner Liz Martin, formerly head of the national road transport hall of fame in Alice Springs, had been saving pieces of Australia's road transport history for decades for the Port Pirie collection, also a memorial to a brother who was killed by lightning in 2001 as he unloaded a truck in Western Australia. It also acknowledged 44-year-old truck driver Gayle Little, who died with a colleague when their B-double crashed and burst into flames on the Eyre Highway near Port Augusta in 2016.
Martin believed the 1908 Daimler Renard in her collection was the oldest truck in Australia. Built in France, it was the only four-cylinder model shipped to Australia with five other Daimler Renards. The Port Pirie museum’s lone survivor of those trucks was originally going to be used to cart salt on Eyre Peninsula but was diverted to carrying cooper ore at Farina in South Australia’s north. It shuttled between Yudnamutana and Farina on heavy iron wheels that shortened its service because it kept getting bogged.
In 1972, Don Wilsdon found the Daimler Renard truck as a rusty wreck at Farina and restored it, minus its original motor. It was sold at auction and stored at a shed in Whyalla on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula, where it was struck by lightning and its rear was burnt off. Liz Martin bought the truck in 2016 and rebuilt the cabin. Two trailers that the truck used to pull were found in scrub north of Port Augusta.
Martin and her team of volunteers built the museum and expanding the collection of trucks that were lost be thousands after World War II service when they were often sold off for work on farms. Martin believes this trucking history needs to be recorded: “They opened up rural communities and rural industries — if it wasn't for the trucks, it wouldn't have happened.”
