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Hauling cattle along the Warrego

From his early years in South Australia, Martin Rieck has always enjoyed working with cattle, a vocation that he has embraced further with his move to southern Queensland as an owner-driver.

 

Anyone regularly travelling Queensland’s Warrego Highway will, at some point over the past six months, caught a glimpse of Martin Rieck’s new Mack Super-Liner hauling B-double livestock trailers. However, Martin has been on the road for much longer than that, while his association with trucks goes back to his family’s property in north-east South Australia which he says was “nearly one million acres in the desert”.

The property, south of Innamincka and west of Cameron’s Corner, ran cattle. Out of necessity Martin bought his first livestock truck. More trucks were upgraded over the years.

“Dad always had trucks, not livestock trucks, but he had an earthmoving business, so we always had trucks to shift around and supply the fuel,” Martin explains.

“Working with the stock was first and foremost, so I was bought up more machinery to start with before trucks. My father didn’t really like trucks,” he adds.

Martin Rieck swapped his Western Star for a Mack Super-Liner and hasn’t looked back

The Riecks’ home state of South Australia was the obvious choice for sending cattle to sales yards and abattoirs. However, in the early to mid-1990s they soon realised that southern Queensland provided more opportunity.

“Earlier on South Australia was always the place to go with the cattle,” Martin recalls. “We started coming this way (Queensland) because there was a lot more competition with the buyers and the feedlots, a lot more places to go with your cattle. South Australia was limited to only a few buyers back in them days.

“It was a little bit further, 300km or something, but it was still going to be better to come this way. Better weather and, when we did move, there were more opportunities with the truck.”

Martin runs mostly Haulmark and Cannon livestock trailers behind the Super-Liner

Earlier, the Rieck family had sold the property to Australian oil and gas exploration and production giant Santos, leasing the same land back for around 12 years. That lasted until Santos began selling its properties following the oil price crash.

Champion shearer

Martin, wife Kate and children Mason and Taylor, made the permanent move to southern Queensland close on five years ago. Sadly, Martin’s father Ted Rieck had passed away in 1990, but not before leaving behind a major personal achievement.

“He was a champion shearer, he was the first one to break Jackie Howe’s shearing record,” Martin proudly exclaims.

“My father was the first one to break it with mechanical shears. He sheared 327 sheep in seven hours, 39 minutes and ran out of sheep before the end of the cut. That was up near Brinard Station, Julia Creek.”

The names of the Rieck’s children, Mason and Taylor, names are neatly scrolled on the Mack

Martin’s relocation across the Queensland border came after selling almost all the gear from the South Australian property. He brought his family along, as well as his Western Star prime mover, one of two he’d owned over a 16-year period.

However, running a small owner-driver business means the less downtime, the better. The six-year-old Western Star, with around 480,000km on the clock, wasn’t cooperating. While Martin enjoyed his long history with the brand, a series of engine issues, namely the Cummins EGR, forced him to look for an alternative.

He began turning his attention towards the Mack brand. “I knew people who had Macks and they had a good run out of them.”

Placing an order for the Mack Super-Liner in October 2021, he received delivery of it in April this year and then sold the Western Star, admitting that he “should have put more on it”.

The Mack came with an MP10 685hp engine and mDrive automated manual ’box. After years of operating an 18-speed Roadranger, Martin became an auto convert, especially as his runs take him through regional townships as well as trips to Brisbane. “That’s one thing you don’t worry about, changing gears,” he remarks.

However, he often switches to manual override, especially on roads such as the Toowoomba range. Putting it into 7th gear, he says holds it all the way down with the engine break on.

He’s also pleased with the Mack’s engine and its fuel economy, believing that if he’d had stuck with the Western Star it would have worked out around an $30,000 a year. “The way things are going with fuel at the moment, the old truck would have broken me.”

As for the Mack’s safety features, including lane departure warning and automated cruise control, he opted out.

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“I could have got all that, but they deleted it for me. Being it’s a bush truck, I really didn’t want it,” he says.

Martin’s only regret is the Super-Liner’s single bed. His old Star had a double bunk and he would have preferred a 64-inch in the Mack but he says that spec wasn’t available. At any rate, he still has enough space for a TV and microwave, handy for the three or four nights a week he spends away from home.

Effluent issues

The majority of Martin’s subcontracting work is around Roma where the saleyards are situated, and south to Surat and east to the feedlots around Dalby, with only the occasional run further west.

“Nine times out of 10 you always do a load in Roma on Monday before the sale, the rest of the week you might take cattle to a feedlot or a meat works down in Brisbane,” Martin says.

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The Brisbane run takes him to the Beenleigh meat works, his most easterly destination. That brings Martin to the issue of effluent and hauling cattle through suburban streets.

“There’s a big argument with the effluent side of things as a truck driver. Because I’ve owned cattle myself, even coming 1200km, we’d curfew them for 12 hours before we load them. The simple fact is that they travel better,” he explains.

He says others will load the cattle full of water to keep the weight on.

“But as soon as you put them on the truck full of water they start emptying out, and that causes another problem. You need to wash them out and that’s a cost that’s getting higher and higher.”

He says he can be up for around $300 to wash his crates out. Then there’s the ever-changing regulations and the inconsistency between meat works.

Martin is a convert to Mack’s mDrive automated-manual ’box, especially handy when negotiating city streets

“Some are very good, some are very ordinary,” he says. “Because my crates are sort of set up more for road train work, they haven’t got the sliding doors on the back.

“It makes it harder in some of the meat works because you’ve got to back in. I still do it, no worries at all, but the rules and regulations are getting tighter and tighter from dropping through your three load doors at the back.

“As far as unloading, Roma’s good, nice wide dumps, you can pull up and open all three doors sideways.

“A lot of feedlots haven’t got ideal unload facilities, you’ve still got to unload down a ramp which is a lot narrow, so you can’t open all your doors. That way there’s a smaller gap to try and get out.”

Martin runs either three, four or five decks on cattle, with five the ideal combination as he can get a permit to go into Dalby from St George. “With six decks you can’t get the permit anymore,” he says.

Fuel economy was one of the reasons for Martin’s switch to Mack

Nevertheless, Martin enjoys the job, travelling along the wide open spaces and working with livestock. However, he has words of warning for young would-be drivers and owner-drivers.

“Money is the big thing these days,” he says. “There must be easier jobs they look for, and the rules and regulations and fines put a lot of people off.”

Red light alert

Martin says going through Brisbane’s suburbs on the way to Beenleigh can get tricky with red light cameras put in a position where it’s difficult for trucks, especially those loaded up with cattle, to pull up safely.

“There’s some cameras going to Beenleigh where you can be right on them and they’re green, then they’ll change and if you roll through, you can then get a fine.

“The amount of points you lose, you only have to lose them three or four times and you’ve lost your licence.”

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Still, Martin has managed to cut costs in a couple of areas. Five years ago he gave up the dreaded ‘nicotine sticks’, which he says cost him $200 a week. “I don’t know how people can afford to smoke,” he adds.

Other cost-saving areas include doing 50 per cent of his own maintenance, especially on his trailers, while Kate covers most of the billing and banking.

“At this stage between the fuel, insurance and registration, the future is a bit of a mystery at the moment,” Martin says.

“Something’s going to have to change, especially for the small operator.”

Photography: Greg Bush

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