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Herron hangs up boots after 52 years truckin’

Transport and timber were central to Keith Herron’s long trucking career.

Keith Herron of Birregurra, Victoria, looks forward to holidaying with his wife Maree now he has retired after 52 years in trucking.

Seventy-year-old Keith remembers crossing the Nullarbor in a Commer Knocker in the mid-1960s. He bought his first truck – a Peterbilt – in 1996 and was an owner-driver until he sold his 2006 International Eagle 9200 at the end of September.

His last job was hauling logs out of the Pyrenees Mountains, near Avoca, Victoria.

Keith was offered two driving jobs a couple of days after he sold the Eagle, but he wants to have a rest.

“I loved two things in my working life – transport and timber,” Keith says. “I’ve probably been from one end of this country to the other, but I’ve always come back here to logging again.”

He spent decades carting logs out of the Otway Ranges. There were about 11 hardwood mills in towns surrounding the Otways when he started trucking. Most of these mills had closed by the 1980s when he worked at WH Bennett and Sons’ large mill at Birregurra. He was their transport manager.

Today there is no logging of native forests in the Otways, but trucks still cart timber from private plantations on the range.

Keith can’t imagine driverless trucks carting logs on the Otway’s steep logging roads. “They’d want to be pretty clever, I think. There’s a few spots there I know they won’t get out of.”

He is glad for the improvements to roads, trucks, trailers and communication during his career. But there are a few things he won’t miss. “The red tape has just absolutely wrecked me.” And he says overzealous policing of logbooks is “only raising revenue as far as I’m concerned”.

Keith and Maree look forward to celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary in January

Read the full story in Owner//Driver’s 25th anniversary December issue.

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