The chicken parmy is an iconic Australian meal. It’s a stable of many roadhouses, pub meals and has even been attempted by McDonalds. Finding the perfect chicken parmy is obviously very personal, we all have different expectations. But I can attest, and I reckon I would have the backing of every truckie that has passed there, that the Emerald Springs Roadhouse in the Northern Territory made arguably the best chicken parmy ever. Perfect pounded boneless chicken breast, fresh enough you’d believe it had only recently walked in from the coop, run through a rigorous three step breading procedure of flour, eggs and then the most delicious crisp breadcrumbs. Precisely pan fried to perfection then topped with a true Italian inspired tomato sauce, covered in just the right amount of mozzarella cheese and grilled into ecstasy, oh my mouth is watering at the memory already.
The three-day drive to the tiny territory establishment was always worth it and I’ll admit there were tears when the parking bays were full. But why am I decorating these pages with pictures of a perfect replica of Australian trucking history and waffling on about the gift from the gods of the perfect parmy? Because I am trying to establish the extreme importance of a childhood memory that has motivated the enormous amounts of time and money that has led us to this truck. I am trying to lay the platform for the sacrifice a young Jon Kelly made that would decades later motivate him to build a replica of that moment in time.
The year was 1989, the location was the aforementioned Emerald Springs Roadhouse, home to the world’s best chicken parmy meal – perfect pounded boneless – oh wait I’m getting distracted again. It might be better if I let Jon tell the story.
“Ned Kelly was always the pinnacle truck for me, I remember seeing it as a kid pull up at Emerald Springs,” Jon recalls.
“I was doing a trip with my grandad in the old R700, and we pulled up next to it.
“I was about eight or nine, we were sweating our ring out, peeling ourselves off the vinyl seats and we watched Jack Taylor walk out of the bunk, out of the full length door and I just thought ‘what the F is this?’ I couldn’t believe it.
“He let me look in the bunk, look in the cab. I couldn’t believe this truck; it was beyond belief.”
Now to tie all this back to my opening diatribe, you need to appreciate Jon’s next admission.
“Jack and Smiler (Jon’s Grandad) went in the roadhouse and got on the piss for 10 hours and I reckon I sat in that driver’s seat until they came back out and shoed me away. I was happy to sit in there and not have dinner,” he says.
For a young man to sacrifice the world’s greatest chicken parmy just to spend time in a truck – I don’t fully comprehend that level – but it was the birth of an obsession that wouldn’t be fulfilled for another 30-odd years.
To understand that almost OCD addiction of an eight-year-old, you really need to understand the preceding years, as well as the years that have passed since. Jon Kelly is a name synonymous with Australian transport. He is an easy target for many keyboard warriors as much as he is a source of invaluable Australian trucking history to those that need it. He has built some of the most well-known and recognisable custom trucks and he has been involved in some of the biggest and loftiest heavy haulage moves in Australia. He is an ironically private man that lives a life out in the open, through the likes of social media and multiple TV shows. And most of all, he is an extremely passionate trucking man.
“I was really lucky that I got to grow up in a time of really cool old trucks,” he says.
“What I want to do now is help preserve our history through trucks.”
Jon grew up on his grandfather’s boot laces, Frank ‘Smiler’ Nilon. Smiler was a legend of Australian transport; he was one of the first drivers to ever cart machinery into the Mary K uranium mine – eight hours in an old Foden to cover just 45 miles is a sign of a patient professional. By the time Jon was on the scene and old enough to reach the passenger seat (five years old, for the record), Smiler had his own Mack and was building his long-standing relationship with Hasting Deering and forging the heavy haulage pathway between Brisbane and Darwin.
Every opportunity Jon could get, he was accompanying his grandfather out on the road, sitting in the passenger seat of the various Macks that Smiler progressed through. From the Flintstone to the R700, the Super-Liners, Value-Liners and even the CLs, Jon learned the ropes, the skills and the loads.
By the time he was 10 or 11, Jon was more than equipped to drive the loads. I’m not sure what the statute of limitations is on child labour, so we’ll all just pretend he wasn’t ever ‘actually driving’ in those days.
It wasn’t just his grandad’s trucks that fascinated the young Jon – it was all the big boppers that ran those western highways back in the day. With an almost Rain Man like ability, Jon could pick out the trucks coming down the road and the history with them. Retaining that nostalgia is what drives him now with his Heavy Haulage Assets business. Finding old trucks that he encountered, experienced and sometimes just admired. Bringing life back to them and restoring memories.
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Even from the early days, Jon’s drive and focus was on having his own truck and doing the big jobs. Meeting Jack Taylor and having that time in Ned Kelly turned that truck into not just an idol for Jon, but a goal as well.
During the ‘90s and Jon’s teenage years, he absorbed himself in trucks and trucking. While the rest of us were slacking off in school, enjoying MC Hammer music videos and figuring out how to replace the bourbon in the liquor cabinet with cold tea, Jon was helping his grandad with pricing out and submitting quotes for massive moves, planning said moves, perfecting the patient art of heavy haulage and competing with Smiler to perfect the gear change.
By the time he hit 19, Jon had saved up enough to purchase his very first truck in a 1988 Mack Super-Liner out of Melbourne. I would love to tell you it was a truck that would hold a very special place in Jon’s heart, but truth be told, he had it for a month, did a month-long spruce up on it and before he even got it back up to Brisbane, he had sold it for a very good profit. What made that first truck so memorable, however, was the fact that the cash he got for selling it allowed him to be in the right position at the right time to purchase Kingsford Smith. The sixth Mack Bicentennial off the line.
“Kingsford Smith was my first official working truck – the first that I registered and went to work with,” Jon says.
“A normal Super-Liner was around $80,000 back then and I got Kingsford Smith for $110,000. Nobody really understood how important they would be in transport history.”
It is fair to say starting your transport career with a Bicentennial Mack Super-Liner as a kid is pretty fulfilling, and more so for a kid whose memory was still in the driver’s seat of Ned Kelly back in Emerald Springs. I do say kid as well, because at this stage Jon was only old enough to have a couple of years’ experience walking legally into a pub. He was a kid.
From that first working truck, over the next few decades Jon learnt and grew. Many trucks have seen the HHA touch, and many have been refurbed and passed on to customers. Jon’s passion for trucks and for heavy haulage became widespread. All you have to do is mentioned names like Gangsters Paradise, J-Cash, The Majestic or Bandit-1 and people know.
Throughout all the ups and downs of Jon’s career, there was always that lingering itch, that ‘missing out on the chicken parmy for this one truck’ feeling.
“After that moment when I was eight or nine, I was always like ‘can we get a bicentennial’, ‘can we get a bicentennial’, ‘can we got one’ – I was like those kids screaming are we there yet,” Jon laughs as he recalls how frustrating he must have been.
“Even when I bought Kingsford Smith, that was really cool, it was a great truck, but it wasn’t Ned Kelly.”
That itch never faded for Jon and over the years as he bought and sold other trucks, when he found himself flush, he made several attempts to purchase the original Ned Kelly. Jon came close a couple of times to getting his hands on it, but timing meant it just never quite lined up.
Jump to 2018 and Jon was pretty much out of the heavy haulage game – his focus had moved into the truck sales side of things. This involved some refurbs and rolling the trucks out the door to new owners. It also allowed Jon to start purchasing and restoring to original a lot of the big bangers he had admired and idolised as a young fella from the passenger seat of Smiler’s trucks. The crew of experts he had assembled to assist and organise some monumental overhauls meant Jon had the skills on hand to maybe undertake a massive emotional project in building a Ned Kelly Bicentennial Replica.
“I had just purchased a 1988 Mack Super-Liner off Grant Angel up in Mataranka, and I was driving it home and just thought ‘you know what, I reckon I could make this a Bicentennial’,” Jon admits.
Now replicas are nothing new in the automobile world. In cars, the 1967-1968 Shelby Cobra is the most replicated car in the world. Chances are if you see one it is almost guaranteed to be a replica. In Australia, believe it or not, the A9X Torana is the most popular replica, closely followed by the XB Couple. As far as trucks go, more often than not they are classed as ‘tribute’ trucks, like the amount of Optimus Prime inspired trucks you see on the roads, but replicas is something not really attempted in our world.
“I just wanted to do it for me and for my boys,” Jon says.
“If they can do it with the GT Falcons, I can do it with a Super-Liner. Plus, no one has done a Bicentennial Super-Liner back to 100 per cent brochure perfect, with the exhaust, the gold rims, the quarter guards, the straight up and down bullbar and the original KAB seats. That was my vision. It took me seven or eight years, but I have gotten it done.”
While the timeline was extensive, a lot of that was purely due to life getting in the way. The project began with a hiss and a roar, dealing with the biggest and most exclusive part of the Bicentennial Super-Liners – the bunk.
“A Super-Liner is a Super-Liner regardless of what it is, the biggest intricate thing for the Bicentennials is the sleeper,” he says.
“They were unique to them, they were 48’, they were high rise, they had the full-length walk-in door. They were the only factory fitted 48’ sleeper that Mack ever offered in that Super-Liner.
“The bunk itself was a standard Mack 36’ sleeper that was blown out to 48’ and had 11’ in the roof.”
Now for all Jon’s attempts to be 100 per cent brochure perfect, unfortunately legal reasons trump a childhood memory of skipping a parmy for a seat in a truck.
“For copyright reasons I had to get Joe Bradley to make a 50’ version instead of 48’. He put 11’ in the roof but I had to get the flat name plate bit and the bit up the top where the boomerang aerial goes done by my fibreglasser,” he says.
It was a 12-month project just getting the bunk done alone, then you had all the time spent on everything else, like setting the chassis up, overhauling the engine and diffs and even adding the chrome tapper covers that were pretty unique back in 1988. Jon’s drive to be 100 per cent brochure perfect, or at least within two inches, meant it would take time. I mean, you can’t exactly pop down to Carpet Court for a roll of crushed green velour interior carpet, can you? For the record, that was another challenge, but they did find some in Belgium of all places.
Some things came a little easier than others. Brisbane’s Seats R Us somehow managed to have a couple of the original KAB seats they’d restored, while items like the ‘hounds tooth door entry handle’ became the bane of Mick McCormack’s (one of Jon’s fabricators) existence as he had to handmake perfect replicas of a now non-existent part.
“By the time we had it finished for the Casino Truck Show last year, it was nut and bolt perfect,” Jon admits.
“We built it so it can be used, the best feeling was hooking a double up to take it down to Casino and then we hooked a triple up to take it to Alice Springs as well.”
That trip was even more emotional as his son James took the opportunity to replicate his father’s actions and pull his first triple across the Barkley.
There are plenty of people that Jon wants to credit for assisting with this momentous build. There’s probably too many to remember, but special shout outs go to the likes of Gary Rose, his head of the refurb team, Mick McCormack, driver Dave and Jon’s son James, who pushed pretty hard to keep this project rolling. Huge appreciation to Glenn and Richard Graeme who own Bicentennial No.1, Ludwig Leichhardt. They had their truck accosted by Jon on several occasions to measure up templates and cross check references. Big shout out to PJs for the painting of the truck and a special thank you to the Britannica of Bicentennials himself, Ernie Hastas, who kept Jon on task for ensuring the little details like lines and colours were also 100 per cent accurate.
There is no doubt countless others involved in this project that deserve a shout out, they have all played a part in bringing memories and history back to life and they all get to share in the massive smile that Jon sports as he enters the vicinity of his replica Ned Kelly. But I think Jon summed up his appreciation and motivation the best.
“What I do, and how I do it these days, is to freeze those amazing moments and memories of my life through the trucks I build and bring back. Most importantly, let others hear and understand those moments and live a little of that glory with me,” he says.
Personally, I am torn, seeing as I hear Emerald Springs Roadhouse has closed. I still kind of hold it against Jon for missing out on a chicken parmy that day. But then, as I photograph this amazing replica, knowing it’s not just a reflection of history but also a reflection of the truck that fanned the flames of Jon’s trucking passion, I reckon I can let the parmy go.
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