Fiona Semple earned her nickname ‘Xena’ while driving road trains in the Outback. Today she’s happy working closer to home.
Fiona Semple works on a potato farm near Deniliquin and enjoys carting potatoes from the paddock to the shed in the farm’s old Macks and S-Line Internationals.
The potatoes are dug fresh every morning, sorted, washed and loaded onto trucks within a few hours of being harvested.
It’s not as exciting as when she was driving road trains in the Outback, but Fiona loves the job, and working close to her Deniliquin home has made it easier to raise her three children.
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Fiona and her sons Angus and Dustin admiring a Peterbilt during a recent visit to Klos Custom Trucks, Geelong.
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Fiona’s ex-husband taught her to drive a Western Star with a 435 Cat and Spicer gearbox when they were working in the Outback. “I was too bored sitting in the passenger seat,” she recalls. She earned her nickname ‘Xena’ in the late 1990s when she was driving road trains in Australia’s north – from Cooktown in Queensland to Broome in Western Australia, and as far south as Alice Springs in the Northern Territory.
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Fiona Semple working at the potato farm.
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At first they drove two-up. But when they increased their fleet they could drive a truck each. Sometimes Fiona drove the 1998 Mack Valueliner which she described as “one of the easiest and best trucks I’ve driven”. But mostly she was in their 1997 Western Star with ‘Warrior Princess’ painted on its side.
Both trucks operated as three-trailer road trains. Fiona says driving with a third trailer “doesn’t faze me one bit” because she has experience under her belt.
Fiona is glad her children share her love of trucks. And she likes travelling with her boyfriend who drives a new Kenworth 909.
This chapter of Fiona’s life has been dedicated to her children, but she hopes the next chapter will feature more trucking adventures.
She’d love to drive side tippers at Western Australian mines when her children are older: “I’m dying to do that – do the fly-in, fly-out.” Meanwhile she’s happy working on the potato farm.
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Fiona enjoying the view from the top of stock crates in the late 1990s when she was driving road trains in the Outback.
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Read the full story in the February 2018 issue of Owner//Driver.