Heads or tails? That’s the 2000-word question today. The reason I am flipping a metaphorical, and behind the scenes, literal, coin is because what started out as a single lane story quickly diverged into a two-lane tale. Allow me to explain before I flip the coin.
I was recently asked by Rocklea Truck Electrical to track down Nathan Howell from VE Group in order to snap some photos of the Kenworth 100-year anniversary truck – a model that Rocklea Truck Electrical had a hand in creating. Having personally seen one of the American 100-year releases myself, I had several questions. Like what? Ah? Are you serious? And of course, when can I shoot it?
The idea of an Australian 100-year tribute truck instantly triggered my ‘I need to make a story out of these’ senses. The single lane story I was aiming for would focus on Kenworth’s century long history, the special 2023 releases over in America and exactly how there is an Australian built truck waving the Kenworth 100-year flag.
The second lane of my story manifested itself when I met Nathan Howell and his wonderful wife Bronwen. This humble couple have built one of Australia’s leading earthmoving and civil construction companies, all while holding onto the work ethic and country culture that’s entrenched in their small-town roots. The story was meant to be purely about the truck, but then I met the force behind the machine and suddenly I have two avenues to cover. Do we start with the mechanical or start with the familial? Let’s flip.
Tails it is, and that means we get to start by prying into the lives of Nathan Howell, his wife Bronwen and the VE Group.
“I grew up around trucks, my dad had a truck and pig trailer with a loader doing local work for the council – their industrial lot was adjacent to the Moura Wheat Board which was also a hype of transport activity,” Nathan says.
“Moura Bulk Grain & General Haulage was owned by my uncle and aunty, Tony and Marlene Seccombe. They lived next to mum and dad’s depot, which, in years to come, became our own Moura depot. Next door to that was Absolon Transport.
“Absolon had a few R-model Macks, and it was big gear back in those days – I was just truck mad. If I wasn’t sitting beside dad in the truck, I was sitting beside my uncle Butch or next door helping uncle Tony or up in Absolon’s yard, I was always doing something truck related.”
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Listening to Nathan recall his childhood in the small Queensland town of Moura brought out the jealous side of me – no internet, no Wi-Fi and probably only three channels on the TV you never used, but an outdoor playground that consisted of trucks, trucks and more trucks. It really was inevitable that decades later Nathan would find himself working under the shadow of a gluttony of gorgeous trucks and life size tonka toys.
“Dad also had yellow gear as well,” Nathan says, referring to the distinct CAT yellow earthmoving gear.
“My passion shifted to include that stuff. Because us kids didn’t have any licenses, we would just use his little digger to mix dirt for Dad or dig sand out, stuff like that so dad could go deliver it.”
Through Nathan’s school years, the distinct lack of earthmoving and transport activities in the government set curriculum meant Nathan’s attention was often focused more on the school bell and getting home to undertake some manual labour. This meant that once Nathan was old enough, he said goodbye to school lunches and hello to a country apprenticeship.
“I went and worked in Absolon’s shed, completing a lot of general maintenance such as re-bearing trailers and doing brake linings the old school way with having to do the rivets manually – we didn’t get to just buy them off the shelf like you can today,” Nathan says.
It wasn’t your standard official apprenticeship that many get. Instead, it was the country apprenticeship that has nourished so many of this country’s greatest bush mechanics.
Seeing as Nathan was still in his late teens when he left school, he had the skills and desire to drive trucks and earthmoving equipment. However, that good old-fashioned issue of ‘not legally old enough’ kept rearing its head. That period of waiting was filled in for Nathan by getting some work on a local farm, then moving into work in a local Moura engineering workshop that would lead to work with an earthmoving outfit where Nathan found himself out west building dams and doing property work, ‘bush ticketed’ of course.
“I never actually thought about having my own business back then,” Nathan says.
“I was wanting to get officially ticketed and get into the coal mines, which I did. I was about 20 when I got a job in the mines and was there operating the big excavators and such. I moved up the chain, supervising people, running a crew. After a few years I remember coming home to Bron one night saying, ‘this isn’t for me, I think I want to start our own business’.”
Bronwen Howell, or Bron as she will be referred to, is Nathan’s wife and mother to the couple’s three children. Nathan and Bron have been a couple and team since they first met way back in high school.
“Behind every successful business is a successful team,” Nathan says, adding in that without Bron, none of what the couple has achieved would’ve been possible. Bron is a story on her own with her amazing charity work on top of the day-to-day VE Group work she takes care of. She also recently picked up the prestigious 2023 Queensland Trucking Association (QTA) Trucking Woman of the Year award.
Hence back in 2006 when Nathan finished his night shift and sat down with his wife to tell her he wanted to start his own business with her. Bron was right there to assist. That business would eventually become VE Group and began with a small little skid steer loader – no truck, no transporter, just the skid steer. With a laugh, Nathan recalls the company’s humble beginnings.
“I had a mate building Cavalier Homes and he couldn’t get anyone to do his pads, so I bought a little skid steer and I’d park it at home,” Nathan says.
“On my days off, and sometimes after night shifts, I’d just order the product from the quarries to site, then drive the little skid steer around town to the site, do the job and drive it home. Eventually some plumbers wanted work done, which needed a little digger, so I bought my first truck in an Ex-K&S 4864 Western Star. I took the sleeper off it and bought an old Shephards bin off Croydons in Sarina, had it brought down and fitted at Shephard Transport Equipment in Brisbane.
“I then got a single axle tag trailer to haul the digger around on. As that work picked up, I was finding I’d have reliability issues with getting the product to do the jobs I had, so I bought another truck and dog tipper combo, a full tipping setup. It just kept growing from there.”
Now we jump ahead a little to the VE Group story. The trajectory that VE Group took was the picture-perfect representation of ‘hard work pays off’. That first truck became two, then four and, with positive word of mouth growing, the company kept expanding and taking on more and more jobs. The company’s workload shifted from council jobs in small town Moura to large scale projects in the greater Queensland area. Next thing, the VE Group started undertaking more work interstate, with Nathan and Bron currently setting up a new head office in Brisbane.
The reason I am not using all my words to track the course that VE Group took to get from a single skid steer to their current collection of around 60 trucks, a similar number of trailers and almost as many pieces of yellow gear is because I want to focus on the couple and the culture at VE Group. It will segue perfectly into the second half of this story where we shine the light on the big 909 on the pages before you.
Spending time with Nathan and Bronwen, the one thing you do pick up is the old-school, small-town values that are the essence of many grassroot companies. It’s not just about hard work, honesty and loyalty, although those three attributes are extremely important, it’s also about building relationships and treating everyone, from suppliers to staff and customers to contractors, with respect.
“We don’t label ourselves a family business, even though we are,” Nathan says.
“But we’ve found if you say family culture then people don’t want to call each other out and have some of those hard conversations that need to be had sometimes.”
Having the ability to undertake tough business conversations, and fostering an environment that cultivates and encourages them, means you are held to a higher standard and thus the work you produce is of a higher standard. It is an aspect of life that has paid dividends for the company.
One particular example of this is the very low staff turnover within the company. It is a very competitive job market out there and, in order to hold onto your staff, you need a culture that people want to be part of, which VE Group prides itself on.
“Our core values are integrity, endurance and relationships,” Nathan says.
“We want to build a culture that people want to be part of. To make something like that, you just have to go that extra mile.”
While practicing those values is important to VE Group, finding reciprocal values in the people VE Group deal with is also vitally important and that is what brings us to the second lane of our two-lane story today in Kenworth.
“My first truck was a Western Star and it did us well. When we started buying more trucks, we tried another manufacturer and we just had such a bad run. It almost sent us broke, to be honest,” Nathan says.
“Then we got onto Kenworth and the product just spoke for itself. The support throughout the Brown and Hurley Network is awesome, the resale value is there and we haven’t had any issues.”
The VE Group truck role call sees the ever-popular T610 model as a favourite for the truck and dog tipper combinations. When it comes to the away work and the float work, that’s when Nathan starts rolling out the bigger gear, with several T659s in the fleet and, of course, the favourite child of the Kenworth family in the Aussie-built T909. All of this leads us towards our star pupil for today.
LANE TWO
In 2023, when Nathan first went looking for a new truck to add to his expanding fleet, he chose to add another T909 to the stable. However, this time he wanted to try and do something a little different. He wanted to shine a light on a brand that has been the backbone of his company for many years by celebrating and acknowledging the 100-year anniversary of Kenworth.
Australia has been a card-carrying Kenworth country since 1960, when George Blomfield and Ed Cameron imported the first Kenworths from the United States. A decade later, the huge Bayswater plant in Victoria was built and, in 1971, the first Australian-built truck, a K125CR, rolled off the production line. That was the origins of Kenworth in Australia, but the American trucking icon had a history nearly 50 years older than our first locally built ‘Grey Ghost’.
Kenworth Motor Company was incorporated in 1923, with the name coming from the two guys that owned the company, Harry Kent and Edgar Worthington. Hence the original Kenworth logo was just a round badge, with Kenworth written through the middle and a K and W above and below to represent the company’s founders. The two men were aiming to build trucks tough enough to help out the local loggers who were struggling to get the felled trees up the slippery winding mountain track.
Since its beginnings, Kenworth has become a household name, both within the transport circus and the general Joe public. In 2023 it celebrated its 100-year anniversary by offering a limited release of 900 commemorative W900L and T680 tractor units. Now 900 may seem far from ‘limited release’, but keep in mind Kenworth sold nearly 40,000 class 8 trucks in 2023, so 900 is very limited in that scale. These limited editions came with special badging, numbering, interiors and a few other goodies. ‘Why didn’t we get them over here?’ you ask. ‘We’re Kenworth fans, what about us?’. To start with, the T680s would laugh at our width laws, and the W900L would positively crack up at our length laws.
This did not stop Nathan Howell from wanting to get in on the celebrations.
“We decided with the new one that we really wanted to do something different, something to celebrate the Kenworth history and we thought we would reach out and see if we could get the limited edition parts and add them to an Australian truck,” Nathan says.
Nathan applauds the assistance he got from everyone at Kenworth in Australia, beginning with local Brown and Hurley guru Matt Innes, all the way through to the likes of managing director Damian Smethurst, director of sales and marketing Michael Long and regional salesman Matt Robertson, as well as many others who helped twist the arms of the big wigs in America who assisted the request and sent over everything they could to help create an Australian 100-year truck.
“They sent us over the badging for the dash and the 100-year badges for the sleeper. There were also the door kickers that looked a bit like 610 door kickers, so we modified those to fit,” Nathan says.
“The bonnet badging is also different, it’s old school individual letters rather than the current one piece set up.”
He also received the 100-year pillows and blankets and got the interior stitching done to the back wall of the sleeper.
The other talking point of the VE Group 100-year Kenworth is the amazing artwork on the back of the sleeper. Courtesy of Cyclone Airbrushing, the mural showcases the North American geography and features the original Seattle factory, as well as the original Harry and Edgar log truck, all of which is overlayed atop the Seattle Street map. For those avid cartographers reading, you may notice the Kenworth logo on the mural lays directly over the Seattle factory’s location. The whole art piece took weeks to complete but was well worth the wait.
Getting a masterpiece like VE Group’s 100-year truck on the road is a team effort and big praises need to go out to all of those involved, from the likes of Sam’s Signs, who did all the lines and scrolls and Mr Bullbars who created a custom engraved 100-year bull bar, to long time VE Group suppliers Shephard Transport Equipment, who supplied and fitted all the hydraulics to the big rig. Nathan also gives credit to Brock, Kim and the team at Rocklea Truck Electrical, who were instrumental in putting together this stunning ride. Along with many custom-made fabrications, it was the RTE team that was responsible for so much of this truck, from organising the custom painted tanks and painted drop visor to organising the 100-year embroidery inside the big Kenworth bunk.
I guess it’s about time my two-lane story winds up so you can go and have a closer look at this outstanding truck. I am very thankful I got the invite to capture such a one-of-a-kind tribute truck and am extremely appreciative of the time I had getting to know the power couple behind VE Group. I’m privileged that I have been able to share their story. Now it’s time to let this big beauty go and earn its keep.
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