Laurie O’Neil - Mr. Peterbilt Australia

In-depth

20 July

If asked what car one would aspire to, the answers might vary but the product would almost invariably be European - Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche or maybe Mercedes. When it comes to trucks however, you could safely put your money on it being American and bearing the moniker Peterbilt. No other brand comes within a bull's roar of the reverence and mystique in which this hallowed name is held. That we have Peterbilt at all in this country can be laid squarely at the feet of one man, Laurie O'Neil.

The O'Neil family were the Foden agents for Australia from 1945 and young Laurie grew up in and around trucks. Leaving school at 15 he joined the family business and worked in all areas of the concern, from ordering parts to selling trucks across the country. Many Foden owners of the day would attribute their purchase decision to the gung-ho attitude of Laurie.

"We serviced them, we operated them and we sold them. We brought the Fodens out from England CKD. Before we assembled them we used to run a drill through all the holes and go to bigger bolts everywhere. As they were, if you loosened the bolts, you could move the frame around but when we put them together we'd almost have to hammer the bolts home. It made for a much tauter truck that could withstand the rigours of Australian roads."

The business' success allowed Laurie to travel the world, including America where he had visited the Peterbilt factory in Oakland, California in 1956.

"When the family sold the business I was looking for something to do. I was super impressed by the Peterbilt brand – their toughness and attention to detail was, I thought, perfectly suited to Australian conditions.

I went across and met with Don Pannell, the head honcho, and negotiated the Australian distribution rights. I needed to have the whole country to cover the spare parts equation. In a state by state scenario the various distributors simply could not afford to stock the spare parts - owners would have suffered and the business would have failed before it began. In a niche market you just can't have spare parts everywhere – it's not like a Holden or Ford dealership.

"The deal wasn't as difficult to seal as I had expected. I said to Don Pannell that I had a following in Australia because of Foden Trucks. I told him that if I had sold someone a Foden, I could sell them a Peterbilt - and that's exactly what I did.

"I also thought at the time that I didn't want to be selling trucks for the rest of my life so I put it to Don that if I could get the business established, how many trucks would I have to sell before the company would let me import and assemble, and progressively gets some parts made here. Don replied, 'Well, we can tell you that because we've just had to do it in Mexico where they insisted we had to have a Mexican partner. The number is 100 trucks.'

"So I said, if I can get to 100 trucks a year I'd like to buy into the manufacturing, the selling - every bloody thing with you people – be it 10%, 50%, whatever. Don put out his hand and said, 'Yep, we've done it in Mexico, we'll do it with you'. We shook hands and the deal was done.

"To get the brand established in Australia we started a trucking business ourselves, running to Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. We ran all the trucks with three drivers allocated to each and always two in them at any one time. When a truck got back to our Sydney base, who'd ever done two trips got out, the fresh driver got in and the other one, he stayed there. So we ran those trucks around the block 24/7.

"There was a lovely bloke by the name of Ron Thompson at Grafton to whom I had sold, maybe a dozen Fodens. There was a truck stop in Grafton that the drivers used to stop at. They'd always lock the Peterbilt cabs because people wanted to climb up inside and things would often go missing.

Week after week, at 11 or 12 or 2 o'clock in the morning, Ron would come by, climb up and shine a torch on the odometer which went up massively each week. He couldn't believe they'd been putting on as many miles so quickly. Then he started looking at the tyres and the bogey tyre treads are going down and down but the trucks are pristine. The upshot was I ended up selling him ten or a dozen and he loved them.

"Over the next four years or so I sold 117 Petes. We were outselling Kenworth - which Cameron’s were importing - and we were heading to where we could see doing 100 trucks a year. Then Pacific Car and Foundry at Seattle pulled the pin. I don't know why. They never gave me an explanation nor did they pay me out.

"I went over to America and sued them. They never thought I would. I had set my life up on an expectation. It had been a handshake agreement – you couldn't get anything in writing, but back then many of us worked on handshake agreements which were gold – except of course for Paccar.

“In any case you couldn't have a written agreement with a distributor. I mean, I might have gone off my head and they would have been tied to a lunatic in a mental asylum. I can understand that. It didn't take much to tell me it's impossible to get a written thing. But the way they got rid of me was f...ing terrible.

"In the court hearing we exchanged documents. In theirs, we found a letter from a Melbourne solicitor telling them that I would probably sue them for how much I've lost in Australia – to which they said right, let him sue us.

“But I didn't sue them in Australia. I went to America. I took all our documents to a firm of lawyers in Washington who never go to court. All they do is give opinions. They specialise in that.

“They could have said, ‘no you haven't got a chance’, but they advised me that under anti-trust laws I could have a go. Under anti-trust you didn't have to guarantee your profits. Under anti-trust it's anticipated profits.

“Now the anticipated profit could have been $100 million. Our lawyers said not to do that because I’d frighten the jury to buggery. So we pegged it to $12 million. I wonder what Kenworth Australia is worth today?

"What they (Paccar) did through a whole network of things, ended up with me going before a judge who was called the 'Hanging Judge'. He had nothing to do with corporate law. He was in their pocket. They gave me what that judge said that I should get, which was nowhere near $12 million – it was nothing!

“I remember it like it was yesterday. My wife was with me, and a friend of mine - an American, and my lawyer from Sydney. We're in the judge's chambers and we said, we're not going to take that!

“He said, ‘Now listen to me. Let me warn you. It's taken six years to get before me. It'll take you another six years to get before the next one. And you know what the next judge is going to say? The first thing he'll say before he even reads the documents will be, I wonder why Judge Conti threw this out?’

"It took about 10 seconds for the penny to drop. The American lawyer that we had said, 'Laurie I don't want my bill, you don't have to pay me.'

I said, “Well that's lovely. But Jesus, who's got at you?”

"I was terribly f...ing hurt because I had a wife and nine children and it could have completely bankrupted me. It didn't, but they didn't know that… and they didn't care.

“I was more upset to think that anyone would do something like that to ruin a family. Oh, they were a lot of bastards! You know that for, maybe 10 years after, I wouldn't fly through America, I was so crook on them. I'd go to England via Singapore. I loved America. But Jesus, I don't like Pacific Car and Foundry. To give him his due, Don Pannell argued and argued against it – for me to keep the business, that is."

Laurie O'Neil would have every right to hate the sight of a Peterbilt after his business was destroyed in 1966 (he sold the last in1967), but his love of the marque continues unabated to this very day.

"I love it. It's the Formula One of trucks!"