The F*** Word

In-depth

17 Sep

Colin Merrett uses the word F***. A lot! It’d be enough to make your ears burn.

“I’m too old to care,” says Colin, a septuagenarian. “I’ve been using F*** all my life. The wife’s used to it, and she says it all the time too. Some of my mates don’t like me using it so much and they say F*** back to me. The other F***, that is”

The “F***” so commonly used in Colin’s vocabulary is Ford. When we met he had four of them lined up in order of age - a 1935 model, a ’48, a 1966 F800 and a 1979 Louisville.

“When I got the Louisville in 1980, everyone said to me, ‘Why do you want a truck that size for?’

The Merrett’s are well known in their home town of Nhill, Victoria, where Colin is a third generation truckie. Well past retirement age, Colin is not letting the grass grow under his feet.

“The old Louisville has done over 4,000,000 km and it’s barely run in. And I only have two payments left on it. I still work the Louis, carting grain from Nhill down to the other side of Warrnambool.”

The first truck Colin ever owned was a ‘37, which he bought from his father with 1,000,000km (or maybe that was miles) already on the clock. “We used to border hop. In the early days you were only allowed to cart stuff in Victoria, provided the railways didn’t want to do it. We built a depot between Bordertown and the border and my job when I left school was to drive this truck, carting wool over there and picking up the stuff that had come from over the border to take back. I started driving on a South Australian licence at 16.

“Dad said we needed someone to drive the truck to Melbourne and he picked me. That was a 1950 Ford. I would do three trips a week to Melbourne and back. In the truck we carried a change of oil, an axle, head gaskets, water, starter motor, generator and pistons, and the tools to work with them. I had a broken piston more than once which I fixed on the side of the road. It was a common problem in the old side valve Fords.

“I would get under the truck, drop the sump, pull the head off, put another piston on the conrod and put it all back together and get going again. Job be right.”

Colin’s views about tyre wear also come from another age.

“All this shit about tyres not being safe when they have still half the tread on them. We used to run the old rag tyres down until we got to the lining. I remember coming over the ranges about 10 km west of Nhill and I had a tyre where I could see the tube coming through. I reckoned I could get from there to home before the tube blew. That’s just what we used to do.

“Petrol got up to 2/6p a gallon. It was shocking! So I would put kerosene in one tank. She would run on kerosene as good as gold. Kerosene was much cheaper than petrol in those days.

“We had to worry about weights and measures in those days but we ran overweight anyway. We had a single wheel push axle in front of the drive. It wasn’t set up on hydraulics but it was set up with a series of holes in the spring hangar. If it was on the Weybridge you’d get in there with the jack, jack it down and put a pin through it so there was about 10 ton on that pusher axle. They used to think you couldn’t have much weight on that so they just weighed the drive. That’s how we got away with it.

“One night I got nearly to the top of a steep hill and the truck stopped. Keith Thomson, who was going past, pulled up and asked what was wrong? I said I’d missed a gear and now I can’t get started up. I said I’ll back down on the flat and start off again. So Keith held the traffic up and I backed down.”

“I’d been sitting up there with the clutch slipping and everything was red hot. Thought I better wait until everything cooled down. After a while I headed off again and would you believe I did exactly the same thing! She (the truck) said to me, ‘I told you last time I couldn’t go any further than this.’ In the end Keith towed me over. They were good times.”

“We used to cart grain way out woop-woop to a chook farm. Someone told me about a shortcut which I took. There was supposed to be a bridge over a river which I couldn’t find. A copper came along and said that there was no bridge but a punt. Wasn’t too keen on that. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I go across all time.’ Down I go and the bloke who operates the punt comes out and asks how much weight I’ve got on. A fair bit, I replied, which was the understatement of the day.

“I drove on and the bloody boat was sitting real low in the water. We got over the other side and it wouldn’t hook up to the landing, it was sitting so low. He backed back and had another go and just managed to hook on.

“I said, ‘Now we’ve got another problem because I won’t get up over the bank.’ He told me to back up as far as possible to the stern and take a run at it. So I backed right up to the back of the punt, with water lapping over the stern and gave the old girl a spurt but didn’t make it. The second attempt I just got off but I couldn’t get up the incline. The punt went back and collected the copper, who drove straight past me without apologising for suggesting the bloody punt in the first place! I didn’t mind that so much actually, as I was so overweight, but I had to sit there until the next day until a grader could pull me out.”

These are just a few of many stories that Colin had in his memory bank after 60 years behind the wheel of, mostly Fords. He shows no sign of slowing down, although wife, Shirley would like him to retire.

“If I was home every day, we’d be divorced in five minutes.

……..

I wrote this story quite some time ago, and given Colin was 78 years young at the time, I thought it prudent to ring him and see if he was, well... still alive and kicking. Shirley answered his mobile and I immediately thought the worst, and that the story would become a eulogy. But thankfully no, Col was just having a relax.

We talked and talked and when I replayed the recording, Colin’s wonderfully dry sense of humour it was too good not to share. So, rather than write an update on the Merrett’s, Colin can tell you in his own words.

Listen here:

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