Shearer tales documented in new video

The museum is home to two of the last shearers’ trucks to go north on the legendary Murchison, Gascoyne, Pilbara and Kimberley runs of the 1920s through to the late 1960s.

They are on permanent loan from Marc Synnot – known as ‘Young Marc’ to the shearers because his father, of Synott & Dunbar contracting fame, was also Marc – whose family was involved in the wool industry in the north for more than 50 years.

The occasion was the official launch of a 33-minute documentary video featuring the trucks, some of the shearers who rode them north and their stories of an era when shearing teams travelled, worked and played together, away from home for most of the year.

Some 90 people, including former shearers, roustabouts, pressers, wool classers and contractors, and their families, attended the first public viewing of the video at Revolutions, beside a battered 1948 Bedford with a long, unpadded wooden seat on its tray – shown in action in some of the scenes.

Originally the idea of former shearing contractor, historian and author Val Hobson, 81, the video titled The Truck Days became a project for the Shearers & Pastoral Workers Social Club of WA.

Dingo Is Talent, which produces the Home In WA television program, was engaged to make it and club members set about raising sponsorship and putting together suitable material from their own and other private photograph and amateur film collections.

Shearers & Pastoral Workers Social Club president Doug Kennedy, 77, a former wool classer who took over as shearing contractor from his father Eric, said executive committee members did not realise the amount of work and time that would be involved, but believed it was important to record the history while some of those who were there were still around.

“In speaking to some of the younger generation working in the North West, they had no idea that the area was all sheep and wool production before cattle and mining,” Mr Kennedy said.

“So it is great to have made some contribution (with the video) to the history of the north west of WA.

“The video has recorded an historic period (and) those people that participated in the wool industry, in particular as shearers and associated work force, that travelled the pastoral regions of WA on the back of trucks (and) who played a vital part in harvesting the clip, then a major export, when wool was king.

“Time of course has passed and the wool industry no longer exists in those northern regions (but) during that period, many lifetime friendships were made.

“There is a great sense of camaraderie between these men that worked together in those remote pastoral regions with all the hardships they endured – the rough conditions, fibre mattresses, wire frame stretchers, the isolation and primitive communications with home.”

Ron Reddingius from Dingo Is Talent described The Truck Days as his “most rewarding” production in 30 years of television.

“We were creating a piece of history that will now not be lost to the future or to old age,” Mr Reddingius said.

The video provides a researched account of the pastoral wool industry before its demise in the early 1970s due largely to losing its local workforce to the mining industry.

It also includes the personal reminiscences of retired wool classer and contractor Peter Letch, 77, and former shearers John Moore, 81, Kevin Plunkett, 86, David Sears, 78, Colin Christensen, 85, and Terry Wilkinson, 93.

They recalled details like when the truck did not appear to be slowing down as it approached the Whim Creek Hotel north of Port Hedland a cry would always go up “swag overboard”.

By some mysterious coincidence it was always the overseer’s or wool classer’s swag that fell off outside the Whim Creek Hotel, so the truck had to stop.

Shortened versions of The Truck Days will be shown at Revolutions as part of its shearing truck display and a copy has been presented to the JS Battye Library, an arm of the State Library which stores historical records and original publications.