It wasn’t just the maintenance on the Stanhope factory’s extensive truck fleet but, in his early days, George was a driver, which gave him the unique experience of wrestling the 12-and-a-half gallon cans from farmers’ dairies onto the back of the tray trucks and then off-loading them at the factory.
For most of the 39 years, George was a mechanic working to service and maintain the trucks.
He witnessed the transition from cans to bulk milk collection in semi-trailer tankers.
George first worked for the Stanhope and District Dairy Co-operative after moving to the town in 1959.
“Most of the farms had a conveyor and you would push the cans along that to get them onto the truck,” he said.
“Sometimes you had to lift them up from the ground. There was a real knack to that, lifting about 130 pounds [58kg]. I don’t reckon you’d be allowed to do it, these days.”
While collecting the full cans of whole milk, the drivers had to drop off empty cans for the next milking, and in the days before on-farm refrigeration, timing was everything.
“We’d take them into the factory and Keith Murphy and Vin McGrath would unload them into the hopper,” George said.
He found permanent work as a mechanic servicing the tray trucks — initially Fords, and then Thames Traders.
Neither rain nor hail stopped the dogged drivers from their milk collection, but sometimes an overzealous driver would run into trouble in the wet weather.
“One of the worst places was near the river at Yambuna in the floods,” George said.
“Water would get into the diffs and gearboxes. Water and oil don’t mix too well.”
Over the years George has played an active role in Stanhope life, as an executive on the RSL Sub-branch, with the fire brigade and as a contributor to the town’s newsletter, exercising one of his passions — local history.
He lives only a few hundred metres from the factory.
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