An old International truck that starred in the movie Crocodile Dundee, and usually resides at the outback Walkabout Creek Hotel in McKinlay, is undergoing repairs and will be back there soon.
The pub, which went on the market in July, is run by legendary outback couple Frank and Debbie Wust and is between Cloncurry and Winton.
“The truck is having a few repairs done at the moment. Frank has had to replace the timbers in the tray and revamp the seats. It will come back out the front as soon as he has finished,” Debbie told Spy after numerous truckies had contacted me regarding it.
Frank and Debbie were from Biloela, in central Queensland, before they took over the pub at the end of March 2004.
Frank had worked in the coal plant at the mine there, and Deb was a travel consultant.
In 2014, they got a phone call from the executive assistant to the Cornell family, asking if they would like to have the truck – and they jumped at the chance of course.
“It’s not every day John Cornell offers you a piece of Australian film history. They gave us the truck and a certificate of authenticity signed by both John Cornell and Paul Hogan. All we had to do was pay the freight to get it here,” Frank said at the time.
Other stars were John Meillon who played Wally the tour guide and Linda Kozlowski, who played a reporter for Newsday America, for whom she travelled Down Under to write a feature on Australia and its people.
The truck arrived at the Walkabout Creek Hotel on Blinko’s Transport on November 9, 2014 and soon ended out the front of the pub to help lure the tourists in for a photo opportunity.
The couple have never met the human star of Crocodile Dundee, Paul Hogan, but have watched the movie a few times.
They are pretty good at answering the flood of questions about Crocodile Dundee which was released in 1986.