What a rollercoaster life has been since my last column. Dealing with the death of my mother has shown what a wonderful industry I come from and how important your family and friends are.
I know I speak about this often and it’s been proven not only in dealing with the loss of Mum but also an incident in the immediate aftermath.
Returning from Mum’s funeral I left almost immediately for the Festival of Transport in Alice Springs to host the Transport Women Australia Limited opening breakfast at the festival.
The program includes the Cummins race afternoon and the opening drinks at Stuarts Kitchen on the Friday night. However, after the breakfast I felt a need to retreat to my motel room.
After getting up on Saturday morning I had a phone call saying there had been suspicious activity on my bank account.
Unfortunately, the caller who was advising me of the alleged suspicious activity was the actual scammer. After lots of questions and a couple of phone calls, and my naturally suspicious mind and lack of trust, I contacted the bank, cancelled my cards, and froze my bank accounts, which left me in Alice Springs with no access to money and $7 in my purse to get through Saturday, Sunday and transiting via Adelaide.
Fortunately for me, I work in the trucking industry and have amazing friends and knew that nobody would let me go away without money or to go without anything really; that all I needed to do was ask or even not ask and just describe my situation and this proved to be true as my friends, the McMillans, the Hayters and the Whitmores offered money to make sure I got home with cash in my purse until the banks sorted out the issue with the hacking of my bank account.
Please, you need to be very wary, but it also shows that there are still wonderful people in the world, and we need to be grateful for them.
The Festival of Transport itself is wonderful, the breakfast was a huge success, lots of wonderful people, the weather was perfect, food was great and ABC radio was in attendance to do some interviews.
Everything was well organised; Nick, Dee and the rest of the staff and volunteers at the Hall of Fame did a wonderful job.
On Saturday afternoon at the induction ceremony Hazel Whitmore from Whitmore Bus Group was inducted into the Hall of Fame and TWAL could not be prouder than myself and her son Jamie. I also got to witness the induction of David Hayter who I know from my days at the Livestock and Bulk Carriers Association and Adrian Johnson with whom I was friends back in the 1970s when I was growing up in North Bourke.
The Saturday night legends dinner was a fun night for everyone involved, with some of us all dressed up and some coming straight from the inductions but there was great food, lots and lots of laughter, a wardrobe malfunction, and a few minutes on the On the Road podcast with Mike Williams. All in all, catching up with a friends and acquaintances from around Australia, A fabulous weekend!
I then hibernated for the week only emerging for the Australian Freight Industry Awards on Saturday night as a guest of the NHVR.
TWAL was truly fortunate to have two finalists for the awards, Louise Azzopardi in the Young Achiever category and Alex Fraser/Hanson Australia in the Female Leadership category. Cara Spencer accepted the win for Alex Frazer/Hanson Australia for the Female Leadership Award, while Louise was unsuccessful, a fabulous young woman from Linfox Logistics – Claudia Jennings took out the award.
We are justly proud of Alex Fraser and Hanson Australia who have brought a huge amount of young female drivers to their companies since 2018 when they first joined the Women Driving Transport Careers Initiative, now steadily added to their total since then adopting their own programme.
Transport Women Australia Limited are proud of this program and the companies who have been a part of it since inception of the joint venture with Wodonga TAFE and Volvo Group.