Brisbane based truckie Julie Bell – who also goes by the pseudonym ‘Crazy Cat Lady’ – has been helping to brighten up the days of her fellow truckies through her words.
From inside her office, a 2014 Mack Super-Liner, she has put together numerous (and humorous) poems. If you’re lucky, you might catch her reading one out on the UHF while you’re stuck in peak hour traffic.
Bell, 52, says her penchant for rhyming all started during one boring and monotonous run in June last year. Before she knew it, she had written her first truck inspired poem, which has now grown into a collection of 14 poems, such as this:
I am a lady trucker
I drive a big old Mack
I’m on the road each day with you
Dealing with the same sort of crap
I drive through city traffic
I drive the open roads
I drive down small farm tracks
I cart all different sorts of loads
I tie down on the flat bed with straps or chains and dogs
I tip the load, I cart the boxes
I fill out the same logs
I drive through rain and heat wave
I drive from Dawn to Dusk
I won’t let anything beat me
Till I’m nothing but a husk
22 wheels and 40 tonnes
Of pure determination
Powering down the road
Across this beautiful
wide brown nation
I’m proud to be a truckie
I love the job I do
Taking on the challenges
As all my brothers do
Bell began her truck driving career just five years ago. “I started in baby trucks and worked my way into the bigger stuff. I started driving semis about a year ago. Now I do a mixture of local and interstate work, along the east coast,” she said.
Working for small transport business Wags Transport, she travels across Brisbane and into Sydney and Melbourne, carrying everything from general freight to oversize and steel, as well as pulling tankers and tippers.
Bell says her fascination with trucks was sparked in her teenage years. “I travelled around Australia from the age of 15 to 19, basically hitch-hiking in trucks, from town to town,” she explained.
“Having kids got in the way of driving trucks but now here I am. I had no background in trucking so had to learn everything from scratch.”
But since hitting the road, she hasn’t looked back. What she loves most about the job, she says, is the fellow truckies, as is exemplified by this poem:
I love listening to this channel
All the things that truckies say
There’s no filter and no censor
The government has no say
If you’re sensitive or delicate
You’d better block your ears
Cause political correctness
Just doesn’t happen here
Out on the open road
It’s all helpful and polite
And truckies wish each other well as they travel through the night
But round town it’s a circus
With no ringleader in sight
The abuse, the threats, the swearing
It goes on all day and night
Bell added that her poems are about lifting the mood up, making people feel a bit better about themselves and knowing their worth:
I write these little poems
for all you Truckies on the road
To lift your day a little
To lighten up your load
For the Truckies job is hard
Doesn’t matter what you cart
It all takes brains and muscle
On the road, and in the yard
So to all you drivers out there
In your Kenworths and your Macks
Your Scanias and Western Stars
Your DAFs and CATS and MANs
Freightliners and Ivecos,
Volvo’s and Mercedes too
You’re all my brothers on the road
And I love every one of you
As you listened to my poem
You’ve just done another mile
And it warms my heart to think
That I might have made you smile
So if you happen to see a Mack on the road adorned with cat stickers including one she’s named Luna and a bobble head in the window named Loki, be sure to listen out.