After nearly seven years taking on one of the country’s most remote and unforgiving transport routes, this legendary outback truckie has shifted his focus to the grain harvest in the west.
Based in Ceduna, South Australia, 64-year-old Kym Mozol has been tackling the notorious fortnightly run into a remote Aboriginal community called Tjuntjuntjara, delivering supplies to its only community store.
Home to about 100 people, the small town is located roughly 650 kilometres north-east of Kalgoorlie, in the Goldfields-Esperance region of Western Australia.
Tjuntjuntjara is only accessible by two dirt roads and both are in quite a sorry state.
For Kym, getting there requires a gruelling 1800km round trip across rough red dirt tracks, with some sections now in the worst condition he’s ever seen.
Though it’s approximately 14 hours each way – on a good run – Kym has at times been stuck there much longer, the longest of which saw him there for eight weeks.
Kym runs his own transport business, together with his wife Bethney Mozol. They have six trucks in their fleet – four Western Stars, a Kenworth cabover he recently purchased to cart water tankers and a rigid.
For the Tjuntjuntjara run, Kym relied on his trusty 1999 Kenworth T604, which is currently undergoing repairs before being sold to Jordan Lambeff, who is taking over the “rough as guts” run.
A qualified mechanic, Jordan had spent time working in the mines before deciding he was ready for a change – embarking on his first trip to Tjuntjuntjara on January 8, in another truck he owns.
While Kym has no plans to give up life on the road any time soon, he told Big Rigs the time was right to pass on the baton for this particular job. For some years, it’s been the only outback run he does, with the rest of his freight work revolving mostly around fertiliser, grain and general freight.
“I’d done it for nearly seven years, so I thought it was someone else’s turn,” he said.
“Being every fortnight, it means you can’t go away and do anything else. My last run to Tjuntjuntjara was in December. Then I spent seven weeks in Western Australia doing grain work.”
Along with being a truckie, Kym is also a farmer, honing his skills in trucks and machinery from as young as nine-years-old.
He says another reason the time was right to give up the Tjuntjuntjara run was because he was having to juggle the farm and being away while on this outback route.
“I had my son helping me out on the farm but he recently moved to Adelaide with his wife and kids, and my brother who used to work on the farm with me passed away in September 2023, so I lost two farmers,” Kym revealed.
“It meant I was having to work longer hours and work harder, as there was no one else working full time on the farm while I was gone. Something had to give, so I decided it was going to be Tjuntjuntjara.”
Kym is now driving his 2007 Western Star, pulling an AB triple set of tippers.
Following a brief time back at his Ceduna property this month, Kym plans to head back into Western Australia to do another couple of months of grain work, before returning home for seeding.
Speaking about his final Tjuntjuntjara run, Kym revealed things didn’t quite go as planned. Although it wasn’t anything he hadn’t seen before, as a seasoned outback truckie – what made this time different, was that he was trying to get back in time for his daughter’s wedding!
“For that trip, it took me a week because my trailer got bogged – it usually only takes two days. I had enough food and water with me for the week. You always have to take supplies with you just in case,” Kym explained.
“We had to put levy banks around the wheels, bucket the water out and then wait for it to dry out.”
“My truck got bogged, then another guy with a truck and trailer got bogged, along with a couple of four wheel drives that came out to help and got bogged too.”
Thankfully Kym made it back just in the nick of time. “I got back to Ceduna on the Thursday at 3pm, then got in another truck on Friday morning and drove to Clare to be there for my daughter’s wedding on the Saturday,” he revealed.
“I could’ve left the trailers there because the truck wasn’t bogged but then I’d have to go back to get the trailer, and it happened about 730-kilometres away from Ceduna.
“I had a few other things go wrong on that trip too. I broke a 30mm bolt in the airbag spring in the middle axle, so I had to chain that axle to the axles at the front and rear of it to keep it straight for the drive home. Oh, and the centre bearing shit itself too.
“And that was the last run to Tjuntjuntjara I did,” laughed Kym.
“The wedding was really beautiful and very relaxing. Once the wedding was over, I turned around and drove straight to Esperance.”
Kym said the weather has always been the biggest challenge with that run. “It’s the road condition when it gets too wet,” he said. “And breaking down, because there’s no phone service. I have a satellite phone but if you broke down and needed someone, you’d have to wait for them to come out from Ceduna.”
Until the road receives some much needed upgrades, these sorts of problems are likely to remain, for anyone brave enough to take on the job.
“Every month or so you’d have a bad run where something breaks, it’s just the road conditions. That’ll keep happening until they can get some funding to grade it a bit, to make it easier on the machines,” said Kym.
“Not much gets done to the road once you get over the border through to Tjuntjuntjara. The last time they graded that section was about three years ago. And when it does get graded, they start at the good end all the time!
“The first 100km from the SA/WA border heading west is the worst it’s ever been. And probably the last 80km on the South Australia side is also the worst it’s ever been. You’re lucky to get to 20km/h – it’s just that rough!”