A Bit Of Argy-bargy
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday November 22, 1997
The Captain Bligh who once ferried quivering passengers across Brisbane's Moreton Bay has mellowed and moved on. But his Amazonian daughters have taken over the helm to create an unlikely transport dynasty. By Frank Robson.
Years ago, a group of us bound from Brisbane to nearby Moreton Island came close to being thrown off the barge before it left port. Our crime, according to skipper Neville Hawkins, was letting our kids stray into a prohibited area. They hadn't, but by the time the real culprits emerged, relations with the lean and frenetic Hawkins had passed flashpoint and entered apocalyptic.
"Get off!" he kept screaming, pointing at the exit ramp. "Get off! Get off! Get off! Get off!"
In the end, we were saved by all the other vehicles parked behind ours on deck and the issuing of a formal apology for calling Hawkins a "f...ing Nazi" in
the heat of battle. Over time, reports grew of other explosive encounters with the captain of the Moreton Venture. In one, Hawkins pulled up in the middle
of Moreton Bay, shut down the motors and tore someone to bits over the loudspeaker, refusing to go on until the miscreant stopped whatever he was doing. In another, an entire fishing club was banned for life for "backchatting"; in yet another, while trying to pluck four drowning yachties from a stormy sea, Hawkins bellowed on the third pass: "Catch hold, you bastards, or I'm leaving you here!" They made it, and Hawkins charged them $15 each for fares.
At Kooringal on Moreton Island's southern tip, locals used to take folding chairs and beer to the beach in anticipation of his arrival. "It was the best show around," one of them says now. "Heaps of people would come to watch Nev yelling and screaming at his passengers." Hawkins' regular crew - his wife, Shirley, and one or more of their three adult daughters - helped police
his rules, but with nowhere near the same zeal. (The most contentious no-nos were smoking on the vehicle deck; taking alcohol into prohibited areas; "running" children, and any deviation from strict loading and unloading procedures.)
The Hawkins women wore short blue tunics with a monogrammed "H" (the company logo) and were themselves often victims of a withering tirade from the bridge. They never responded, enduring each storm in silence. Accounts of their Amazonian strength and abilities rivalled those of the skipper's powder-keg volatility, giving the enterprise a Conrad-esque air of intrigue and unpredictability.
About eight years ago, Neville and Shirley Hawkins suddenly left the barge and began driving semitrailers and road trains around Australia, living in their cabs and returning to Brisbane only briefly. Control of the family companies was divided between their daughters: Anne Davies, 42, runs the barge; Kerry Seymour, 41, is in charge of road freight; and the youngest, Roz Shaw, 33, replaced Hawkins as managing director.
When Roz took over, Hawkins Transport had three trucks and a handful of staff; under her control, it has grown to 50 trucks and 100 staff, with an estimated value of $16 million. The sisters can drive anything; they regularly labour like men, yet even now they like to work in the little netball-type uniforms their mum designed. Roz continues to use her father's business cards, with his name crossed out and hers pencilled in.
Modesty? Deference to the outgoing skipper? Roz shakes her head. "We were brought up to never waste anything," she says. "When I get rid of all Dad's cards, then I will have my own card."
I wait for her to laugh, but she doesn't.
What made Neville Hawkins
so cranky? Why is he fixated with order, frugality and rules? And what will happen if he remembers I once called him a Nazi? (Keep in mind, he has reduced strong men to jelly for parking incorrectly.) Mercifully, when we get together during one of their Brisbane stopovers, Hawkins doesn't remember me. Relaxed and friendly after driving 13,000 km in 10 days - "All I ever really wanted to do was drive trucks" - he and Shirley, both in their early sixties, spend a couple of hours reviewing the family transport dynasty.
The first carrier was his grandfather,
T. B. Hawkins, a teetotaller who refused to transport alcohol. Then came his father, Harold, who drank the entire proceeds of T. B.'s toil and abstinence, ruining the company and dying of liver disease at 47. Neville remembers Harold as an accordion-playing raconteur, generous and charming, but so chaotic in his personal affairs he would sometimes lend one of his seven cars and forget who had it until weeks later.
"Party boy," says Shirley in her succinct way, and Neville nods.
Harold disliked rules and regulations, bequeathing Neville - who took over the company at 20 - a nightmare of unpaid taxes and neglected paperwork. A numbers whiz who topped the State in some of his earlier accountancy exams, Neville resurrected the company only to hand it over to his late mother, Alice - "a tyrant who also drank"- because he couldn't stand working with her and her new lover.
Disowned by their respective mothers for marrying young, he and Shirley started a transport business of their own. They spent all their time together, insular but happy - "talking, always talking" - and saving every penny. "We are both very mean," Shirley notes matter-of-factly.
In the late 1960s, the couple was drawn to the remote beauty of Moreton Island. They bought land at Kooringal, building a house from scrap timber ferried 20 nautical miles across the often stormy bay in a small open boat, their four kids perched atop the loads. They opened Kooringal's first shop and brought passengers and freight from the mainland, acquiring ever larger boats to meet demand. Like ex-teacher Shirley, the kids were expert drivers from an early age. The 35 km-long, pure sand island has no roads, just 4WD tracks. Vehicles travel between its three small communities - Kooringal, Bulwer and Cowan Cowan to the north - via the beaches.
This wild and challenging isolation suited Neville Hawkins' perspective on the world. He formed his family into
a tight, well-disciplined workforce, servicing Kooringal's every need.
"Neville has very little tolerance for drunks," says Shirley. What he had
was tested every Friday night when passengers were usually drunk by the time they left Brisbane; when they reached Kooringal two hours later, many were legless, falling into the dinghy
to go ashore.
"They always used to land on their Coolite iceboxes and smash them to bits," recalls Anne who, as a teenager, drove them to their cottages in a 4WD ex-army truck. "When they got off, they would fall into the bushes and just sleep there till morning." (Anne later became
a nurse, using her skills to attend victims of heart attacks and accidents when there was no resident doctor.)
Kerry, the "strongest" sister - "Strong as an ox," boasts her mother - helped on the boats, handling tonnes of freight and sometimes swimming drums of fuel ashore through shark-infested sea and rolling them, unaided, up the beach. During holiday periods she ran the shop. When she was 15, the boy she would later marry came in with another girl. Kerry remembers his words. "He said, 'I'll have a packet of P.K and a Cherry Ripe.' Then he turned to the girl and said, 'I have $20 and I intend to spend it all before I go home.' "
She laughs. "Des was a big-noter
and a pain in the neck ... I helped him rebuild a [beach buggy] outside the shop, but we didn't start dating till years later." (Kerry and Anne were both married on the deck of the barge.)
Being younger, Roz, the "brainy" sister, was left to her own devices. She joined "The Clan", a group of daredevil kids who tore about endlessly in old VWs
and motorised trikes. Back then, when
no road rules applied, parents allowed children as young as eight to drive - often to get them out of their hair during the long summer break. Roz's future husband, Robert, was another Clan member. "We were absolute ratbags," she says. "We raged every night, rolled cars and had all sorts of accidents, yet no-one was seriously hurt. If my kids did what we did, I'd be horrified."
When they left school, Kerry, Roz and their brother, John, went straight into the family company. Anne went overseas for a few years, then joined the others. "We really don't have any other friends," she says now. "Just the family." John, 40, doesn't get on with his father and left the company several times before Neville blew up and told him he could never return. John now works for an opposition trucking company in Townsville.
Why did their father suddenly leave the barge and the island? Roz says he missed driving trucks, but Kerry believes Hawkins' pride was hurt. "We virtually built Kooringal from scratch ... Dad did everything for those people, that's why they called him the 'King of Kooringal'. But in the end, some of them turned against him; they said he was making too much money out of them. It wasn't true, but it really upset him ... I think that's why he got out."
Kerry says Roz wasn't afraid to stand up to Neville, but she and Anne never opposed him: "He's much happier now, but in his angry days - when he got in
a foul mood - it was because he was worried, or something had gone wrong.
I understood that. It was usually me or Mum that copped it: we were his favourite whipping girls. But you'd just wear it, and then it would go away."
On a recent Sunday, the girls of
"H company" return to the island that shaped their lives. They stand on the deck of the Moreton Venture in their snazzy uniforms, watching the line of distant hills take form and colour. Since Neville left, the barge plies mainly between the Hawkins depot near the Port of Brisbane and The Wrecks, a popular anchorage on Moreton's western shore. With 12 children between them, and the company to run, the sisters rarely get time off together. Except for Anne, who goes there daily on the barge, they no longer visit the island much, put off by the restrictions that came with extended National Parks, resident rangers, camping fees, and - most offensive to
the ever-mobile Hawkins - a crackdown on child drivers.
Watching them laughing together on deck, it's hard to reconcile the sisters' conventional looks (apart from those uniforms and the strength evident in their hands and arms) with stories of their legendary toughness and forbearance. Like Kerry falling off a semitrailer she was loading, then working on in pain
for 18 months before learning her wrist was broken. Or Anne crossing the bay
in an open dinghy, holding together the forehead of a man who'd been slashed with a bottle; or Roz, even before she became the boss, agreeing to fire staff on her father's behalf because he was too "soft-hearted" to do it.
When I ask about John Hawkins, Roz says, "The fact is, he just can't work for us. He couldn't accept that Dad was boss, or that I became the boss after Dad left."
Anne: "He's very talented, but he's not boss material. I know I'm not, and Kerry knows she's not, but John won't accept it." (Neville Hawkins says his "party-going" son can't handle responsibility: "He's either going off his tree and abusing staff, or letting them do what they like." John responds: "After all those years, I wasn't prepared to play second fiddle to Roz. Dad and I are both fiery, which is probably why we never got on.")
How do men in general react to a transport empire run by women? Kerry: "We told our drivers, 'You're working for female bosses. If you can't handle that, you can't work here.' Some left right then, but most are fine. We still get callers from other transport companies who say, 'Don't you have any men there?' "
Roz: "We're all anti-feminist. We don't think women should have to 'take a stand'; they can do whatever they want. If I take a truck out [she got her truck licence at 17] I make sure I'm wearing make-up and a dress. I don't like that image among some female truckies who feel they have to look and talk like blokes."
Anne: "Strangely enough, it's women who seem most horrified by what we do."
Kerry: "When I was younger, women on the barge used to tell me all the time
I shouldn't work so hard; shouldn't let my father exploit me. Later, some of
the same women would ask our mother, 'How come your girls are so well-adjusted? How come they can turn their hands to anything?' "
By now, we can make out a cluster
of vehicles and figures waiting on the island beach. On the lower deck, arriving passengers stir, pointing from their vehicles at the blueness of the
sea and the towering white sandhills. Among them are Evan and Mary Edwards, who've known the Hawkins for 30 years. "They're good people to deal with," Evan says. "But if you do something wrong, they will yell at you.
I do what they say. If they say, 'Let your tyres down to 15 pounds per square inch,' [for sand driving] that's exactly what you should do."
Later, the sisters discuss famous island heart attacks over coffee at the nearby Tangalooma Resort. Roz: "Remember the bloke who 'died in the act' on the sandhills? Remember how his girlfriend ran naked to get help?"
Anne: "She was always naked ..."
Roz: "You couldn't get a better way to go!"
As they joke on, a small boy - one of theirs - approaches the table whimpering over a scraped knee. They ignore him at first ("Typical male reaction to a bit of pain," snorts Kerry), but after a while Anne interrupts herself and turns to the unhappy child. "The thing to do," she tells him pleasantly, "is to go and lie down somewhere and die quietly."
Since hitting the road, Neville Hawkins is a lot more relaxed. "The girls can run everything now," he says. "They don't need me any more. Knowing that pisses me off sometimes, but mostly I'm happy and proud of them."
There were times, he admits, when he was arrogant and short-tempered: "But I was in charge of a vessel, and if people stood me up, I would always pull rank." After 43 years together, he and Shirley seem closer than ever. Hawkins marvels at her powers of observation: how she'll notice a new camellia bush in a South Australian backyard they passed a year earlier, or
a repainted house somewhere, or a new billboard beside the Hume Highway.
"She's incredible," he says fondly.
"I think she'd make a terrific detective." When I leave 30 minutes later, Shirley gives me a searching look. "I've seen you somewhere," she says. "Now
where was it ... ?"
© 1997 Sydney Morning Herald