Truckie mum “I raised my kids on the road”

This WA mum homeschooled her girls while driving big rigs across the country

When her marriage broke down in the early ’90s, leaving her with two young daughters to raise alone, Heather Jones was handed a lifeline – an offer to drive a truck for a transport company in Karratha in Western Australia.

It would give the former mining secretary and selfprofessed tomboy a great income – and at the same time provide a mobile home for her young family.

“Kersti was five and Chelsea was four,” Heather, 51, recalls of the moment she decided to take her girls on the adventure of a lifetime.

“The [company] said to me as long as those girls don’t get out of the truck you’re more than welcome to come and work for us. So that was our start in the industry,” Heather explains.

With a bunk, a fridge and a closet built in, Heather homeschooled her girls as she drove around Australia – the tight-knit trio spent seven years happily learning.

They each had their chores – youngest daughter Chelsea packed healthy snacks and lunches in the morning and Kersti would make sure they had all the books and tapes they needed for each lesson.

It wasn’t just basic spelling and arithmetic they learned, but life lessons the girls say put them streets ahead of their peers when, as teenagers, they started traditional lessons in high school.

“The work they gave us when I started school I’d already done at home!” recalls Kersti, now 29. “We learned so many more meaningful lessons [on the road] than we could ever have learned at school.”

“Mum always made homeschooling fun and interesting, and she made sure we had tutors for any extra help we needed,” adds Chelsea, 28.

After the girls decided they wanted to attend school like their friends in their early teens, Heather made Perth their home base. And not long after that she made a big change for herself, too.

Horrified by the training conditions at the company she was working for, Heather quit her job, but not the industry. She decided go into business on her own, vowing to use the opportunity to get other female drivers on the road, too.

“I was absolutely terrified because I put everything of ours on the line,” she recalls of her decision to start Success Transport – a solely female owned and operated trucking company.

“I had to mortgage the house and that was our only safety net. And then I had to go out there and compete with the boys for every single job.”

That was in 2004. Today, Heather’s daughters both work alongside her in the business, and all three women have vowed to up the female quota of truck drivers in the industry, which sits at five per cent.

‘If I could have 100 women in trucks tomorrow I would’

With that in mind, they started Pilbara Heavy Haulage Girls, a training and mentoring service that helps women both young and old get on the road.

“We like to target young women before they’ve had children, and the older women in their 40s and beyond, especially those who’ve been left by their husband or partner and literally have nothing,” says Heather.

“I’ve got a woman with me at the moment who is 59, a single person who has brought up her children.

“This is an industry where you can earn a fantastic income and be free. Free to literally drive up and down the highway, doing what you want and living in the back of your truck,” she says.

“If I could have 100 women in trucks tomorrow I would. I love the fact we can empower these women.

“Back in the beginning I was given a chance and without that I don’t know where I’d be,” says Heather. “To pay it forward has been my whole life.”