The new Actros.
TO THE NEW ZEALAND TRUCKING INDUSTRY, Jim Barker was an icon, a legend, pioneer, a visionar y…and a l arger-than-life character. To truckie Daniel Mateni he was all of that….and much, much more. He was his beloved Grandad Jim. The founder and inspirational leader of Freight Lines, Bulk Lines, Stock Lines, plus Strait Shipping and Bluebridge Ferries, was Daniel’s role model, hero, mentor and confidant.
And when Big Jim died back in 2016, Daniel – encouraged and supported by his grandfather – had just achieved the dream of buying his first truck.
He was devastated: “Jim’s death was a big hit for me. I’d only just started going….but I was ready to give up right then and there.
“In so many ways, the confidence in going out on my own was knowing that he would be there. Then (when he died) it was ‘what am I going to do?’ ”
That the grieving Daniel didn’t quit on his newly-created Main Road transport business was also down to Big Jim. His Grandad, Daniel says, had heaps of colourful sayings: “The biggest one for me was ‘cowboys don’t cry.’
“You’d be busy and stressed out – yelling and screaming about things – and Jim would say: ‘Cowboys don’t cry – just get on with it. Crying ain’t gonna get you nowhere.’ ”
So, af ter his death, his grandson got his act together – and just got on with it. His feelings showed with the picture of his Grandad airbrushed onto the back of the cab on his Kenworth
K104 – that first truck – along with those words: “Cowboys don’t cr y.”
You might think that being Jim Barker’s grandson would, for sure, mean that Daniel was always going to be involved in the “family business.”
And that was certainly how he started out in his working life. But for the past handful of years he’s been intent on stepping outside that seemingly comfortable possibility….and creating something of his own.
Not that the 40-year-old, whose Main Road Limited company is now six years old, is claiming to have done it all by himself. Far f rom it.
“I’m definitely under no illusion that I’ve done this on my own – it’s been the people around me, with me and sometimes against me that has kept me going and got me to where I want to be essentially.”
He’s done it with the help of the huge business that Jim Barker created and many people in it – r unning his own small business alongside it....and with its help.
It has gone beyond close f amily – like Grandad Jim and
Nana Bev, his Mum Sheryl (Ellison) and Uncle Peter (Barker) – to individual drivers like David (Stretch) O’Sullivan, Lance Crosland and Mathew Cribb, to good mates who have come to his aid….
Thanks even to the help he’s had f rom other transport operators, like the Porter Group, Barry Satherley and PTS owner Scott Miers.
And he’s done it mostly because of Grandad Jim’s huge
influence on his life – a s f ar back as he can remember...back to when he was a little boy.
He reckons his childhood was spent “all over the place” – he and his Mum and Dad (Sheryl and Timmy Mateni) moving around a lot.
“And they didn’t have anything to do with trucking or transport. Dad was an aerial installer and a l awnmowing contractor, while Mum was a schoolteacher.” (Sheryl would though, go on to become the managing director of Strait Shipping, af ter Jim’s f rustration with dealing with the Railways’ unreliability and uncaring attitude led to him starting up his own Cook Strait ferr y ser vice).
There was though a constant – his grandparents, Jim and Bev, in Otorohanga – and Jim’s world of trucks and trucking. It was where Jim and Bev, his sister Cynthia and brother-in-law Dennis Dow had started out – f orming Otorohanga Transport, in 1963.
Daniel reckons “I always spent a lot of time with them: School holidays – and I s tayed with them on and off.”
And it soon evolved that trucks and trucking “was all I wanted to do and where I wanted to be. To me Otorohanga (with Bev and Jim) was home.
“I think Grandad Jim was the motivation: I always wanted to be around him and see what he was doing. But I liked being
around all the truck drivers too: Sale day was Wednesday in Otorohanga so I’d be hanging out there.”
He’d entertain himself “washing trucks or basically kicking stones around. They taught me how to grease trucks when I was about 10 years old and that was me. Uncle Pete (Peter Barker) drove, so I went with him and Cribby (Mathew Cribb).”
This went on for years: “Even as a teenager – r ight through. I’d be living with them (Bev and Jim) and annoying all the truck drivers to take me for a r ide. Cribby was a hero for me growing up, but he was a bit naughty so I wasn’t allowed to go with him all the time – and so I had to go with Arlo (Mark Dew).”
There are many special memories – like for instance: “Grandad actually pulled me out of school for two weeks when I was about nine, to take me down to the South Island. We took forever to get down there, on a t iki tour – and I got to watch him on the brick phone talking to people along the way.”
At the Clyde Dam he watched as a couple of big silos Jim had bought for lime storage at calcium carbonate producer Omya’s Te Kuiti plant, were broken down and loaded onto transporters. Then he rode home in one of the trucks, travelling in a c onvoy with pilot escorts: “It was really cool.”
On leaving school Daniel worked in the Christchurch yard of
Freight Lines as a f orklif t operator for about a year – and then moved to Auckland and worked at the company’s depot there until he turned 18, when he moved down to Otorohanga, and got his heavy traffic (HT) licence.
“I’d like to say that was self-driven (rather than an opportunity offered and organised by his Grandad): I wanted to be a bigtime trucker for as long as I c an remember.”
Of course, Freight Lines made it possible – and gave him a job straight off – driving a l ittle four-wheeler Nissan Diesel (“the Datsun,” he calls it), doing local runaround work.
For the next 15 years or so he drove for Freight Lines
(or Bulk Lines): “Once I got my trailer licence I was off to Wellington.” He progressed through the likes of a 113 Scania, a Volvo 460 FH12….eventually getting a brand-new Kenworth K104.
Around 2014, he had a c hange of direction – turning to heavy-haulage pilot duties, working for both Freight Lines and the Porter Group. In return he helped out with the dispatching of the Porters trucks…
And then, with the support of his Grandad and Uncle Peter, he got into driver training. That, he says, was another notch in his belt: “It’s all been notches,” he adds, summing-up his working life: “I wanted to get into training because I wanted to learn more about that aspect of it – how they were getting licences, how they were training people. Piloting I just liked doing and because I wanted to learn about heavy haulage.”
The biggest notches in his belt – t he biggest learnings – had always come via Jim: “If I’d done something wrong, he’d ring up and say ‘we’re going for a drive’ – and everyone knew what that meant!
“Grandad was always out and about, travelling around. So sometimes he’d ring out of the blue and say ‘get out of bed – we’re going to the sales.’ If it was a c lose one I’d get to go and watch what’s going on.
“Grandad was like my idol in every f acet: As a f ather, grandfather, a boss….drinking legend. The biggest thing for me was his interaction with people, in every situation – his ability to talk people down. You’d get a t ruck driver spinning out, all red…and Grandad was just calm and collected and able to resolve situations. He could just get on with people everywhere we went.”
And Daniel reckons with a l augh: “Sometimes I think the only thing I got off him is that my hair’s f alling out and I have a beer gut! But I have got his calm composure. Well, about 90% of the time – I h aven’t quite reached 100. If you’d have asked me that yesterday, you’d have got a different answer.”
However, Daniel does say that Jim didn’t always get it right with his advice: “He used to always say: ‘Take the job on and work out how you’re gonna do it later.’ But, oh my God, that’s bitten me in the arse many times!
“I look back now and I wish I’d asked him more questions. Even now, every decision I go to make I think: ‘What would he have done?’ Or, ‘I just wish he’d give me a little bit of guidance here.’ But in saying that, I s till go to my grandmother, ‘cos she clearly knows everything that’s going on.”
The decision to stand a l ittle bit apart f rom the f amily business is also down to Jim, he reckons: “When I was growing up – and even in Grandad’s latter years – he was always big on standing on your own two feet.
“I would bitch and moan about certain things within the company and he’d say ‘well you’re not in the position to do anything about it until you go out on your own’. I don’t know if it was me wanting things my way, but I wanted to take control of my own destiny as such.”
So Daniel could “upskill – put another notch in the belt”
– in 2015 he signed-up with the Bay of Plenty Polytech to become a commercial driver training tutor, running an 18-week course in Otorohanga.
The followup to that was the creation of Main Road Training – owned by Jim, Peter Barker and Daniel – under the Freight Lines umbrella: “The driver shortage was the reason we