INTRODUCTION

G'Day! My name is Tony Brown and photographing trucks is my hobby.

With my father being both a bus and truck driver most of his working life, my uncle running a large quarry in the Adelaide hills and myself  working for the South Australian agent for Perkins Diesel Engines over a twelve year period, it is probably only natural that I grew up with an interest in commercial vehicles. Although I have owned a camera since my mid teens, I never thought to record any of the trucks that I saw in everyday life. It wasn't until the early nineties and after I had seen a copy of the American Truck Historical Society [ATHS] magazine "Wheels of Time" with all its wonderful photos and stories relating to old trucks, that I regretted not taking photos of the trucks that were a part of my growing up. The fact that those nostalgic old photos aroused in me memories from the past of old Fodens, N series Macks, KB Internationals, ex-army Diamond Ts and many more familiar marques, prompted me to start recording the local trucking scene so that in years to come hopefully my photos may give someone the same pleasure. Armed with my old trusty X-300 Minolta and my then new Cannon EOS 1000 I set off to become a trucking historian.

At first my photography was a bit haphazard, not knowing exactly where to start or what format to follow. It took a little while, but eventually I got my act together and arrived at a routine that gave me reasonable results. I began to keep records of the date, location, make and model of truck and any other information that would make my photographs more interesting. Bitten by the bug I also started collecting trucking books and magazines and this led to submitting photos to those magazines that printed readers photographs. After having a few photos published, I began to receive mail from fellow trucking enthusiasts overseas who were interested in swapping photographs. This added another aspect to the hobby which eventually grew until at one stage I was corresponding with close to 30 mates all over the globe.

Then one day I received an unexpected call from the editor of "Truckin' Life" Mark Gibson, offering me the job of taking over the "People" pages in the magazine. The position involved interviewing drivers or owners and taking their photograph. Even though I was already running my own full time business and the interviewing would have to take place in my spare time, I jumped at the chance. With no previous experience I was thrown in at the deep end and after few minor hiccups managed to turn the task into another interesting extension of my hobby. I even had a full length article published. Not too bad for a lad that constantly failed English in high school! The job with "Truckin' Life" suddenly ended after three years due to a dispute in the Brisbane office, but I have no regrets as I learnt more about the trucking industry in those three years talking to drivers, owner drivers and other people connected to the industry than I could have possibly otherwise envisaged.

It has been more than 12 years now and 40 albums later since I first started in the hobby and although I soon realized that there were many other people also photographing the trucking scene plus the abundance world wide of fine magazines and books on the subject, I still enjoy it and like to think that I am doing my bit to preserve memories for the future.

If you have a comment or information relating to a photograph that I can add to my files, please contact me at motortruckpictures@bigpond.com .