Car number 3...1955 Hillman Husky station wagon.

A great little station wagon, it had a 1265 cc 35 bhp (26 kW) side valve engine with single Zenith carburettor. Anyone with any knowledge of old Pommy cars will know how the Zenith carby was capable of driving sane men right around the bend!!

Unlike the Minx with its column change, the gear lever for the Husky was floor mounted. There were individual seats in front and a bench seat in the rear which would fold flat to increase load area. The trim material was leather cloth. The rear door was a single piece opening sideways, the front seats could also be folded foreword and this gave a very long flat area, actually long enough for me to sleep on which I did as I drove this car from Brisbane to Adelaide!

My brother Des was working in a meat works in Murray Bridge south of Adelaide and wrote to tell me there jobs going, come on down....I chucked in my Brisbane job, threw some tools, and camping gear, in fact all my worldly possessions and chugged off over the Toowoomba Range, December of 1967.

Driving through the Australian Outback should never be taken lightly...here it was, summer, I was in a car that had probably already traveled to the moon and back and I was about to drive 2000km!. As it turned out the trip was good, 1967 was not a particularly hot summer, at least as I drove across three states. I did have one little 'incident'...I was just out of Balranald in NSW, that’s on the Hay plain between Hay and Mildura, when the engine over heated, this was the first time anything had happened since leaving Queensland. A check under the hood quickly found the problem, the V pulley on the end of the crankshaft, the pulley that drives the fan belt and radiator fan had disappeared!...the belt was still there but no pulley, it appeared the nut had come loose and simply fallen off, of course with the fan not spinning the engine soon overheated.

Fortunately my luck was with me, I spied the V pulley wedged alongside the radiator lower mount..my lucky day. I allowed the engine to cool and I installed the pulley, it fitted onto a keyed shaft, it was quite a snug fit but the nut was missing, I was less that 20km from Balranald and I decided to take the chance and drive, slowly, into town and get a new nut.

I made it to town ok but...it was Sunday, town was a dead as a cemetery, the one and only service station didnt have a nut like I required, the nut was unusual in that it was quite large (maybe 30 mm (1") and thin in dimension and of left hand thread, nuts like that don’t grow on trees.

I decided that the wreckers yard would probably be the only place I could get one. I found the yard and wasn’t surprised to see it closed, I prepared to spend the night out front, It was quite cool that day so I decided a fire would be good, I went off to collect some firewood, I'd only walked a few steps when I came across a small pile of discarded car-parts, small springs, screws, wiper blades etc...a nut caught my eye, my heart rate jumped a bit as I picked it up...it sure looked ok. With great hopes building up I hurried back to the Husky, quickly lifted the hood and put the old broom-stick in place to hold it up...believe it or not the nut that I had just found fitted perfectly!!  I couldn't believe it!...I stayed there the night anyway and come sunup I was a long way on towards Adelaide.

I met up with Des and spent the next few months working in the Murray Bridge Meat works Digestor, anyone who has been near a meat works will know that working in the digester is not the best job going, it involves boiling down all the offal from the meat works into tallow...the smell gets into your hair and skin and is almost impossible to remove...ah well the money was good.

Around the middle of 1968 the meat industry went into the doldrums due to a wide spread drought, the meat works put men off and, as usually is the case, last on - first off. Des was lucky enough to keep his job.

Myself and my friend Tom decided to check out the big lights in Sydney, by this time the Husky was without a roof and would not be the car to get us to Sydney.

Why no roof?, you may well ask...in the late 60's rabbits were in plague proportions around Murray Bridge, one of the favourite pastimes of the meat workers was bunny shooting, we would go almost every afternoon. I recall some paddocks quite close to town that appeared to get up and move the rabbit population was so thick! We cut the roof from the Husky to make it a shooting wagon, a bar was welded across the top and you could stand and shoot as your mate drove across the paddocks!!..it was terrific fun.

Another car is another story......