With a ‘working lifetime’ of experience within the transport industry, Road Transport Hall of Famer Graham Sheldrake has essentially seen it all. He’s been a mechanic, a truck driver, a truck owner-operator and business owner, but it’s his ‘putting back into the industry’ mantra that makes him a Southpac legend.

Sheldrake was born in Great Yarmouth, England, however his family emigrated to New Zealand in 1956, when he was just two. Of course he doesn’t remember the trip but says that he has seen early photos of them on the Captain Hobson coming through the Panama Canal.

“Because my dad was a so-called ‘10 Pound Pom’, we came into Wellington and they sent us to Patea. Dad was an argon welder, able to weld aluminium and stainless steel, so he got a job at the freezer works there.”

Sheldrake says that the family then shifted to Waitotara near Wanganui and then eventually ended up in Tokoroa after his father got a job at the Kinleith workshops, and a place where Sheldrake joined him after leaving school.

“I left school and went straight into a petrol mechanic apprenticeship at New Zealand Forest Products at Kinleith, that was in the days before diesel mechanics apprenticeships.”

As luck would have it, he says that by the time he’d completed the petrol apprenticeship, the diesel apprenticeship opportunity came along so he did an extra year on that.

“Most of our work at Kinleith was with diesels anyway, bulldozers, loaders and trucks - so I ended up with trade cert in both Petrol and Diesel.”

It was at that time that Sheldrake’s love of trucks came to the fore.

“I always wanted to be involved in the truck side of things. When I was around eleven or twelve mum and dad had a dairy/restaurant type operation in Tokoroa where they served night time meals for truckers, I remember pestering them to take me for a ride at weekends or school holidays. I think mum and dad were quite pleased to get rid of me.” 

Sheldrake goes on to say that when he was eighteen, every time a truck drove past the workshop he looked out the window to see whose truck it was and who was driving. 

“Because we were driving trucks in the workshops, we all had our full licences, plus tracks and rollers, special vehicles and a lot of us had our pilot certifications too. However when I finished my apprenticeship I couldn’t get a truck driving job in Tokoroa because I was too young.” 

So Sheldrake went to Auckland and worked for a transport company in Grey Lynn.

“They did Motor Specs work, picking up CKD containers and taking them to the rail heads and local deliveries, that’s how I started originally.”

At the age of twenty Graham ventured on an O/E with his sister and brother-in-law, taking a campervan around Europe for eighteen months. When he returned, a friend of his with a removal business in Tokoroa was looking for drivers and asked Sheldrake to drive his 5 speed TK Bedford furniture van, which he did for about four years. And that’s when he met his wife Jillian.

After getting married in 1978 both Graham and Jillian headed back overseas to England.

“Jillian and I were having a six-month holiday and got a call from New Zealand Forest Products (Kinleith) to say they had an opportunity for owner drivers with self-loading trucks. They needed people that had good mechanical ability, and was I interested? That’s when I started being in business on my own.”

Sheldrake bought a brand new Kenworth SAR out of Australia with a Hiab crane, he called the truck Mork and the crane Mindy - nanu, nanu.

“A guy called Ken King from the Kenworth agency back then, he guarantor’d our loan so we could get our funding through but he said to me ‘as long as you’re in the trucking business you’ve got to own a Kenworth, that was the deal. And I’ve always had Kenworth’s in our fleet ever since.”

Sheldrake was essentially moving logs, picking them up in the forest and taking them to Kinleith Mill using the self-loading grapple crane.

“The company grew from there. I had the first truck for about five years and then got the opportunity to have a second truck to work at Kinleith. Then I picked up a contract with NZFP carting logs up to Auckland. That was the mid 80s.”  

He says that contract meant more trucks and double-shifting and it also meant putting a truck on to the highway, which was a bit of a change for him, ‘getting drivers and running two 12-hour shifts’ running to and from Auckland. 

“The business just climbed and climbed, I built it up to about 30 trucks at one stage, 50% loggers and 50% curtainsiders, all our own fleet. In the forty odd years I’ve never had to chase customers, which is a good sign. It’s really important that we have customers that want to work with us.”

According to Sheldrake he’s always thought that if you’re getting something out of something, (if you’ve got the ability or time) you should always put something back in. And ‘put back in’ he has.

The formation of the Log Haulage Contractors Association came as a result of Sheldrake’s encouragement for operators to band together to get lower fuel and insurance prices, to have one voice when negotiating favourable discounts with various suppliers. He has been the driving force behind this organisation since its formation. 

In 1994, he joined the No 2 Region NZRTA, completing a term as President prior to becoming the Owner Driver Director on the RTF Board. He also represented the RTF on the Transport and Logistics Industry Training Organisation and has been a member of the Log Truck Safety Council since its formation in 1997, representing the RTF Board for numerous years on this Council. 

“I was an RTA member initially and knowing me, wasn’t quite happy with the way things were going, so I got involved to make some changes. I’ve been on the board of both the RTA and RTF, I was a representative of the owner-drivers on the RTF board for a number of years and then a region two Director and I’ve also been a Chairman for the RTA.” 

Despite his heavy involvement in the industry groups, Sheldrake says that his Hall of Fame nomination and induction was a real surprise. 

“I do a lot of work for the North Island inductees, and they kept it secret from me, I had no idea I’d been nominated or chosen. I cottoned on that evening in Invercargill, as when I arrived my two kids and their spouses were there, I said ‘what the hell are you bastards all doing here’ then I clicked. I don’t think that I deserved it but am very humbled by the fact that the industry thinks that I’ve put something back.”

He believes that his induction was for his input into the NZ Road Transport Association, the effort he’s put into the Log Truck Safety Council and the industry as a whole. 

“I’ve always been an executive member of the Log Truck Safety Council and the last five or six years I was there representing the Forum on the board, to make sure they had a voice and input there for the good of the RTF members.”

Sheldrake has been involved on the committees and in the management of issues at the time when the LTSA had told them they were going to put logging trucks off the road if they didn’t fix their accident and rollover rates, 

“So we got stuck into that and got load heights reduced, load security, twitches and straps and we’re still developing it now.”

However, at the heart of it all Sheldrake is a family man; he and Jillian have a daughter and son, Emma and Mathew and they also have six grandchildren.  

Several years ago his son Matthew joined Sheldrake in the business and thanks to his tuition and guidance, now owns the business.

“I sold it to Matthew about 18-months ago. He came back from Europe and wanted to be part of the business, so he and I worked together for the last eight to ten years while I trained him up and brought him up to speed. When he was ready, he was able to buy me out, it was a good succession for me.”

But don’t think Sheldrake has hung up his work boots just yet.

“I’m so called semi-retired, so I spend as much time as I can with my six grandchildren, I do a bit of fishing on the lake and at the beach too. But of late I’ve been doing some voluntary work for the RTA, they don’t have any area reps in the top half of the North Island at the moment, so I put my hand up to go and visit the members,”

He says that at last count there are around six hundred members to meet. 

At the NZ Road Transport Hall of Fame it was said, ‘he has been a part of a number of successful industry organisations and has the reputation for tackling many of the difficult issues that the industry throws up from time to time. His organisational skills are second to none and the industry has used these skills to help make our industry better for everybody.’

Sheldrake says, “I’ve taken a lot out of the transport industry so I think it’s really important that I keep putting back where I can.”