Billy Cutting
Inducted into the Shell Rimula Wall of Fame at Reunion 2015.
William Thomas (Billy) Cutting was born on the 20th February 1956 in Salisbury South Australia. He was destined to live a life of a trucker after his father passed away when he was just 11 years old. His uncle Graham gave him a job at his Cuttings Transport Company, which operated from Millicent in South Australia's south east and later had a depot at Gepps Cross called Freight Brokers carting goods to the Northern Territory and Queensland.
Billy was employed to load freight and refuel trucks, which eventually led to him obtaining a truck licence at 18 years old. After training with other drivers he did his first solo trip to Darwin in a 160 International single drive and bogey trailer. Later he drove a new 1418 Mercedes Benz, before graduating to pulling double road trains and eventually triple road trains with the biggest Macks and Kenworths.
In his early years travelling north the road was unsealed from Port Augusta to Alice Springs then turning into a single lane bitumen road to Darwin thus bringing lots of stories of breakdowns and endless delays, making every trip an epic journey. After many years at Freight Brokers, Billy moved on and worked for Mike Beinke Transport and Marty Ryan Transport for the following four years carting triple fridge vans.
He then drove for Jeff Gilbert Transport, which lasted 13 years driving triple roadtrains from Adelaide to Darwin, North Queensland, Townsville, Cairns, Mt Isa, Wyndham, Argyle and Kununurra with return loads of fruit being brought back to the Adelaide and Melbourne markets. He also did a year working for Titan Bulk Transport driving road trains to Whyalla and Roxby Downs. Billy has driven over 1000 trips from Adelaide to Darwin as well as all of his other destinations. It is estimated he has travelled well over eight million kilometres.
From about 1974 Billy drove numerous brands of trucks including Internationals, Mercedes Benzes, Macks, Kenworths, Scanias, Whites and Western Stars on most northern Australian roads in Western Australia, Northern Territory and Queensland including outback roads servicing cattle stations, mines and small towns. Also supplying cattle feed, general and refrigerated goods in fact almost anything you can get on a trailer to various outback communities. One of his biggest missions was to take triple trailer loads of huge oversized steel tanks to the Darwin and Gove fuel depots.
That was 26 years of roadtrain work before eventually in year 2000 to this current time Billy has had his own transport business in Adelaide with semi tippers and doing road works contracting for K & L Profiling and general earthmoving and demolition for various other companies. 40 years of transport to date and still going strong. He has three daughters, seven grandchildren and many, many friends.