Jason O‘Connor is from the Waikato but left his native land in the 90s in search of adventure in ‘the big country‘, and has not returned since. “I keep meaning to go back, but it just never happened,” he said. Jason and Paul O‘Callaghan had just loaded 132 fat cows each at Fossil Downs Station in the town of Fitzroy Crossing in Western Australia when the Irishman persuaded the Kiwi to pose for a photograph. Jason‘s 2002 Kenworth T904 has a history that is as impressive as its appearance. “My first job was driving a Scania T143 for John Backman in Perth, after which I went to Broome to work for Lawson Clopper in 2004. The deal was that I was going to buy a T950 from him to pull his trailers. But when I landed in Broome, he casually told me that I would now be buying his T904 instead!” Jason worked the CAT-powered Kenworth hard for four years, at which point he bought a new T908 with an Eaton UltraShift transmission, pulling triples for Saddlers/Nexus up to Darwin.

At one stage he was running four trucks, but scaled back when his wife became terminally ill. Ten years after he sold his original T904, he spotted it for sale and immediately did a deal to buy the old girl. “It was in a pretty bad way when I bought it – the turbo was lying on the bunk.”  Having tidied the truck up, Jason began pulling crates for Mitchell‘s Livestock Transport of Waroona, but it has recently been based out of Broome, pulling for Road Trains of Australia. When questioned as to whether he‘d sell the Kenworth for a second time, the answer was a resounding, “No, I‘ll never sell it now”. And who could blame him? The 18-year-old truck has dated well and it‘s difficult to distinguish it from a new T909 model.

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