We have plenty of time to immerse ourselves in the big issues confronting us this year, so let’s forget all that for a moment and start 2023 on a gargantuan positive.

Like so many of you, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the arrival of my precious copies of Mack. The Life., the epic, two-volume work put together over the past half-decade by Grant Gadsby, Paul Livsey, and Ed Mansell. The books are a pictorial chronology of the first 1040 Macks assembled in New Zealand, with each truck’s ownership journey depicted.

It’s an honour to have known all three authors personally for just on four decades. We were all around the truck show and photography circuit in the 1980s, a great era that spawned a lively camaraderie among the roaming crew of the time. It was a privilege to have ‘Livo’ [Paul Livsey] hand me my set personally just before Christmas as we enjoyed a festive ale together with a couple of friends.

As part of an amazing team, and knowing all too well the challenges we experience putting the magazine together each month, I was staggered by the size of the project undertaken by three busy blokes. I was equally staggered by the result. I’ve spent much of my Christmas pouring over the pages, reminiscing over great trucks in our history and learning what happened to them. Likewise, those ‘Oh, so that truck, is that truck’, moments. It was such a thrill to see a truck I’d driven sitting there on the pages.

In short, the value and worth of the volumes to the recorded history of road transport in New Zealand is immeasurable. What they have achieved is unfathomable.

The books also provided another realisation – an appreciation we all have and understand at face value, but one that doesn’t truly sink in until it hits you like a mallet from the images on the pages.

There’s nothing sadder than seeing the final photo of what was an iconic truck, now a pile of rusted steel, or a cab shell with the ghost of its once invincible livery hidden beneath a layer of moss as it lies forlornly in a paddock, under a tree, or in a shed. Then you turn a page and find another, one of the lucky ones, a truck rescued and restored by our genius restoration community. Mack. The Life. clarifies in the starkest possible way the debt of gratitude we all owe the restorers and the need to help them in any way we all can, regardless of marque. I’ll not go near any names here – I’ll miss someone out for sure.

To Ed, Paul and Grant, congratulations and thanks beyond my ability to put into words – and on behalf of everyone of like mind to myself, the same must go to the restorers.

The industry owes you all an immense debt of gratitude.

All the best for 2023.

Dave McCoid
Editorial Director