The History Vault

This heavy-haul Leyland Hippo seen working for Roadways in the sixties, is representative of the archive of historic images hosted on www.truckarchive.co.nz The site was created to safeguard, host and display what remains of the photographic and film history of the NZ road transport industry. Credit: Harold Hemming. M.O.W. Photographer

THE PRIME/SKY TV COMMISSIONED DOCUMENTARY SERIES

Truck Files – The New Zealand Story, that aired last year on Prime and Sky had a two-fold agenda, explains producer Bryce Baird.

He says the primary objective was to educate the general public about the importance of the industry to the country and to counter some of the negative perceptions that are out there.

Simultaneously it was an opportunity to showcase the industry and make it aspirational – an industry that a young person might like to join.

“There are a lot of grey heads in our industry now, mine included, and there is a massive need to get proactive about encouraging new entrants into an industry that few young people now have access to,” says Bryce.

Convincing a TV network to air a documentary style programme about trucking was a story in itself.

“Most of the networks were only interested in a reality TV-based approach, which relied heavily on hype and drama, and reinforces entrenched stereotypes that paint our industry generally in a poor light,” Bryce says.

“TV programming has been greatly dumbed down over the last decade. I wasn’t interested in that, so it was gratifying to find that Prime wanted to take a more in-depth look at the subject.

“There is clearly an anti-trucking bias in the news media, not helped by an educational system that doesn’t regard a career as a professional truck driver as a serious option. As an industry we need to be seen to be proud of what we do, and promote what an exciting industry it is, and that road transport offers many career options.”

Truck Files – The New Zealand Story was funded by a group of industry stalwarts that shared those concerns.

“They backed the project for the common good and our industry owes a great deal to Sime Darby, HWR, and Daniel Smith Industries who provided the key sponsorship to get it underway, and also to ETL (Emmerson), Transport Trailers, Patchell Industries, Williams & Wilshier, Summerland, three of the RTA branches, McCarthy Transport, SML, NZ Truck & Driver, Road Metals and a few others that also helped fund it.”

However, the making of the documentary also highlighted how fragmented the historic record of the industry had become.

“A great deal of the photographic and movie record has been lost, usually because nobody knew what to do with that box of photos or cans of film when the owner passed. It was either dumped or donated to a local museum, which usually wasn’t much of a better option,” says Bryce.

Bryce’s involvement in the industry spans 45 years, and in that time he has gone from driving to writing and photography, and then videoing and archiving the industry, to documentary maker.

He joined forces with Trevor Woolston and Jon Addison in the early days of NZ Trucking Magazine, which they founded, and he came onboard as the South Island contributor for the magazine, specialising in writing feature articles and historical pieces about the road transport industry.

Some days, truck driving in New Zealand can’t be bettered. This was one of these days when a pair of Sollys’ Nissans were headed into the Anatori region on the upper West Coast of the South Island. This scene and other clips are being used as part of a QR resource for careers advisors, and institutes to sell our message - that trucking is an option that can lead to a great and satisfying career.

The R-series Mack profoundly changed what could be expected of a truck when introduced in the seventies, and it ushered an era of reliability and capability that other brands strove for. ‘Southern Pride’ is a fine example of the type of combination that evolved after de-regulation for line-haul work. It can be seen as part of an ever growing portrait gallery of significant NZ trucks. ‘Menu - Photo Archives - Portraits’

While Trevor and Jon sold that magazine sometime later, Baird stayed on as a contributor, enlarging his role under various editors, until the Christchurch earthquakes of 2011 instigated a major change of direction.

Nearly three decades of feature writing, along with the photographic, and then later the video-graphic side of his main business activities, resulted in an impressively-large archival resource.

“I’d be guessing that there’d be something in the order of 40,000 images in my photo archive, and many-terabytes of video footage, which covered the 40 years of great change in the industry between the `eighties and the present,” he says.

It was this resource that provided the nucleus material in order to convince Prime/Sky that “we had the footage to tell the story.”

The advent of digital video technology in the late 1990’s allowed SD broadcast quality footage to be captured economically, and Baird was an early adopter of the technology, and filmed the first of his Truck Files DVD series in 1999.

“I could see that many aspects of our industry were undergoing rapid change, especially in the rural sector,” Bryce says.

“The high-country tenure review process was locking up a lot of the back-country and big stock movements were becoming a thing of the past. Native logging was coming to an end and there was a lot of reorganisation in the truck manufacturing industry resulting in brands disappearing or changing distributors, vertical integration and increasingly powerful trucks. It was a very kinetic period, a time we will probably never see the like of again.

“My main focus was on filming the remote aspects of our

Much of what we do as an industry goes under the radar of the general public. www.truckarchive.co.nz is a storehouse of video and photographic material for the industry to promote itself, record the history, educate the public and provide an image and video bank to aid recruitment. This 8x8 MAN was used by SML in Canterbury to cross the Waiau River and service a difficult to access forestry-block.

industry, the work and places that not everybody gets to see. The by-product of this was an archive of professionally shot footage of a great number of trucks no longer in work.

“R-series Macks, Foden Alphas, Sterlings, Pacifics in the Kaingaroa Forest, and a plethora of other brands that are no longer on our roads - created a rich resource for TV programming some two decades later.

“I’d inadvertently recorded some really cool stuff, that time and earthquakes has made into history,” he says.

“Daniel Smith Industries had one of their 400-tonne cranes dismembered and being carted to the North Island and I got a great sequence of four of his Kenworths in convoy coming through one of the Kaikoura tunnels – tunnels that have been rebuilt since the Kaikoura earthquakes. I’ve filmed stuff that isn’t there anymore, bridges, equipment and people. Of course, you never see the big picture while you are doing these things.

“DVD sales never covered the cost of production, but that didn’t matter at the time. Filming the industry took me places that I would have never got to see otherwise, and I still get a kick out of looking at this material. New Zealand is an incredible place to be a truckie, and a film-maker.”

Then in 2011, working from a basement office below the family home in Opawa – just 0.6 kilometres from the epicentre of the February earthquake event in Christchurch – the house sheered from its ring foundations. The street lost 60% of the buildings in an instant and Bryce’s home was barely habitable, and eventually written-off.

“It was a wake-up call as to how vulnerable our history is,” says Bryce.

“All those photographs, articles, books and video hard drives could have just as easily ended up in the debris pile at the Burwood Forest super-dump like thousands of other houses did.

“It was just good luck that all that stuff wasn’t lost. Another few seconds of shaking and it may well of been.

“Hard drives don’t like earthquakes and we had something like 17,000 quakes of varying sizes over three or four years. Some drives did die, so this experience motivated me to find a way to safeguard this footage in case of another disaster.

“YouTube and Vimeo were relatively new to the scene at the time, and it seemed logical to start loading up the important stuff from the Truck Files DVD series so I created www.TruckArchive.co.nz over a decade ago to protect some of this material.

“Back then, the streaming infrastructure couldn’t cope with the amount of material I had to archive, and it’s been a case of waiting for the technology to catch up. The site has undergone more than 10 years of experimentation and development to reach the stage it is now, and thousands of hours of time invested in creating it over the last decade.”

Bryce says the site currently sits at around 450 pages, comprised of infinitely expandable photographic libraries, video libraries, hidden QR code modules for use in museums, collections and education.

And it’s still very much in an expansion stage; “I’ve only scratched the surface of what I think needs to be hosted,” Bryce says.

“Facebook is a great thing, and great entertainment, but the archive is a collection point, designed for a different purpose.

“It provides three or more levels of redundancy, firstly with content being hosted on the web, as well as across multiple TruckArchive hard-drives, and thirdly, with the image owner having the original in whatever form it that may be.

“It’s all searchable, and if I was to die tomorrow, the structure of the project could be easily understood by anybody with a passing familiarity of how a website works. Levels of editorial control can be granted, and I envisage that people can add information to the photographs or video content to build on the history through the editor.

“What we are providing is a place to showcase these, and create as comprehensive a list as possible of the companies, equipment and brands that have long exited from the industry. It will provide material for film makers, historians and those with an interest in the industry to research, as well as produce new content about the industry.”

While most of the site is free-to-view, some content is pay-to-view in order to cover the running costs, and provide funding for the development of future content.

“The Truck Files TV series generated a phenomenal amount of

new footage, and together with the older archive of photographic and other historic footage. I have a list of at least 30 programme ideas, which are in varying stages of development, covering a wide range of subjects, some of which are in development for future possible free-to-view TV broadcast programming,” Bryce says.

“TV still has its place, and I am working on something new at the moment.

“Producing a programme to broadcast standards is an expensive exercise, and there are many constraints as to what can be aired. A website can host a much broader range of items than we could ever hope to get on TV, and it may be that TruckArchive becomes a defacto trucking-content channel as much as it is an archive.

“NZ On Air funding is hard to come by, and that means almost all content for any type of programme has to come from the industry it is showcasing. Watch any fishing show, or building show and see who funds it, very little funding comes from NZ On Air anymore.”

An industrial-strength linear-actuator was developed specifically to film some the majority of the Truck Files content. The system allowed for fast set up and mobility, and as far as Bryce is aware, it is the only system of its type in New Zealand.

It can raise and lower an independently suspended and stabilised, gyro-controlled camera system from ground level to windscreen height in seconds, which allowed quick and safe filming especially in remote or rugged regions.

“The up-side was that we could generate a huge amount of footage in a short space of time, but the down side was that we could generate a huge amount of footage in a short space of time,” Bryce says.

“This resulted in huge amounts of footage, all shot in 4K at a fast film rate that required massive hard drive storage systems, which swallowed a lot of the budget.”

It’s a well-known cliché that a lot of film is left on the cuttingroom floor.

“We’ve got gorgeous footage of trucks working over much of the country, just waiting to be made into content.

“We had the same problem, if you can call it a problem, with

Photographed in 1999, this Ryal Bush FH12 460 Volvo livestock unit was hauling deer out of Lilybank Station, and seen here crawling out of the Macauley riverbed. The original article hosted about six images, but the full shoot can be seen among others with a historic context here ‘Menu-Photo Archives-Significant trucks/fleets/shoots-Volvo’

New Zealand was a difficult country to lay down a roading network, and SH94 into Milford Sound was perhaps the most difficult of all to create. Driven by Don Graham, this Gore Services MAN tanker is pictured coming out of the Homer tunnel in 1988....

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....and this Allied Petroleum FH Volvo is seen here plying the same road in 2018. This is a good example of the depth of history www.truckarchive.co.nz hosts, and these items and others will contribute to a mini-doco coming out later this year about this historic road. For the MAN - ‘Menu-Photo Archives -Significant trucks/fleets/shoots- MAN - Gore Services’ For the Volvo - ‘Video Archives - The Modern Industry RAW footage - By Location - Fiordland Te Anau to Milford Sound’.

articles during my magazine days,” Bryce says.

“You might shoot 300 images for a story, and then only use 10 or 12 in the article. The web allows me to put the rest up for viewing, and that’s another thing I am doing – just throwing as many of these shoots as possible onto the site, and over time we’ll fill in the details.

“There is still much to be filmed. We are entering another era of great change. We’ve been through the horsepower to petrol-power, petrol-to-diesel, from four-wheeler truck to nine-axle combination eras, and now we are entering the demise of diesel and the age of autonomous vehicles. It’s important to record this in a professional manner.

“I very much see this as a trucking-community project,” says Bryce.

“I’m a safe pair of hands. I’ve seen every aspect of the industry, and have the equipment and skill set to record it. History keeps on being made on a daily basis, and I’ve made it easy for anyone to have a little ownership of this project by helping fund it.

“Or not. It’s up to the individual as to whether they see worth in this project or not,” says Bryce.

“Either way, join the newsletter to keep up with what we have discovered.” T&D