60 YEARS AND GOING

After returning World War 2, Vic Cordwell and family lived at North Street Yandina. Vic worked for the Forestry department in Cooloolabin for a short time before purchasing a small tip truck and starting his own business. He would cart all sorts of things for people all over the Sunshine Coast (3 shires at that time). This included anything from delivering furniture, collecting cord wood delivered to anywhere for boiler engines using steam eg the sugar mill, milk factory and others using steam engines. Bones were collected from the slaughter yards and unloaded into train wagons to be taken to Brisbane to be processed into fertiliser. He collected Molasses in 44 gallon drums and delivered to dairy farms - all done by hand. Vic did at least 4 loads a day and every day he was shovelling something. He would cart sawdust from the local sawmills, collect ash from the steam trains at the Yandina station to be used for tracks and driveways. Rocks were handpicked from paddocks straight into the back of a single drive 4 -6 cubic yard (4.6m) truck (100 shovels to the yard).

In the late 1940s a horse drawn metal scoop was used to retrieve sands and gravel from the Maroochy River, shovelled into his truck for delivery to customers. Other methods were shovelling into a boat off the banks at low tide and then into a trolley. The trolley was then winched up in near the North Maroochy River bridge bank and shovelled into truck. The demand was very high for these materials. Nothing was crushed at this time it was straight out of the river and used, most being a perfect size. Sons, Ronald, Trevor, and Garry when old enough would help with the loading of trucks.

Later a tipper fitted with a Berryman Loader was used, this is a winch mounted under the body of the tipper which pulled the filled scoop up the ramp into a frame and tipped the scoop into the truck. As it started going up the slide someone would have to jump into the truck to use the clutch and jump out again to pull the rope that controlled the gears. A shilling a yard a mile was the charge for works, some of which were done by contract and the rest was whatever was going at the time. Blue metal gravel when required had to come from Gympie goldmines, which was a big trip for a 4m load. Sandstone came from road cuttings from various places around the area to be used for tennis courts. Sand was also sourced from the Mary River in Kenilworth in addition to the sand and gravel from the Maroochy River. Plastering sand/ fine sand was got out of swaps from Bli Bli and Rosemount and supplied to people form Brisbane to make monuments for cemeteries. Brickies Loam came from the riverbank on Fairhill Rd and various other places, when the first brick houses were built. Raw materials were dredged from the river by a tractor (an old David Brown) with a winch. A pulley was placed on the other side of the river and a wire rope driven by one wheel jacked up on the tractor which pulled the scoop to the other side of the river. Then the winch was used to pull the scoop loaded with sand or gravel to an area so it could be shovelled onto the truck. There were others around doing the same thing at the time like Halls, Evans, Rutherford. An old chevy blitz (an old army truck) was set up with the drag line to assist with extraction of sand and gravel. Was also used to clean dams and waterways out when people requested the job.