Deals on Wheels #464

He always just
wanted
to drive trucks
A
Luke Sheridan
operates Southern
Star Transport along
with this wife Jacinta
(Inset) Luke and
Jacinta Sheridan’s first
truck – the infamous
Louisville
s many born into rural farm life
observe throughout their formative
years, the trials and tribulations of
a farmer’s existence can easily deter
younger generations from pursuing the
same path.
For Luke Sheridan, the farmer’s life
on the land didn’t appeal to him, so an
apprenticeship as a carpenter/builder was
embarked upon. While the building game
provided income and security, Luke still
seemed to have an itch to be scratched.
Deep down, Luke admits that he just always
wanted to drive trucks.
Perhaps driving around farms and gazing
upon the big trucks passing through his New
South Wales rural hometown of Coolah lit a
fire in his vocational soul that could not easily
be extinguished – by hammers, chisels and a
tool belt.
Leaving the building game behind, and
pivoting into the direction of his ambitions,
Luke took on a job as a labourer and then
truck driver for a Roads and Transport
Authority (RTA) bridge crew in Bathurst,
while his wife Jacinta was attending
university in the same town.
When an employment opportunity for
Jacinta arose in Tahmoor, the Sheridans
looked at a tiny point on a map, showing
the small rural location about an hour or so,
south-west of Sydney, and decided to pack
their bags to move to a place they had never
been, and give it a go.
With Jacinta employed, all that was left was
for Luke to find a job, a task which would, for
a time force him to take a step backwards
from his driving ambitions and return to
the building game. This lasted for around 12
months with Luke eventually realising that he
still hated this line of work.
To readjust his path, Luke took on a
job driving concrete agitators for a large
concrete company, which in a fortunate
stroke of serendipity would eventually
become a company he would have a long
standing, ongoing business relationship with,
sometime later in the evolution of Southern
Star Transport.
The agitator driving role eventually
morphed into a batching and managerial role
to which Luke was not comfortable. “It was not
where I wanted to be, I just wanted to drive.”
Moving on from there, Luke moved into
driving concrete powder tankers for Pioneer
Concrete, a job with such irregular hours
that he confesses: “The hours broke me in six
months.
“We just had our first kid and I thought that
working these hours was a mug’s game, so
I returned to the agi work, but I still wasn’t
happy,” Luke explains.
Leaky Louisville
It would seem that the Sheridans were
at a crossroads and a resolution was,
unknowingly to them, just around the corner.
It was just a matter of taking the right turn.
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