Owner/Driver #339

“The 4900 model with the integrated
Constellation bunk was too long for
the 19 metre B-double skel.”
Top: Flashback to little boys and
big boys’ toys. From a tender age,
Quinten Mathie already knew
what he wanted to do. Drive trucks,
just like Dad
Below: Quinten Mathie (left)
with good mate and good driver,
Shannon Doherty. For Shannon
and a 19 metre B-double loaded
with fuel, deadly fires on the south
coast came too close for comfort
on one particularly nasty day
trucks ever bought by Bruce Mathie & Sons were Western Stars,
15 in total.
“They’ve always been a good truck for us, so why change?”
Phillip asserts, before reflecting, “Loyalty works both ways and
the people at Western Star have been as loyal to us as we’ve
been to them.”
He sits silent for a few moments. “I don’t think there’s a lot of
that, loyalty, going around these days.”
Meantime, still never far away from his father or the trucks
or the machinery, the teenage Quinten was increasingly itchy
to leave high school and start work. His father had left school
at 14 to work with his father, so why couldn’t he?
Fair enough, but still several years away from being old
enough to hold a licence, the parental proviso insisted on a
trade first, and there was no better trade for the 16-year-old
Quinten than a four-year diesel fitter’s apprenticeship with
Cummins at Queanbeyan near Canberra. “It was one of the best
things I ever did,” Quinten would later confirm.
At every level, these were good years for the family and, with
the fully-qualified diesel fitter returning to Dalmeny in 2006
to maintain equipment and drive log trucks for Bruce Mathie
& Sons, life appeared to be going exactly the way everyone
thought it would.
Still, Quinten was predictably keen to do his own thing and,
in 2009, at just 23 years of age, he bought his own truck and
trailer set to start his own company, sub-contracting to Bruce
Mathie & Sons. Fittingly, the company name is QB Mathie, or
simply QBM. The new truck chosen to haul a Kennedy Mini-B
folding skel trailer was – wait for it – a Kenworth T908 with a
600hp (447kW) Cummins under the snout.
Nowadays, Phillip smiles at the memory of his son’s first
truck being something other than a Western Star, but equally
respects and accepts his decision.
“He’s the one who had to pay for it,” he says with a shrug.
“Besides, he knew what he was doing.”
For his part, Quinten insists: “There was no real preference
for a Kenworth over a Western Star but it was always going
to be one or the other. I wasn’t interested in any of the other
brands.
“And I’ll tell anyone that Western Star is a good truck. A
very good truck, but the 4900 model with the integrated
Constellation bunk was too long for the 19-metre B-double
skel. Yeah, I could’ve gone for an aftermarket sleeper but I
wasn’t keen on that.
“On the other hand, Kenworth had a 28-inch (71cm)
integrated sleeper. It’s not a big bunk by any means but when
you’re tired it’s a heap better than the day cab 4900 Western
Star I’d been driving for the previous few years.”
However, 2009 was a year when the cycles of change were
moving in directions far more intense than simply the choice
of trucks.
“It was definitely a big year,” Quinten explains.
“I bought my first house, bought my first truck and we [with
future wife Tennealle] had our first child.
“But it wasn’t all good because that was also the year Dad
66 APRIL 2021 ownerdriver.com.au