[Ken Smith]

The next truck I have been thinking about is the portee ARN 51720, this is more of a I wish I had asked the owner questions while he was alive, instead of assuming I knew everything.
The truck is quite nice I had always thought it was something special because the horn button has a very well made clip on cover over it, so assumed it had always been roofless. The truck was fitted with a 13 cab steel hinged side body ex RAAF, when I got it. I assumed that was the way the previous owner bought it from somebody in Sydney. The story was they bought the truck drove it to Dalby to their new farm job, it was good because his wife could easily get over into the back to look after the kids. It was their car for a number of years.

Over the years I spent a lot of time doing tractor repairs at the farm they eventually bought just out of Dalby, they had lots of interesting, but not interesting to me ex army stuff. One thing was an old rag top KB5 Inter which I used to repair for them, the body off that was lying over in their dump, the body was some sort of parts body with hundreds of little draws and shelves in it. It was made of wood and had deteriorated but was still restorable back in the 70s.

In the 80s when I was interested in stuff I picked up few things at the farm, such as a spare wheel ramp wasn't sure what from and the toolbox from the rear of a water truck.

Which brings me up to this week, I now know thanks to the AWM books that my truck was a portee and wasn't converted to a GS. I started looking over the portee photos on this forum and something got me thinking about the spare tyre ramp I found at the farm years ago. So down the back and sure enough I have the original spare tyre ramp from a portee with the retaining bolts still in place, where the wood has rotted off.
So now I am assuming that the truck came up to Qld with at least the front part of the portee frame still fitted, with maybe the RAAF body bolted on in place of the 2 pounder frame. They had quite a few kids and they would only have been little then, I think it would have been a job to get them to sit safely on the portee seat for that distance.

Why why why didn't I ask what was on the truck for the trip up, I did ask about the cab roof that's how I found out about child care in the late 40s.

The previous owner was ex RAAF having trained pilots on Oxfords and Ansons.
We drove the truck from the farm to my place and have had it in a couple of parades as well. It is stinking hot in a parade without a roof and I usually keep the doors on half open latch to let a little bit of cool air in.



Ken