Legendary transport icon Jim Barker's biography is on sale after eight years in the making. File photo.
A biography celebrating the life of New Zealand transport industry legend Jim Barker will be on-shelf and online this week after eight years in the making.
Big Jim: Transport Legend, tells the story of how a lad from a Waikato coal-mining town that no longer exists, built a nationwide trucking and shipping business and changed New Zealand’s transport industry forever.
Told through the eyes of his wife, Bev, who joined him on the journey, Big Jim is about a man who never said can’t and his vision, perseverance and determination to always find a better way to do things.
When banking proved too poorly paid and lucrative coalmining proved too dangerous, Jim and Bev set out with his sister, Cynthia, and brother-in-law Dennis Dow and bought a tired road transport company and its six dilapidated trucks in Ōtorohanga in 1963.
Over the next half-century, he expanded the transport and allied businesses far beyond Ōtorohanga.
When New Zealand Rail and its Cook Strait ferry monopoly notorious for intransigent unions and industrial stoppages blocked his way, he created his own shipping service.
You’re crazy, he was told. Look at all those who have failed. But with the right people, Strait Shipping, first carrying livestock and commercial freight and later through a passenger and vehicle ferry service, under the BlueBridge brand, was an immediate success based on a simple premise – we’ll be nice to people.
Simon Bridges, former MP for Tauranga, Minister of Transport, leader of the National party, and presently chief executive of Auckland Business Chamber said Jim was a true great of the New Zealand transport sector.
“Jim has a long legacy that lives on beyond him,” he said.
Robin Ray, one of Jim’s drivers from Te Awamutu, said New Zealand was a better place since Jim stitched it together with his transport interests and Strait Shipping.
Robin worked to have Jim’s work acknowledged at an official level and he was awarded the Order of the New Zealand in 2015.
But, says Robin, he should have been knighted.
Interviews for the book began with Jim in 2015 prior to his death in Mount Maunganui in August 2016.
After his passing, memories were too raw. But a few years later, the project was revived.
Interviews including those with Jim and scores of others were collated, supported by hundreds of articles, records, video and other material.
Big Jim has been published by his family who continue the transport enterprises their father began in Ōtorohanga with numerous depots throughout the country.
Big Jim – Transport Legend is available at: Ōtorohanga Paper Plus, Hamilton Press’ online bookstore –https://www.thebestlittlebookstore.nz/ Or inquire at Bigjimbook@bulklines.co.nz
