She'll be right! War stories from the left lane

There are few better ways to spend an evening than sitting around a campfire at a caravan park, meeting new friends, and comparing notes on bargain camp spots, dodgy dump points, top bakeries, and country pubs that still understand the medicinal importance of a properly cold beer.

It's one of the great travelling rituals.

Someone will mention a brilliant free camp beside a river, someone else will recommend a back road with better scenery, and eventually someone will arrive, politely ask if there's room for them, then produce a chair so comfortable it looks as though it was engineered by NASA for people who have given up on standing.

But lately, the tone of these fireside conversations has changed. The old discussions about where to find cheap diesel, good coffee, clean amenities and a site with enough room to park a tandem-axle van without starting WW3 with the cranky 'vanner next door, are increasingly being replaced by war stories from the bitumen.

Not war stories about caravanners getting it wrong, because that topic has been flogged harder than a rental Hilux over the corrugations on a dash to catch barramundi in Weipa.

No, we're talking the impatient tradie in an overloaded dual-cab ute, with a facial expression suggesting he's just discovered time itself is an inconvenience, and a driving style copied from a getaway scene in a low-budget bank robber movie.

Back in the late 1970s, when I started my apprenticeship, one of the first things we studied was safety. Actual safety.

Not 'safety' in the modern sense, where you wear fluoro, tick a box on an app, and then proceed to drive a 3.2-tonne ute with a ladder tied down at one end, a compressor bouncing around in the tray, and the emotional restraint of a startled bullock.

We were taught that tools had to be secured, loads had to be restrained, and other people on the road had a strange but apparently important right to arrive alive.

Take the following all too familiar scenarios recounted in recent fireside discussions...

Chris arrived at the park that afternoon still wearing the pale expression of a man who had recently reviewed his life insurance situation and found it wanting.

He and his wife, Susan, had been rolling along quietly that morning when a tradie towing a box trailer with lift-up sides came storming up behind them near the crest of a hill.

On the ute was a ladder rack. On the ladder rack was a ladder. And holding this ladder in place was what appeared to be a single sad-looking strap at the front, presumably installed by someone who believed the laws of physics were more of a city council guideline than a binding universal principle.

The tradie pulled out beside the couple near the top of the rise; a bold move if your hobbies include not knowing what is coming the other way.

Chris saw him committed to the pass and jumped hard on the brakes, because when you're towing a caravan, you quickly learn that survival depends on making room for people determined to remove themselves from the gene pool and don't mind taking you with them for company.

He and Susan were shaken, and fair enough too. Five kilometres later, the same bloke veered into a Macca’s drive-through at the last moment and almost collected a woman who had just stepped out of the café holding a tray of takeaway coffees. At that point, it was no longer a near miss. It was a travelling circus with a ladder rack.

Then there was Bill, who had a similar story from the Olympic Highway, north of Wagga Wagga where roadworks had funnelled traffic into one narrow lane, with concrete barriers on one side and workers’ utes parked on the other.

It was the sort of tight lane where those with functioning brain cells accept that patience isn't optional. But not our tradie hero.

As the lanes merged, he tried to squeeze past Bill’s caravan. Bill held steady, then braked hard when he realised the major insurance claim that was about to happen.

The left-hand mirror of the ute came close enough to the side wall of the 'van to make Bill’s stomach tighten, because apparently, a caravan is now expected to “just tuck in” like a Suzuki Swift with low self-esteem.

Then Paul joined in with a story from the run up through Wallan, heading north towards Echuca for the weekend, where the great tradie ute dodgem-car procession had begun its afternoon migration.

Paul was forced onto the road verge as ute after ute tried to carve an extra lane out of the small amount of room he’d left, plus a fair chunk of the oncoming lane, in an effort to get around him.

By now he was in the leftmost northbound overtaking lane, which was coming to an end. He had passed the second merging arrow, and his right-hand indicator had been on since the first.

Every reasonable road user could see what was happening. The lane was finishing. The caravan needed to merge. Then Paul caught a glimpse in the mirror of a tradie ute about 100 metres back, closing in fast enough to suggest either enormous confidence or total brain fade. Paul turned to his wife and said, “This bloke can’t be serious.”

But he was serious. Deadly serious. Paul lifted off the throttle, and thankfully, the oncoming car in the other lane also read the situation and backed off.

The tradie blasted past, but as the ute bounced over the potholes, one of the side toolbox drawers slid open and ejected a handful of tools across the lane.

Spanners, cordless drill batteries and other small metallic projectiles scattered across the road like confetti at a Bunnings wedding. Paul swerved around the bigger bits but heard smaller items flicking up under the caravan.

The tradie kept going, blissfully unaware that he had just converted part of the highway into a clearance bin.

Paul admitted, with a grin, that he pulled over and collected a few Milwaukee tools from the aftermath. Sure, they had a little gravel rash, but they still worked.

Mike had a beauty, too. He was stopped behind a dual-cab tradie ute in Nowra when he noticed the rear roof-rack strap dangling down from the ladder rack. That's never a good sign.

A dangling strap on a loaded ute is like smoke from a toaster. It may not yet be a disaster, but the prelude has certainly begun.

Within seconds, the aluminium ladder shifted sideways, bounced once, then slid backwards off the rack.

Fortunately, Mike had left enough room to brake and move partly onto the shoulder, and the ladder landed across the lane instead of through the front of his Ranger or under the caravan wheels.

The tradie had no idea it had come off. None. Zilch.

He simply powered on into the distance, presumably wondering why his ute suddenly felt more aerodynamic.

Mike caught up with him 20 kilometres later at roadworks and told him the ladder had departed. The look on the tradie’s face was priceless.

Now, before the pitchforks come out, this is not an attack on all tradies. Australia would grind to a halt without them.

Houses would not be built, pipes would not be fixed, wiring would not be connected, roofs would not be repaired, and half the nation would be standing in unfinished bathrooms, wondering why the designer mixer tap was still in the cardboard box.

Most tradies are hardworking, practical people who know exactly how to secure a load and drive sensibly. But there is a growing subset of ute-piloting road warriors who appear to believe that once a ladder is placed on a rack and at least one strap is thrown vaguely in its direction, the rest is up to fate, luck and everyone else’s braking ability.

And that is the part caravanners are now talking about around campfires. Not because they want to whinge about being overtaken. Most experienced towers know they are slower than general traffic and will usually do what they can to help others get around safely.

The frustration comes from tradies who cannot wait 10 seconds, can't read a merge, fail to judge the length of a 'van, don't secure a toolbox, and cannot grasp that a vehicle combination weighing several tonnes doesn't behave like a hatchback ducking into a 30 minute shopping strip zone.

The irony that the modern tradie ute is often a shrine to safety theatre. It has reversing cameras, lane alerts, blind-spot monitoring, multiple airbags, emergency braking and more warning chimes than a casino pokie room.

Maybe it's time for a new apprenticeship module after all. Not a complicated one. Just a simple, old-fashioned subject called “Don’t Be a Bloody Menace”.

It could cover basic topics such as tying down both ends of a ladder, closing toolbox drawers, not overtaking at the crest of a hill, not diving into a Macca’s like a rally driver, not using roadworks as a personal slalom course, and understanding that a caravan cannot evaporate just because you're late to quote a bathroom renovation.

Until then, the campfire stories will keep coming. Someone will mention the best bakery in town, someone else will recommend a quiet river camp, and sooner or later, a caravanner will lean forward, poke the fire, shake his head and say, “You should’ve seen this ute bandit today”.

Related: Has caravan park security gone too far?