A mile in the shoes of a Roadside Parol Member of 45 years
When Jonathan Burley took on a roadside assistance role with the RACT as a fresh-faced 18-year-old in 1980, he couldn’t have anticipated the drama, the humanity and the changes that he’d see in the next four and half decades.
Jonathan, who has been based in Derby for nearly 40 years, has assisted countless motorists on the sides of some of the toughest roads in the state.
There was the time he made it into the paper when he rescued a driver who had locked their keys in the car. The hook was that he’d ridden past on horseback, not planning to do any roadside assisting but always ready all the same.
He’s also rescued animals locked in cars and, many times, humans who used GPS instead of common sense. He’s fixed everything from Winnebagos to wheelchairs.
“I’ve had beach recoveries with the tide coming in and we’ve had to extract them as quick as we could,” he says. “I’ve done a wheelchair. A guy had a flat tyre so I had to jack up the wheelchair while he was still sitting in it.”
He once took a frantic call from a person who realised their missing cat had been locked in the car for 24 hours.
“The cat got in there and then stood on the central locking knob in the console! They had been looking for the cat and then 24 hours later, it was there inside the car, so that was a pretty urgent one to get to.”
As with so many vital roles in rural areas, this is more than just a job. Jonathan prides himself on being able to keep stressed customers calm and in the past has even opened up his own home to those stranded.
“If it’s late in the afternoon and they want to be towed to Hobart, I’ve just said to them, ‘Look, sleep at our place, and I’ll leave early in the morning because I’ve done a long day’s work, I don’t want to drive overnight.’ So quite often we’ve had them sleep at our place while we get a bit of rest before I do their long tow to Hobart.”
This was more common before Derby experienced its huge boom over the past 15 years. Back then, it was almost impossible to find accommodation in the small town. “Now people stay for a week with the bike tracks,” he says. “There’s just so much to do in Derby now that everything’s been opened up: the bike tracks, the lake, the tunnel, the floating sauna.”
Jonathan says he wouldn’t have been able to offer the help and hospitality over the years without the support of Kathleen, his wife of 42 years and mother to their six children.
“Doing a breakdown service is a team effort,” he explains. “There’s no way you could keep going without somebody at home cooking the meals, getting the car ready, cleaning it out and washing it for when a member needs transport.”
A big part of the job is thinking on behalf of those too stressed to do so. “
It’s not always plain sailing. You’ve got to think for the person, because they’re out of their comfort zone. All of a sudden they’ve broken down in a place that they don’t know anything about, and they don’t know the distances, they don’t know what’s available. So you’ve got to nut it all out for them and work out their needs.
“We had a child the other day with diabetes, and his mum had to get him home because he had to have certain medication. And some people have got to get to an aeroplane – the plane’s leaving at eight o’clock, and they’ve broken down at four o’clock, and you’ve got to get them to the airport, and you’ve got to work it all out to get their hire car back as well.”
Jonathan says technology has changed the way he responds to call-outs. He used to be able to fix 90 per cent of mechanical issues on the side of the road, but due to increasingly electronic car systems, he’s now only able to fix about 10 per cent on site, requiring towing for the others.
Then there’s the GPS…
Jonathan has lots of stories of GPS directions sending people down entirely wrong roads. Like the time a tourist drove down a road that had been shut for about 20 years and planted out with pine trees.
“He’d broken the bull bar, smashed the left-hand front window trying to get between the trees, and then got it stuck on a bit of a stump. I said, ‘Where are you?’ and he said, ‘Well, I don’t really know, but I’ve got the coordinates.’
“So I had to go to the fire station at Weldborough – because I’m in the fire brigade too – to lend their maps of the area, and I put all the coordinates on it, worked out exactly where it was, and I had to cut down 13 trees to get the vehicle out.”
Sometimes Jonathan just has to have a quiet chuckle, like when he was called to help a husband and wife who’d locked themselves out of their caravan in the dark at Myrtle Park at Easter.
“He was in his jocks and T-shirt, he had to sit in the car with the heater going; he was too embarrassed to get out of the car. I know him actually, he was from out this way!”
Next year marks 40 years of Jonathan’s service in Derby, and he thinks that might be the right time to hang up the tools. He’ll leave some big shoes – and riding boots – to fill.
