John Coyle
John Anthony Coyle, affectionately known as Joe or Coyley, was born in May 1951 at Maitland Hospital NSW. He is the second child for Maxwell and Aileen Grace Coyle. Coyley spent his primary school years at Rosebrook Primary and completed his high school years at Maitland Boys High, Coyley lived at Maitland Vale until his parents divorced.
One of John’s first jobs was working for Karl Hvirf who was a potato supplier at the corner of the New England Highway and Melbourne St, East Maitland where John would stack and load spuds. He would also deliver spuds locally around Maitland and the surrounding areas.
Coyley was also a keen horseman and won the 160km endurance race, the Tom Quilty in 1969, riding a horse called Jackass. Coyley joined the army and only had a couple of months left to serve when Gough Whitlam was elected prime minister and announced the termination of military conscription. He then left the army in 1973.
In 1974 when Cyclone Tracey devastated Darwin, Coyley travelled to the Northern Territory to help with the clean-up. He relocated to Darwin for approximately 10 years with several of those years working for Kilpatrick Green, driving trucks for a couple of different companies. Around 1985 he purchased his own backhoe and F600 truck and continued working in the Darwin area for a few more years until he moved back to the Newcastle region. When John arrived back in Newcastle he started driving a Scania for Gary Lillis. Over the years Coyley worked for Doug Lawler, Tom Lawler, Ben Teidman and John Teidman driving trucks carting just about everything.
Coyley eventually purchased his own truck, a 1418 Benz. He later purchased a 1977 R model Mack which was burgundy in colour. His brother Greg hand built a 5-post bull bar for it, but it was just a bit too heavy and was later replaced with an aluminium one. The truck then went to O’Neills for a tidy up and a full respray where it became white. Coyley did well over a million miles in the old Mack and reckons that it never let him down or left him stuck on the side of the road.
Coyley again carted just about everything and anything but did a lot of spuds out of the Atherton tablelands in Queensland and seed spuds back up out of Thorpdale in Victoria. He also did countless trips across the top carting extendable loads of pipe and railway line from Townsville to Karratha and Port Headland and return. On a couple of those trips he became stranded due to flooding and had to get food and beer flown in.
Coyley updated and bought a T600 Kenworth. To make it his own John purchased a Peterbilt sleeper off Glen Lynch in Newcastle and fitted it to the T600 working it from 2007 until 2014 when he semi-retired. He then gifted the T600 to a young man named Brody Barker to give him a head start.
For the next couple of years Coyley worked casually for John Tiedman and Shane Tiedman before starting working for Woods Haulage in Newcastle where he became part of the Woods family and where he continues to work to this day.
