THE MAKING OF Legends

T900 marked the birth of a new era for Kenworth

The year was 1990. Businesses across the board were taking a severe belting and, among many, Kenworth was doing all it could to simply endure treasurer Paul Keating’s interminable “recession we had to have”.

Almost a decade into his long and laudable career as Kenworth’s first Australian managing director, Andrew Wright had been quick to react to the downturn. As he saw it, the economic signs were foreboding. With his bean-counter brain kicking into survival mode, retrenchments at the Bayswater (Vic) head office and factory came hard and fast.

Everything depended on the factory’s ongoing viability and Wright was uncompromising in his determination to protect the future and avoid Kenworth becoming just another importer.

Yet seemingly overnight, Kenworth, generally, and Wright, specifically, became pariahs as commentators and competitors publicly lambasted the cuts as corporate overkill. Cries of “too much, too soon” and “putting profit before people” were loud and long.

As time would soon show, an astute Wright had simply seen the writing on the wall clearer than his contemporaries. In fact, as the extravagance and excesses of the ‘80s collapsed into the economic doldrums of a new decade, and truck sales continued to slip lower than a frog’s freckle, there were more than a few executives openly wishing they’d followed Wright’s lead and made the tough decisions sooner rather than hovering in vain hope of a quick recovery.

Whether we had to have it or not is debateable, but this was certainly a recession that hung around far longer than anyone expected. Road transport was hammered particularly hard, and difficult decisions were forced on companies of all persuasions – especially those with significant investment in local manufacturing tailored almost entirely to the domestic market. Companies like Kenworth.

In fact, things were so crook in the Bayswater bunker that then sales manager Russell Davey rang a town crier’s bell after every order that had been credit approved. A collective cheer went up every time it rang but the clangs were few and far between.

Behind the scenes, though, with business in the pits and the factory building barely half a truck a day, Kenworth was quietly working on the creation of something new. Something for better times ahead