The rides of my life

Andrew Mathieson
DRIVING taxis can be tough work for an average mother-of-three at the best of times.
It’s even tougher when a rifle is on the back seat and a shady character asks to lose the police in a car chase.
The man came running out of a Norlane fruit shop and leaped into Tracy Tot’s taxi one day.
“Pull up just out here,” Tracy remembers him pointing and whispering, “just wait a minute.”
He ran to a rubbish bin and grabbed a big plastic bag containing – as she later found out – a rifle wrapped up inside.
“He jumped back in and threw it on the back seat. I was looking at it, hoping it wasn’t a gun,” Tracy remembers.
The man put his hand out the window and banged on the side of the taxi door.
“Let’s go,” he told Tracy like a scene from the movies.
The taxi pulled up at his flat where a police divvy van was waiting out the front.
“Oh, oh, yeah, that would be about me stolen guitar,” Tracey remembers the man stuttering.
He began eyeing off the police out the window.
Then he decided to pick up some framed painting in the other direction.
“I told him that the police were going to follow him, and if they put on their sirens or their lights I was going to pull over,” Tracy explains.
With the police in pursuit of Tracy’s taxi, the passenger leaned over and asked: “Do you reckon you can lose them?”
“Not in a big yellow car with numbers written all over it,” Tracey said.
Police pulled the taxi over a few streets away, walked slowly from behind and opened the door.
The man turned to the officers, whose hands were on their holsters, and smiled innocently.
“Did you find me guitar?” he asked before being arrested.
That was just a day in the life of the Teesdale cabbie. Other passengers have taught Tracy the way to every brothel or offered drugs for the fare.
Half way to Fyansford, one passenger started telling Tracy how he was on a methadone program.
“You then pull up in some deserted little place and some guy rolles out of shed, finally,” she says.
“Then they start doing a drug deal on a quiet Sunday afternoon.”
A new taxi public relations initiative has identified Tracy as one of Victoria’s friendliest drivers.
The Taxi Project aims to showcase the insights and stories of drivers for a new book.
“I love people,” Tracy exclaims, “I love meeting different people.”
Her favourite customer is a disabled woman named Maxine, who loves cats and will start the ride with a kitty chant.
Driver and passenger sing What’s New Pussycat? every time they’re together.
“I used to hate driving: now I love driving,” Tracy reckons.
“I get in the car, go everywhere and my husband doesn’t get a look in.”
The 46-year-old’s earliest memories are the taxis her dad used to drive, old black and white cabs that were buffed, polished and full of white ribbons for weddings.
Henk Blumink was a Geelong Radio Cabs chairman. Now he’s a Geelong Taxi Network director with almost 30 years driving experience.
Henk was behind the wheel of Geelong’s first taxi on gas, way back in 1972.
“Everybody called me an idiot when I went through with it,” he remembers.
Ford dealer Cam Dawson had a demonstration car that aroused the interest of the former mechanical engineer.
When Henk had turned his meter off and taken a break from taxis four years later, still only one other car in Geelong from a fleet of 106 had made the LPG conversion.
Henk also owned a Ford taxi that clicked more than 1.2 million kilometres.
“In that time you were allowed to keep a car longer than eight years,” he grins.
Observing a wallaby jumping up Ryrie Street, then ducking down James Street gave Henk a good belly laugh during one night shift.
But police initially greeted the wallaby reports with cynicism.
“They looked at me a bit strangely until it came bouncing out of a couple of rubbish bins, across the bonnet of the divvy van and away,” Henk laughs.