If you’re one of The Travelling Jackaroo’s 246,000 Facebook followers, you might have seen he was coming to town on his 1960 Chamberlain 9G tractor.
If you were in Shepparton when he passed through, you would not have missed him on his magnificent rig, plastered generously with all manner of Australiana, as he raises funds across the country.
The 21-year-old Travelling Jackaroo, also known as Sam Hughes, set out for a one-year fundraising journey from his home in Maleny on the Sunshine Coast when he was just 18 years old.
That was three-and-a-half years ago.
His mission seemed common enough: to help people and travel Australia.
His means to achieve it — in a little less orthodox way.
And while his parents had initially been apprehensive about his plans, they quickly realised how special it was what their son was doing.
Mr Hughes has raised more than $250,000 for three charities: The Royal Flying Doctor Service, Dolly’s Dream and Farm Angels.
He has donated a huge $150,000 of that to the RFDS; the shell of an aircraft decorated to look like an RFDS plane adorns the top of his trailer.
Inside that trailer are Mr Hughes’ sleeping quarters in the front and a garage for the little two-door fur-wheel drive he uses to runaround town when he’s camped somewhere in the back.
On the front, there’s an ag bike ramped, adorned with a metal cockatoo, a toy crocodile and a plush replica of arguably Australia’s most popular cartoon character Bluey.
There are also a few trucker caps swinging from the roll bar, adding to the estimated couple of hundred attached at the top of the Chamberlain.
“People just started giving me caps,” Mr Hughes said.
“I didn’t really know what to do with them, so up there they went.”
Mr Hughes said the Chamberlain was “pretty original” and cruised along at about 45km/h.
“Sometimes 50km; it can do a bit more, but I don’t want to push it, 45 is where it’s comfortable,” he said.
He laughed as he told a small gathering crowd that his proudest moments on the road were overtaking two caravans.
Of course, we’ve all had to pass caravans out there on the highways and byways, but it’s an ambitious attempt to do so when your own top speed is only little more than 50km/h.
When asked if it was a lonely existence travelling around the country in such a way with just himself and his little mate Bitsa — a rescue dog he picked up about three years ago in Charleville — he said it was “weird”.
“It’s a different kind of isolation; you see people all the time, so you’re never lonely,” Mr Hughes said.
“But you only ever see people once.”
On cue, Shepparton local Jenny Morris wandered up to Mr Hughes’ camp with a big smile and a generous donation in her hand to place in his Dolly’s Dream fundraising tin.
“I met you a couple of years ago with my husband Trevor in Victoria River,” she said.
“We had dinner together at the roadhouse.”
The pair reunited over a few old tales from their brief time crossing paths in the Northern Territory.
Mr Hughes is often invited to pubs at the places he camps and makes sure to always take a tin to rattle at dinner.
“They’re usually pretty full after that.”
He regularly banks money to the three charities’ accounts so as not to travel with large volumes of cash, but they all use different banks, so when he’s in town he has to make three stops to offload his donations. Tough gig to spend so much time in the rat race when you prefer the country.
Mr Hughes has travelled about 24,000km so far, which is just shy of German Hubert Berger’s Guinness World Record of 25,378.4km for the longest journey by tractor.
Even though he is on his way home now, he still has a few kilometres to clock in a less-than-direct way if he wants to avoid the rushed road energy of another big city, Sydney, where drivers aren’t used to giving heavy machinery the respect it deserves — or the braking time it needs to avoiding getting themselves cleaned up.
Mr Hughes displays handwritten signs where he camps explaining his journey and his mission in an attempt to avoid some questions he is repeatedly asked.
It still doesn’t work. In fact, this scribe is guilty of opening with those same questions, which probably triggered an internal eye-roll in Mr Hughes’ head.
Obligingly, he answered them with friendly Aussie grace anyway.
Once, he said, he wrote the answers to the most common questions on the undersides of his arms, and, that day, whenever someone asked them, he’d lift an arm so they could read the answer.
“They got a bit worried when I started unbuttoning me shirt,” Mr Hughes said with a laugh.
Out of curiosity, at the Cairns Royal Show he thought he’d tally up how many times he’d been asked the question ‘How fast do you go?’.
After having to erase the full whiteboard three times to keep adding to it, the total was 1477 in one day.
The now celebrity said he knew he was “getting a bit too famous” when he couldn’t go to the toilet without someone recognising him on his way there and waiting for him at the door, much to his awkward surprise.
In the past month he’s had more than 2.8 million viewers on the platform.
He looked at me wide-eyed for a moment to let the number sink in and then asked: “Can you fathom that?”
With his lovable larrikin and instantly endearing personality, it’s not actually surprising he’s gained such a following.
The humble country lad said to him it felt “pretty crazy”.
Now that he’s being recognised everywhere he goes, he said it was a strange feeling that so many people knew him, but he didn’t know them.
Of course, people are bound to love you when you’re a humanitarian, but, add to that, paving a path and setting an unofficial record that nobody else has is certain to inspire awe in your journey.
Mr Hughes already has grand plans for his next venture once he gets home.
He’s going to create a mobile museum on bush history.
“It will be all about Australian travelling history of truckies and drovers, Cobb & Co, rail, road and air, all that,” he said.
To get him started, The Furphy Museum at MOVE — where he camped when he temporarily broke down in Shepparton before Aerodrome Automotive got him going again — donated a Furphy water cart lid to his forthcoming collection.