A pointer from Luke Buckmaster who rates this #5 on his list of Ozploitation films. Tarantino is a fan. Stacy Keach plays a forty-ish man with a dog who drives a truckload of pig carcasses across the Nullarbor from Melbourne to Perth in 1981 to break a strike by the western meatworkers. (Strangely it's a single trailer, not a road train — it isn't going to feed even Fremantle.) Somehow out on the plains he picks up a couple of female hitchhikers, specifically Jamie Lee Curtis who he romances at the telegraph station at Eucla. Plotwise he's notionally trying to capture a bloke in a green van who has a taste for slaughtering young ladies, or at least evade being framed for such.
Overall I found it pretty funny, largely because of Keach's excess interiority and willingness to plough on no matter how ridiculous things got. The geography was way off (the IMDB page lists many errors) but the locations were put to good use. Director Richard Franklin mostly did B-grade stuff like David Williamson's Brilliant Lies; he had a peculiar talent for squandering his ingredients.
Herbert Mitgang at the time.