Jonathan Hermawan: Bush mechanic and low aromatic fuel champion

Jonathan Hermawan works for the Red Dust role model organisation as an alcohol and men’s health educator. A qualified teacher, Jonathan has led an interesting life to say the least.

Born on the east coast of NSW, he has lived in most states of Australia and these days spends half his time in the Western Desert community of Kintore and the rest in Alice Springs.

As well as being an educator, musician and advocate for Indigenous leadership and youth empowerment, Jonathan is a self-taught mechanic who runs workshops for people interested in cars and the inner workings of engines.

“Growing up, all around me, my uncles and brothers were always on the tools working on cars and motorbikes and lawnmowers, in fact anything we could get our hands on. I think I rebuilt my first engine when I was 8 or 9 years of age.” Jonathan said.

As a mechanic with over 20 years’ experience Jonathan has seen many changes in the industry, but the most significant one he says was the introduction of Opal or low aromatic unleaded fuel in the mid 2000’s to help communities cope with the problem of petrol sniffing. At the time he was working in the remote community of Kintore, 530 kilometres west of Alice Springs.

“When it first came out the BP people came to Kintore to talk to us about Opal and I actually didn’t believe it was fuel, it had very little aroma and it was a yellowy colour. I said ‘this isn’t fuel fella’s’, and they said ‘yeah they had taken out a lot of the aromatic properties to lessen the intoxication factor’ and I was blown away by that,” Jonathan said.

“We started using it straight away and we found it to be a perfect fuel, we found the cars ran really well on it. In the early days there were a lot of myths going around, a lot of people were making up stories about fuel lines being corroded prematurely and people saying ‘my engine blew up because of Opal fuel’.

“I remember talking to the newspapers in town, the Centralian Advocate and the NT News and they interviewed me a number of times about any the issues I had with Opal fuel and I reported zero, absolutely nothing,” Jonathan said.

“Of course the most important thing about the fuel is that it’s helping cut down petrol sniffing in our communities. I have seen the dramatic reduction in the lives lost to petrol sniffing in communities out our way”.

Jonathan says that we need to make people more aware of the benefits of using low aromatic unleaded fuel, something he does whenever he gets the chance.

“We need to get people educated about low aromatic unleaded fuel, I have been in situations where I am filling my car up at the bowser and I have a modern LS Chevy engine in my Commodore and I get people who are from interstate who say ‘Oh don’t put that fuel in your car it will ruin your engine’ so I sit there and have a debate with them about low aromatic unleaded fuel and how they need to do their research. It’s really ignorance and hearsay that causes the problem around the fuel and people not willing to use it,” Jonathan said.