“I just love them and will really miss them. Driving a bus can be uninteresting, but it’s the association with the kids that makes the job interesting. They’d amuse me to no end with their stories and little pranks,” Mr Sinclair said.

“I’ve had the rascals – but good rascals, and I made sure the antics they got up to were safe ones. Safety is a big issue driving young ones around, particularly on a 57-seater bus. You have to keep the kids under control, but the main concern is to drive the bus.

“I’ve got eight grandchildren, but all these kids were like grandkids to me. You get to know them all, see them all grow up from preschoolers through to high school. They’re what I’ll miss most now I’ve retired.”

The job has also been educational for the popular driver.

“I usually had the littlies up the front, and the things they’d come out with. I had two little girls behind me and we were going out along a dirt rural road. A heifer was bulling in the paddock and, of course, other cattle will jump onto their backs. One little girl said to her friend, ‘That’s disgusting’, to which her friend answered, ‘Yes, I agree. I much prefer AI’.

“When they started bickering, I’d suggest the game of I Spy. One little bloke had something starting with C, to which we all spent some time trying to guess. We all gave up. It was Truck.”

“Years ago, again on that dirt road, an old sow with a lot of piglets came up out of the river. The boys pleaded with me to stop – ‘we can catch one’ to which I thought, ‘Yes, I can just imagine that’, so stopped. They caught one and it ran up and down the bus for the rest of the trip, then finally joined my team of animals on the farm.

“Many times we’ve had odd passengers – puppies, snails, guinea pigs. And many times the schools didn’t know they were coming.”

Mr Sinclair joked he thought it was “time to get out before I started running into people” and the fact a new contract for the run was due in April.

“I hadn’t even advertised it, but a couple from Toowoomba came down looking for a bus run. They had a look and offered to buy it,” he said.

Mr Sinclair’s run took in many tar and dirt roads around Manilla, including meeting the Barraba bus halfway and offloading students - “some Manilla kids went to school at Barraba and visa-versa.”

“I’ll miss the youngsters deeply, but I’ve still got all my beehives – 50 of them. Playing around with them and selling a bit of honey around the town will keep me pretty busy.”