In the latest report from his round-Australia trip, GEOFF HILLcomes face to face with hairy bikers, ageing bikes and his own mortality
WE SPED north up the coast of New South Wales, past banana and sugar-cane plantations, past brimming rivers as wide as the Mississippi, and through a landscape so lush it was tempting to stop for a nibble, to see if it tasted as good as it looked.
We were alternately drenched by rain and dried by sunshine, and the rain stung our hands, since it was too hot for gloves, but it was a “good to be alive” kind of stinging.
Finally, in the blessed cool of late afternoon, we rolled up to the National Motorcycle Museum, a collection of sheds containing 800 bikes in the hamlet of Nabiac, south of Brisbane. Only to find a squadron of Harleys already there, surrounded by a gang of men, some with more tattoos and piercings than teeth, wearing tattered leathers and denims emblazoned with gang patches and badges.
As we got off the bikes, half of them stomped over, led by the biggest and fiercest looking.
This is it, I thought. I’ve survived the hill bandits of Baluchistan, the drug barons of Colombia and a Saturday night in Sauciehall Street in Glasgow, only for it all to end here.
“G’day,” said the leader of the gang. “You the Irish blokes?”
“Er, yes,” I said.
“Good on ya. Cheffie’s the name,” he said, offering a meaty paw. “We turned up late for the museum and they told us we could stay in the house around the back, except some Irish buggers had already booked it, so we thought it must be you. Here’s me card.”
“Ipswich Easy Riders: Adventure before Dementia,” it said.
“Listen, Cheffie, if it’s a house, I’m sure there’s plenty of room for all of us,” I said.
“Nah, we’ll just go down the pub and camp around the back,” he said.
The house in question turned out to be a rustic clapboard bungalow with a verandah and a meadow out the front.
We finished our work for the day, cooked up some pasta and had a beer on the verandah as the sun went down, feeling like Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.
And then we went to bed like boys on Christmas Eve and dreamt of Nortons. And Triumphs.
Next morning, we were standing outside the door as owner Margaret Kelleher opened up.
She and her husband Brian had run a bike shop in Canberra until Brian’s motorcycle collecting habit became so bad they realised they may as well start a museum with the 480 machines he had stored in sheds all over the place.
Back then, bikers had such a bad reputation that every time they went touring, they had to book ahead so motel owners wouldn’t run screaming when they rolled up on two wheels.
“Then one day in the late 1990s we arrived in Nabiac and everyone treated us like human beings, so we bought a plot of land and built the museum 12 years ago,” said Margaret.
She led us on a happy hour around the 800 motorcycles in the collection, accompanied by her arthritic chihuahua, Acme.
While doing a piece for our TV documentary, I sat on a 1937 Rudge Ulster similar to the one my dear old dad raced in the 1950s, complete with ancient leathers, gauntlets and pudding bowl helmet. It was emotional.
I was filled with melancholy, thinking of him as he is now at the age of 84, grey and full of sleep, and of the man he was when he tore around on motorcycles such as this, filled with vim and vigour.
How sad it is that we all grow old, I thought, then dealt with that sadness in the only way I know, by getting on a motorcycle and riding into the newborn day, holding aloft the torch of hope and optimism against the darkness of the unknown future and my own advancing years.
