Adelaide rides
The first motorcycle rides between Adelaide and Melbourne were undertaken in 1946, shortly after WW2, the running of the first TT races at Ballarat on New Year's day, and later at Easter being the first occasion for the motorcyclists of South Australia, to migrate the 400 odd miles for a major event in many years. I was still riding my 1930-34 KSS, and it was no stranger to trips of 200 miles or so, so little more than normal servicing was required. The big problem was tires – or rather the lack of them – new rubber was in short supply, and we normally accepted the retreading process for as many times as the cover would stand it. The disadvantage of retreads was that the rubber used could be quite soft and didn't last many miles on the rough roads of post WW2.
I had friends from the war years in Melbourne, and I usually took the opportunity to ride the extra 50 miles there during the Saturday practice sessions – the roads between Ballarat and Melbourne were quite good, it being a major well used highway. The roads between Adelaide and Ballarat were unfortunately very basic, with long stretches of poorly maintained limestone based surfaces on the South Australian side, and enormous pot holes on some areas, so on rigid framed machines, it was a matter of careful riding for hour after hour – but we accepted that, in those times we knew of nothing better outside the cities! The trip was undertaken again in January 1947, but this time the main reason was to go to Melbourne to collect an as new Dusting sidecar that had been stored during the war by a RAAF mate. The return trip, with the new sidecar attached, was undertaken via Geelong to take in a race event there on the Monday.
I no longer worked in the motorcycle scene, and the pressure of a new home and two growing children saw the Velocette sold soon after this trip – the sidecar being transferred to a 16H Norton powered lash-up. I soldiered on until Christmas 1950, building the three-wheeler 'Holdon' for family transport, but I also built a scooter to ride to work.
It was now the first week in January 1951 but my first marriage was falling apart so, as a last ditch effort to save it, I planned a short holiday with my wife in Sydney, which she had never seen. New chains were near impossible to find, and the three-wheeler was only being used when absolutely necessary for this reason, it being quite hard on chains when driven hard.
My job involved quite a bit of weekend overtime, driving heavy duty semi trailers, WW2 NR Mack prime movers with 16 wheeled tank transporters, moving heavy machinery, and I had made the acquaintance of interstate road transport drivers, this form of shipping goods rapidly putting the inefficient rail service out of business at this time, and this led me to arrange to meet an overnight Melbourne bound owner driver Commer truck as it left the Adelaide loading depot.
With our minimum luggage and the scooter, which was quite light only having a 50cc DKW motor, secured on board we enjoyed the overnight trip to Melbourne, me sharing the driving. When we disembarked at the truck depot, our driver immediately arranged for us to join a Mack semi-trailer being loaded and heading for Sydney the following morning, and a day later saw us installed in a hotel near the Sydney loading depot, our new driver friend picking up a new load en-route to Brisbane and promising to be back in Sydney in four or five days to take us back to Melbourne!
So we scooted around the Sydney sights for several days, until a message at the hotel desk alerted us to the fact that our ride was due back in Sydney the next morning en-route to Melbourne. So we waited outside the hotel until our taxi arrived, and the scooter was quickly loaded on board and we were on our way back to Melbourne, then a couple of days later to Adelaide with my Commer friend.
The holiday proved to be a fruitless effort, the only outcome being that my wife missed her boyfriend! It was only a few weeks later that I made the decision to end our eight year marriage and a little later, the first week in March, my wife introduced me to Barbara, and at that moment a whole new life started for me!
The next ten years spent living on Kangaroo Island and then from 1961 in Melbourne passed quickly and while I was still riding a Velocette to work at times, motorcycles were well on the back burner. But this soon changed with the Japanese motorcycle invasion, five teenage children, and our involvement with Milledge Yamaha.
Quite a few years back now, around 1982 I guess, I decided to ride over to Adelaide. I had done the ride several times on my own over the years, but always on Velocettes – once on the 1936 MSS solo, and once as the trade box outfit. I had done it several times on my solo KSS Special and it was the subject of my only breakdown, when the top of the piston came adrift a few miles West of Horsham one Sunday night around sunset on the way home. This led to hiding the bike behind a hedge and hitchhiking into Horsham, getting a garage mechanic to drive back in his ute to collect the bike, and drop me at the Horsham railway station. From there it was negotiating the fare back to Melbourne for myself and the Velo with a station attendant, who I am sure had no idea what he was doing – the figure that he totted up for moving me and the bike to Melbourne was completely over the moon! It was while I was trying to figure out what to do, that an old local motorcycle acquaintance turned up, offered to tow me back to his home behind his car, and leave the bike there and hitchhike home. Which is what I did, arriving back at Watsonia by various means, including two suburban train rides from Tottenham in the early hours of the morning.
As it happened, Milledge Brothers were running a big Yamaha promotion the next week in Horsham, and the first thing I knew was my daughter, (Shelley and then Glenda both worked at Milledges), coming home and saying 'Your Velo is at work at South Melbourne – our sales team was told about your bike at Horsham and went around and picked it up and threw it on the trailer with all the Yamaha demo bikes!'. All this without my knowledge! The mate had gone along to the promotion and mentioned having the broken down bike in his shed!
Back to the 80s!
Ted Mc Gan only lived around the corner from my place, and spent a lot of time in my workshop yarning and he jumped at the chance to accompany me on this occasion. He had his nice tidy low mileage Honda 400cc 4, and at that time I was riding an almost new Yamaha 500cc single, that had been ridden straight into something solid, and written off, and traded as was back to Milledge for another new bike. I bought the 500 wreck for a trifling amount, as it was considered an unwanted and non repairable item in the busy workshop and I didn't even dismantle it! Just stretched the horribly shunted frame back into shape in my workshop with the aid of a set of chain blocks, and strategically applied heat, I then removed the forks and triple clamps and straightened them individually. The petrol tank was a mess, but there was a new but slightly dented tank from the then new Yamaha triples laying in the Milledge workshop, the result of transit damage, and it cost me nothing.
A bit of checking showed that the triple tank could be adapted to the 500 frame, and after opening up the front section and altering it gave clearance to the top frame tube oil filler neck and cap of the single, the depression damage was pushed out of the top tank panel and a new section was welded into the front of the tank and the repaired area painted black to match the original black top panel and suddenly I had a very smart looking long range petrol tank!
At Milledge, Shelley pretty much kept the workshop and sales counters tidy and in order in her quiet times as the first girl employed as a motorcycle spare parts saleswoman in Melbourne, and had become a valued employee. Her older sister, Glenda, followed her into the company as Advertising Manager at a later date. Shelley married the head mechanic and later, with their first son growing up with his playpen in a corner of the workshop, she became a mover in the general running of the entire service repair area, even filling in at the engine parts bay and helping to assemble new Yamaha's from their crates.
At one point the considerable new outdated stock and all the service tools from as far back as the 20s was deemed no longer viable, taking up a lot of workshop and stock shelf space, which was now needed for the growing stock of Yamaha spares. A clean out resulted in a large trailer load of old tools being consigned to the rubbish tip but, with official consent, these found a home in our workshop, and odd specialised tools that didn't interest me, were passed on to various mates who could make use of them.
Tools included all the old British and US taps and dies, big end lapping mandrels etc and various specialised pullers and tools – a real treasure trove for the vintage enthusiast. There was also large stocks of new tires and tubes, no longer saleable in the late 60s – in fact tons of new outdated spares were dumped in garbage tips, at this time in Melbourne but strangely in my home state of South Australia at least. Virtually all of the discarded old stocks found their way into private hands, SA having a very active car and motorcycle Vet and Vintage movement that dated from the 30s who actively sought out discarded stocks. Much of this remains stored to this day by enthusiasts and includes quite a few complete machines that sadly have been hoarded – but this is insurance for future generations.
The 500 Yamaha was my everyday transport for several years, and so it was that Ted and I departed early one morning as the dawn was just breaking, and made good time for the first 300 miles, but suddenly ran head on into a howling gale and driving rain in the middle of one of our deserts.
This saw Ted in some difficulty, the Honda 4 being unable to cope with the headwind, and with no shelter in sight, he tucked in behind the Yamaha which was also struggling a bit, and we continued on as we could see a break in the weather ahead. Suddenly the Yamaha stopped dead! There we were in pouring rain and no shelter in sight, the first decision was to dig out the tool kit and get the plug out and check the spark, I did this with Ted leaning over me with his wet gear to keep the rain off the plug, and would you believe it, a piece of carbon across the plug points! Something that I have never experienced before or since on a 4 stroke!
So back together and off again and soon bright sunshine and the storm howling off into the distance behind us. Another couple of hours saw us at Cape Jervis, where we parked the Honda under secure cover and rode on two-up on the Yamaha to board the ferry.
We spent several days on the Island, me visiting old friends and showing Ted the wonderful scenery, and then back on the ferry to the mainland, pick up the Honda, and then a delightful ride up the coast to Adelaide, to see more friends and family, with Ted making contact with a few old mates from the 50s and 60s when trips back and forth interstate to motorcycle competition was common despite the distances involved. A couple of days later and we were heading 480 miles east again back to Melbourne, an easy nine hour ride, which has become almost routine to me over the years. Ted and I repeated the trip about a year later, this time accompanied by two of our mates, but only to Adelaide for a race meeting.
1985 and I was now retired in Gippsland with a new motorcycling community about me, when the Kangaroo Island trip was repeated, but with me now riding a Yamaha XJ600 accompanied by two local mates, both riding Harley Davidsons.
I have to say that this was a good but amusing trip, because for the first time I was riding with guys who seldom seemed to ride more than 50 miles in the hour, always pulling in for fuel at little more than hourly intervals, and never seeming to stop polishing their machines at stops! For me it was a boring ride, and with the deadline to catching the ferry growing closer, by 3 o'clock in the afternoon, I took the lead and left them trying to catch me and never stopped until they were desperately pointing to their petrol tanks, whereupon, a quick stop and off again until we made the ferry without much time to spare.
Riding on the dirt roads of the Island was another challenge for them and I eventually borrowed a mate's car for a tour of the island, the Harleys sitting in the safety of a handy carport. A few days later it was back to the ferry, and then the fuelling and polishing routine all the way back to Melbourne, arriving in darkness, and staying with friends and then the three hour trip next morning back to Gippsland.
A short time later, one of my Harley mates ended his life in a plus .05 state by riding his Harley into a massive redgum at the side of a local road – he was only 26 years old! The other mate suddenly met a girl, married and had children – I had lost my riding companions!
I did another return trip to Kangaroo Island on my own, still with the XJ Yamaha, making an overnight stop at a fellow motorcyclist's home at Horsham. This was my last trip on this machine as my left knee joint was damaged to the point where I had to have a mechanical replacement around 2000, leaving me with a recovery period and limited movement of my new knee. I rode a Yamaha 180cc scooter for some months but the chance to buy a low mileage V-twin 250cc Virago was quickly taken up, the forward footrests overcoming my knee problems which had now extended to limited use of my right knee! I couldn't wait to throw my gear onto the as-new machine and head for Kangaroo Island once more, staying overnight at Horsham as before to make the trip an easy two day journey. I did this trip on my own and repeated it again some time later, but with age creeping up on me, Barbara issued an edict that I was no longer to ride alone, and so, with no riding companions, this has seen the last of my interstate riding – a good decision I guess!
