From the Library

[Biggles]

The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this, 'What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?' and my answer must at once be, It is no use. There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron. We shall not find a single foot of earth that can be planted with crops to raise food. It's no use. So, if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for.
 GEORGE MALLORY, 1922
(Yes, we know he later died climbing Everest, but that's not the point.)

Oz around Australia on a Triumph Geoff Hill & Colin O'Carroll Foreword

[Biggles]

I knew everything there was to know about Australia. After watching Crocodile Dundee and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, I knew that men wrestled crocodiles, shaved with knives and dressed up as women. From further research at the local video store, I also knew that schoolgirls shouldn't have picnics at hanging rocks, and that at any given moment you were likely to round a corner and find Jenny Agutter swimming naked in a billabong. Whatever a billabong was.
Australia was an elemental land where all the men were called Bruce, and all the women Sheila.
Oz around Australia on a Triumph Geoff Hill & Colin O'Carroll p1

[Biggles]

"Listen," said Colin, coming back from the fridge with two more beers, "the only way you're going to find out is to go there. Why don't we rustle up a couple of bikes and ride all the way around Oz on Highway One? It's only 15,000 miles or so." He paused. "And besides, it's about time you learned to do a wheelie."
He was right. Wheelies, like stoppies, doughnuts and getting my knee down on corners, had eluded me through my short but eventful motorcycle life. You see, I may have ridden a Royal Enfield from Delhi to Belfast, a Harley from Chicago to Los Angeles and a Triumph from Chile to Alaska, but in the depths of my heart there lurked the suspicion that I was a bluffer rather than a proper biker.
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[Biggles]

At around 17,500 miles, it's also the longest road in a single country in the world.
Australia's founding fathers had wanted this road to tie all the states together, giving the new country and its people a sense of unity and equality, which it did successfully for over one hundred and ten years, but I had heard that in 2010 it was due to be decommissioned as a federal highway. This meant that it would be broken up among the states, with each looking after and developing its own section as it saw fit. The road would largely remain as a physical entity, but would cease to be a single continuous body that united the entire country. No longer would those black and white signs reading simply 1 run like a ribbon around the continent. I knew that I had to travel on it before that happened.
The thought of returning to the land of sharks, snakes and road trains instilled no fear in me; instead my biggest worry telling my darling wife Catherine of my plans. She was eight months pregnant at the time and I was afraid that this could bring on early labour.
Discretion being the better part of valour, I bravely decided to wait until Geoff and his wife Cate came over for one of our Friday night pizza sessions before breaking the news. I simply announced that I was considering quitting my job, leaving her with an infant and riding off around Australia. Then, as the enormity of what I was saying sunk in, Geoff and I made a bolt for the kitchen.
Once safely out of reach we cracked a couple of tinnies and waited until the screaming stopped, "I think that went rather well, considering," said Geoff.
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[Biggles]

I walked up the stairs to the book-lined study at the top of our house, lit the fire, hauled out an atlas and opened it at the map of Australia, with its familiar profile of a schnauzer gazing west. It didn't actually look any bigger than the Isle of Man from my atlas of the British Isles, so it couldn't be that difficult to circumnavigate, I thought.
I got up, poked the fire into life, picked up the phone on the old oak roll-top desk and called Colin to give him a good listening to. Put it this way, Colin is to talking what George Best was to drinking.
"Here, mate, I've been talking to my publishers, and they're on for that idea of a jaunt around Oz on two motorbikes. Do you fancy it?" Then I quietly put the phone down, went downstairs, made a cup of tea, fed the cat, shaved, walked back upstairs and picked up the phone again just in time to hear Colin saying... so to cut a long story short, I think it's a bloody good idea, mate. I'll just go and break the news to Catherine that we're definitely going to do it. She'll kill me, but it'll be worth it.
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[Biggles]

"Cate, I was just talking to Colin about another book, and I wanted to see what you thought," I said.
"Don't tell me: around Australia on two motorbikes," she said.
I know she's a psychologist, I thought as I went to open a bottle of wine, but it's still spooky how much she knows about what I'm thinking before I've even had a chance to think it.
We filled our glasses and touched them with that old Turkish toast: "Cam cam'a degil can can'a" - "Not glass to glass, but soul to soul". They met with a bright tinkle, an optimistic sound which drifted out through the French windows and rose into the sky, to join the stars as they looked down on that moment which is one of the rare, perfect moments of life, like the moment when you fall in love, or fling open morning shutters on a new city and go walking into streets fresh with rain, or land an aeroplane so gently that you do not even feel when the wheels touch the ground. The moment when an adventure begins.
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[Biggles]

We set off, with first Colin, then me, taking the lead and Paul in behind. I don't know about Colin, but with an ex-police biker watching my every move, I was riding like a granny on Valium. After half an hour, Paul pulled us in for a natter. "Right, you both need to ride faster. There's no point being on a bike if you don't make progress by overtaking and filtering past slow-moving traffic. Colin, you could be faster through corners as well, and Geoff, you seem obsessed with riding down the middle of the road," he said.
"Listen, the first LP I bought was Neil Diamond's 'Twelve Greatest Hits', and I've been middle of the road ever since," I said lamely, and we set off again, making progress, filtering furiously, making our way to the front of the queue at traffic lights, and generally behaving like well-mannered kings of the road. Especially since we'd just been told by an ex-cop to ride faster.
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[Biggles]

It's not the wombats that you have to worry about, it's the emus! Next to sheep, they're known to be the dumbest animals that God ever put life into. They run at 60-80 kph beside you before suddenly changing direction... straight in front of you! The good news is that if you hit them at just the right speed they'll deflect off your fairing and spin down the side of your bike, giving it a nice clean as they do so, sort of like going through an automated car wash. Then there are the snakes which like to sunbathe on the roads, and don't get me started on the kangaroos... happy travels.
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[Biggles]

By the time we got onto the plane for the short hop to Adelaide the next morning, I had become convinced that the Australian Government was putting Prozac in the water, since every single person we had met since we arrived had been unfailingly cheery, optimistic and helpful. Including the drug-sniffer dog at the airport. It was an impression confirmed by the fact that among the duty-free items for sale in the Qantas in-flight magazine was a guitar, presumably in case everyone on board fancied a good old sing-song.
However, that discovery was not the highlight of the day. It was not even picking up the back-up vehicle, a Toyota Hiace High Top with 652,425 km on the clock which the chaps at Wicked Campers had painted up for us with inspired combination of bike adventure graphics and rude  quotations.
No, it was the moment when we collected the keys of two Tigers from the Triumph dealer in Adelaide, started up the engine and I heard that sweet hum which had accompanied me all the way from Chile to Alaska on my previous adventure, and was again in this moment the sound of freedom and the open road.
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[Biggles]

The next day, the three of us that were left- me, Colin and Matt - rose early and rode north heading for the city of Canberra. Our journey took us along a tree-lined highway through rolling parkland which had climbed to high sierras by the time we stopped for a break at noon. As we sat in the shade outside a roadhouse, three Harley riders rolled in and walked inside with a nod.
"So sad the way middle-aged men feel the need to go riding around on motorbikes so they can feel like heroes," I said.
"Aye, what's that all about?" said Matt.
"Beats me," said Colin, and we rode on, passing some wonderful old cars out for a Sunday drive - an acid-yellow Ford V8, a purple Valiant, an endless black Cadillac with fins and whitewall tyres, and a silver E-Type convertible. Australia, like California, is a land where the climate is kind to ancient metal.
The afternoon stretched on, languid and hot, and to stop myself from nodding off, I kept myself amused by spotting road signs such as 'Gordon Exit Here', and wondering how many Gordons had exited, then wondered why; or 'Howlong This Exit', and muttering happily to the inside of my helmet, 'Not so long, thanks for asking.'
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[Biggles]

We had spent the morning exploring the only other real attraction in the city - the new parliament building, which looks like a Neolithic burial mound about to blast off into space. Not that the building was even the real highlight of trip there. That honour goes to the magnificently Australian conversation we had with the policeman who arrived on his mountain bike as I was getting off the Triumph.
"G'Day, mate. Listen, if you park there, it means a fine for you and a shitload of paperwork for me. But if you park over there, it means none of the above, and we're both apples. Nice bike, by the way. Used to have a Bonnie, but these days I've got a nice little Yamaha."
Oz around Australia on a Triumph Geoff Hill & Colin O'Carroll p85

[Biggles]

Later that day we made our way to Deus Ex Machina, the motorcycle company operating from a renovated factory in Camperdown, Sydney.
All devotees of Greek and Latin drama, which I'm sure includes all of you, will know that the phrase Deus Ex Machina means 'God from the machine', and is a device used by crap playwrights when they realise they've only got one minute left in the last act and no denouement in sight. Solution: enter God stage-left with magic wand, and all sorted.
 He'd certainly been busy inside Deus, I thought as we wandered around looking at bog-standard bikes which had been transformed into works of art. Two of the men behind this magic are Dare Jennings, who used to run the surf-clothing giant Mambo before he and a couple of friends started Deus in 1996, and head of sales Shaun Zammit.
"Here, are your parents from the planet Krypton, or do you guys just pick your names out of a Superman comic?" I said to Shaun as we stood looking at a Triumph Thruxton, already my favourite bike in the world, which the mechanics at Deus had made even faster and more beautiful, a thing I had previously thought impossible.
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[Biggles]

Back then, bikers had such a bad reputation that every time Margaret and Brian went touring, they had to book ahead so that motel owners wouldn't run away screaming when they rolled up on two wheels.
"Then one day in the late nineties we arrived in Nabiac and everyone treated us like human beings, so we bought a plot of land and built the museum," said Margaret. 
"Here, what are you doing wearing a Deus Ex Machina T-shirt? Don't you know that most of their clients are gay men with more money than sense?"
"Well, I'm not gay, and I haven't got either," I said. "Anyway, it was reduced from $70 to $15."
"$70 for a T-shirt? Bloody hell!" Having sorted out Deus, she then led us on a happy hour around the eight hundred motorcycles in the collection, accompanied by her arthritic chihuahua, Acme.
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