I have always been a fan of doing crazy shit. I do less of it now than I once did, but that is to be expected. I have more to lose and some of my shit creaks a bit when I seek to do it today.
But, as Kris Kristofferson once observed: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose…” and when I was young, I really didn’t imagine I had anything at all to lose. So crazy shit was what needed doing.
And also, because I was young, all things were possible. Like riding to Melbourne on Friday night, arriving at one am on Saturday morning, grabbing a few hours sleep, then partying meaningfully and with intent until Sunday mid-morning, then riding back to Sydney, and going to work on Monday more or less with my shit together.
It may be a little hard to believe for people who weren’t riding bikes in the late Seventies and early Eighties, but this was a thing.
And I did it many, many times. I did it so many times I stopped counting after 20. There was a purple patch there when I did it four weekends in a row. Her name was Larissa and she was worth it…for a while.
So how did this go? Well, I would come home from work at 4pm. I would strap my weekend shit to the back of my bike and be on the road by 430 at the latest. I would be idling down Melbourne’s Sydney Road (what the Hume Highway became when it entered Melbourne) in North Coburg near on one am.
I did it mainly on my much-loved Suzuki GSX1100EX, but I also did it twice on a mate’s Kawasaki GPZ1100, and once on a Kawasaki Z1100ST I had bought on the cheap. I’d fitted two red hotdog car-mufflers to it, so it sounded utterly insane, and the seat was broken in the middle, but once I’d found a small piece of board in a Marulan truckstop and wedged it between the broken seat and the frame, my life improved exponentially.
So how, back then, did one ride to Melbourne from Sydney, which is 876km, in eight-and-a-half hours, give or take 15 minutes, when you’d struggle to beat ten hours today?
What happened? The bloody Hume is virtually freeway all the way now, and the speed limit is 110. When I was doing it, it was freeway to Campbelltown, then it was bastard-surface, two-lane Hume Highway, filled with a thousand trucks whose drivers were dry-mouthed with meth abuse and hatred.
It was a question of application.
To get to Melbourne from Sydney in that time required you to apply yourself. The only time your speed would drop from between 140 and 180, was when you were coming into a town, but back then it wouldn’t drop much under 100. In fact, the only time it dropped below that was on the four fuel stops I would make.
The fuel stops never took more than 10 minutes. I didn’t smoke back then, and I didn’t need frequent piss breaks in between petrol stops. I also didn’t need to drink the vile poison that passed for coffee in those truckstops, and I certainly wasn’t going to eat the deep-fried cholesterol that powered our trucking industry alongside the wonderful “shakers”. Shakers (aka Duromine, which was phentermine hydrochloride and normally prescribed as an appetite suppressant) were pills truckies took, which, when you necked enough of them, made you tremble like a gleeting hound. But they also kept you rather awake.
I’d get petrol at the truckstops, which were open 24 hours. They were, in fact, the only things open. Australia in those days, was a very, very different place. There were no roadhouses with Maccas or KFC, just truckstops. And you could ride through the middle of Yass at 120km/h.
So, my stops would be Marulan, Tarcutta, Wangaratta, and Seymour (but I did vary this from time to time). I would always have to stop at Seymour, because once I crossed the border, I really dialled it up in terms of speed – and that GSX sucked juice like a drunk doing sherry when you got your head down and tried to keep it pinned for long periods of time.
And I did that for a few reasons.
Firstly, getting booked in Victoria was no big deal, since the states were not linking traffic offenses back then. Secondly, the Victorian part of the Hume was, as it is today, a divided road and basically one long, flat land-speed record stretch of tarmac from Albury until you saw the lights of Melbourne. It was also in much better condition in Victoria than it was in NSW.
So, while I was not at all worried about getting nailed south of the border, I was only vaguely worried about getting booked in NSW – and I never did. Police cars were rare, and far more interested in truckies. And at 10pm on a Friday night, the only thing on that Hume Highway was me and truckies.
By and large, riders and truckies shared a camaraderie. We each hated the cops and car drivers, and most times I was treated with great courtesy by trucks. Sure, now and again, I’d encounter some cock who’d been driving for 30 hours straight, with a badly overloaded semi, was well-fried on ox-blood (a type of speed), had chewed the inside of his mouth raw, and had no idea where on this planet he was or what he was doing…apart from 140 between Gundagai and Holbrook.
Clowns like this would weave across the road, kicking up gravel from the table drains, or indicate for you to pass, only to put you in the path of an oncoming vehicle.
I did remonstrate once with one such knob. He had blocked me passing him for maybe 20km. There were bends in the Hume back then, and lots of double-yellow lines, so it was a challenge. By the time I’d solved the problem, and pulled up in Holbrook for fuel, I was ferally angry. I swore if I ever found the cunt, I’d beat him to death. Which is when he pulled into the servo, with a hiss of air-brakes, and decided he wanted to beat me to death. He failed. And I really didn’t have a lot of time to be creative with him.
He came at me with an iron bar. I brained him with a steel garbage can, and while he rolled around on the ground next to the diesel pump making grunting noises, I paid for my fuel and fucked off.
I’d like you to understand the Hume Highway was a wild and woolly place in the middle of the night in those fine old days. And I am not overstating that.
So, where, I can hear the young people ask, were the cops?
The NSW Highway Patrol came into being in 1975 in NSW and a few years later in Victoria. But it was not at all the money-grubbing, BMW-driving assemblage of rude gronks it is today. Back then, you could occasionally talk them out of booking you. And there weren’t a whole lot of them around. Like I said, Australia was a very different place in those days.
And quite frankly, the few times I did see a cop car and he saw me, I was on the throttle large-style. I’d shit myself when I saw them, button off reflexively, then get back on it hard. And once or twice they did turn their blue lights on (they were all blue-lighted then), but that was wishful thinking on their part. There was no catching me. I have no idea if they even tried, because I was never stopped. Maybe they figured I’d die down the road a bit.
And I almost did a few times. Sometimes my bike would do mental shit – like they all did from time to time back then. Tank-slappers were not uncommon and potholes could set them off. You just rode around that, or not.
Then there was the odd occasion when I’d get involved in some death-dice occurring between a pair of semis. They would overtake each other, which was a slow process, even if they were doing 120-140 at the time. But they would do this across double-yellow lines with absolute fearlessness. CB radio-contact assisted them in this regard, but I didn’t have one of those – and I would chafe to get past them because I was going much faster than they were, and their duelling bullshit was eating into my time. And Larissa’s time.
Like an idiot, I would often get too close and be pelted with rocks, some of which were very large. One time I got sprayed with fresh kangaroo mince, which I guess was better than hitting the actual ’roo, like the Kenworth I was shadowing did.
Interestingly, I never even came close to hitting an animal myself. No idea why. I rarely even saw any. I saw corpses, sure. But nothing ever jumped in front of me.
Which was good, because headlights back then were pretty damn shitty, and you had little chance of seeing anything more than maybe 100 metres in front of you. And at 180, 100 metres goes pretty quick.
So, all things being equal, I would be rolling into Melbourne an hour or so after midnight. I would be utterly speed-crazed. My eyes were like saucers, a bit gritty and red, but they were wide open. I was a little tired, but I was wide awake. My mouth would be dry, and my ears would be buzzing from the wind-roar which had been my only and constant companion the whole way. It felt surreal to be doing 80 down Sydney Road at one am. It felt like walking pace. I could see the lighted shops, and cars everywhere, and had to be mindful of the tram-lines if it was damp. Half-an-hour earlier all I could see was the tiny bit of rapidly rolling grey road my shitty headlight struggled to illuminate at 190.
It was very much two different realities. And a sensory overload, as you can imagine. But it was one hell of a trip each and every time I did it…which is really why I think did it.
And why wouldn’t I?
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