Falls Road

Yesterday was one of those delicious days when you spend the morning sleeping, and the afternoon riding. Hence it was a short ride, but I explored a road which will be central to some of the unsealed farm and national park roads which I will throw myself into once the SR500 is on the road.

I took these photos on Falls Road, just south of Strath Creek. I had come by King Lake and Flowerdale, and would return to Flowerdale, then race through the seven kilometers of sweepers down the mountain into Whittlesea.









The first half of this year was so trying and stressful. And now, it seems, things have turned around. I will soon have the SR back on the road, having found the odd one or two hundred dollars spare from every pay cheque. I love my job, which is low in pay but high in meaningfulness, and in between work I ride. I look forward to sharing these rides with you.

For the Love of Bendigo

My chain goes clack at the moment because it is old. I cannot afford to replace it and get the SR on the road. So I tunelled through bush roads, with the bumps and the clacks, and when I broke through it was Sutton Grange.



Sheep found their way down the slopes while over fences dogs barked, marking farms. But as I rode on only silence entered my ear - or it might have been, the clack and the engine's hum subduing those sounds like fog.

In Bendigo, stumbling down paths through the pine, I happened on details that insist: the bat-smell and their shriek. The silhouettes and lamps of a Jack the Ripper.





The dead are buried within us. New eyes see what they saw, live in the houses they built, and bear their mark. In Bendigo I can still smell their gold.



Their other purposes.



Their mulch and mood.



Days later Fee and I rode home in the sunshine. You can travel in place but not in time. At least not in the same way. And yet as our bodies moved away from the regional city, our minds travelled to future times when we will live in that place.

Rainy Day

I took to the Yarra and Dandenong Ranges last Saturday. Apparently I missed the rain by minutes when I rode east, but it was to catch up with me.

I wanted a simple ride, so chose familiar roads out to Yarra Glen, with a loop up Chum Creek Rd and down Myers Creek Rd, to lunch at Healesville.







These roads are winding, twisting, with great ferns among the gums. Then I made south along the route from Launching Place to Gembrook. I wandered about the town reading about the history of its uses - timber milling, summer getaway, and home to a small community. There was once a great park of exotic animals, nosing about in the bracken and dwelling in the bottom of black pools, to be dredged up if you dared at the end of a hook and line when the weather was cool. Hot weather brought fire and ended the life of the creatures and their place.



The weather was cool this day. I rode home in the dark in terrible visibility, drenched in the water that collected in heavy puddles from where it was bucketed onto me by passing cars. But the daylight hours of rain were a joy to me on my solid motorcycle, riding at speed amidst forests, sweet grass, and small farms.

Pioneers

It is said that to ride alone is good for the soul; and that to ride with friends is good for the heart.

I chose to lay aside soul-work for some new winter heartening. So my friend Rosy and I spent yesterday on the road. We followed in the footsteps of Burke and Wills, Major Mitchell, and the gold diggers.

It was a day pregnant with the ghosts of pioneers. Do you know who flew the first Australian-made aeroplane in Australia?

No, it was not Harry Houdini at Digger's Rest. He was a foreigner, in a foreign aeroplane, and he wasn't even the first to fly in Australia.



The first Australian-made aeroplane flown in Australia was made and flown by the Duigan boys, at Mia Mia. Its construction was based on...a photograph of the Wright brother's aeroplane.





That was July 16, 1910. When, almost exactly one hundred years later Rosy and I found ourselves flying past the place on our motor cycles, how could we not stop?





Later we sat in the Theatre Royal in Castlemaine, upstairs in a private room on armchairs drinking coffee. The building, both in facade and furnishing, is Art Deco.


Above and below, are images found on the internet - I did not think to photograph the place. If I had, even the toilets would not have been spared.


I feel close to a friend when I ride with them, particularly when following them as we weave through the hills in formation. It is a wonderful way to spend time, alone together.

We made south for Daylesford in terribly strong winds, then west for Woodend in the wet, then south down the Calder Freeway in the freezing cold, to meet with Fee and enjoy a hot dinner together.

Oh!, I do enjoy a good day of motor cycling!

Mark B's Retro SRs

One of my favourite blogs of late is Mark B's Yamaha SRs and XTs Random Photos http://yamahasrxtphotooftheday.blogspot.com which is a collection of Mark's large library of SR photos, which he uploads daily. I am particularly interested in the retro-style SRs he shows. Below are links to some of them - click on each letter.

A B C D E
F G H I

T.B.C....

Swan Hill with Fee

Fee and I travelled by motorcycle to Swan Hill this weekend past.

It was my uncle's 60th birthday. He is dying of cancer. This fact was not mentioned at the party, but it was fortunate that we had this opportunity to gather around him. He's universally liked, and deservedly so.  And I am quite sad to see this happen to them both. I'm also sad to know that a character, in both senses of the word - a good man; and an interested and larkish fellow - is leaving the world.

Fee is not up to long trips on the bike, which gave us the pleasant excuse to divide the trip in two, and stay Friday night with my aunt in Bendigo. On the way up we stopped for lunch in Romsey. It was cold - that fine wintry day when smoke hangs like mist, evoking warm cottages and scones. Instead we ate chips and gravy!



Afterwards Fee said hello to some sheep in a paddock by the road.



The man who owned the small supermarket evidently owned the sheep, and weirdly he came outside in a huff to have a go at us. I rose to his occassion and he backed off, but if he had continued I might have suggested he put up signs, right there on the public roadside: "Do not look at these sheep!"

The next day we set off for Swan Hill, where we were due for lunch.

I enjoyed this ride, but Fee did not. She enjoyed it even less when we encountered the remains of the locust plague. They hurt when they hit, in that instant before they explode like paint balls.

At one point Fee anxiously motioned me to pull over, then jumped off in a huff: her visor had been splattered with a stinking locust carcass! We had nothing with which to wipe it off, so in her agitation, to the confusion no doubt of passing traffic, she got down in the wet grass and wiped it. I could do nothing but grab my camera and shoot!





Fee took the opportunity for a photo session of me.



We stayed at my mum's Saturday night, and Fee caught a 6am bus Sunday morning, to avoid another day on the motorcycle.

I left at midday, heading west out of Nyah West.



Along the Chinkapook-Nyah West Road I encountered my beloved salt flats.







The salt flora:



Stumps settle in odd shapes in this landscape. Here, a wild Mallee pig



There were more slat flats to be encountered on the way to Sea Lake. One was a system of lakes and rivers. It was beautiful, but I rode on in order to enjoy it in motion, rather than stopping to look. It is important to balance capturing the scene, with enjoying the un-clutchable flow of things.

At Chinkapook I stopped to admire the ghostly tennis courts. As much as being an experience in the present, when something is left sitting ramshackle since its use in former days it manages to evoke the spirit of the days at which its architecture hints. That's why I call these courts ghostly.



From Chinkapook I rode south: Sea Lake, Birchip, Corack, Teddywaddy, choosing back roads all the way. When my fuel became low I was forced on to the highway in search of the nearest main town, Charlton. From there I took the Calder Highway toward Bendigo, with a sign telling me home was 245km away.

The ride down the Calder was cold indeed! Freezing! When I took a turn-off for more petrol, I was riding through thick fog. My fingers didn't work properly at the service station, my throat hurt, and I almost forgot my $10 in change - the cold had entered my head.

So I have decided that in winter I won't be doing those long trips which leave me starting for home (Melbourne) from Bendigo after dark, which was common over summer. In fact, I think the long-distance rides along endless straight roads might become less of a habit. I did a lot of them, but it was due to the novelty of the Hornet 600, after years of old bikes on which I avoided highway speeds. I am realising how much I love central Victoria, with its winding hills and small towns appearing around corners. And the part of the Wimmera and Mallee regions that I love to ride regularly is the stuff at its edges - the riverina area, or the forests at the edge of the deserts, with bush and sweeping roads. Nyah is not flat - you can see that in the picture above. Whether it is a straight road on hills, or gentle open curves back and forth, it is quite different from the stereotypical endless straight and flat highways. And this is the interesting thing about this landscape, and Australian landscape in general. It is not at all uniform such as we often imagine. The Mallee landscape is a patchwork of many kinds - many different landscapes, related to one another in the way family appearances are, but as with family similarities, there is real difference in each individual member. There is not one essential characteristic. When I ride I love to seek out the different and the new.

The CZ fails but Honda does it

James Devery is a young friend of mine who bought himself a two-stroke Czechoslovakian motorcycle which is nearly twice his age. He fiddled with the wires and rode the thing straight up the Hume to NSW and back, in the week of heat that preceded Black Saturday.

The CZ has "character", so James has not ridden it much. Though he has gone from an ignoramus to a skilled home mechanic in a short time. Here it is:



On Monday last, James and I went on a ride. We intended to wander about the hills between Daylesford and Maldon. The little 175 handled the freeway well, though it left me worse for wear from my position behind, drinking the blue smoke it emitted.

Just south of Tullamarine Airport, James pulled over.  The bike had failed in some way.

You check the gearbox oil-level on the CZ by unscrewing a bolt in the case: if hot oil pours out, there's enough in it. ...a simple yet strange motorcycle! We stood there scratching our heads, turning eccentric bolts, watching oil leaks and strange smoke for a few minutes, while cars accelerated past us at 100kph.  We later learned that his clutch had decided that, now the electrical system was sorted, it should self-destruct.

Suddenly a light truck pulled in. I was getting ready to wave the driver on, when his grinning face revealed Craig, of Mischief Makers, a custom bike fabricator. It was like a TV show where the young bucks get themselves in trouble, and the cool older guy happens to turn up and save the day.

So James' CZ returned home via Craig's truck. After I ferried James himself home, I set off (it was now 1pm) to take the Eastern Freeway out to Kinglake, where I had lunch, then Flowerdale, Strath Creek for Coffee, Broadford to visit an aunt and cousin I have not seen in years, and home down the Hume Freeway.

At Flowerdale I explored a new dirt road, Spring Valley Road.