In 1976, the summer before my last year of school, a mate and I decided to ride our bikes from Adelaide to the Flinders Ranges. He had an uncle who lived in Wlmington. His plan was to ride up to there. My plan was to go with him and see what happened afterwards.
Rest time at Crystal Brook
His achievement is greater than mine because he rode on a dragster. It’s probably a distance record for that kind of bike.
My bike was a conventional 5-gear touring thing with Dunlop Thornproof tyres. I rode over four-inch nails, three-corner jacks and razor-sharp flint and never had a puncture with them.
We left at about midnight to get some of the riding done before it got too hot. I fell asleep on my bike after endless miles staring at the tail light of the bike ahead. I woke up on the verge with my front wheel wobbling about in the stones. I didn’t fall off but it was a pretty effective way of waking myself up.
My mate had a tent but I had a sheet of plastic. When it rained (and it did) I would wake up and wrap myself in the plastic. It worked a treat.
Possum feeding ground
This picture shows my campsite at Wilmington. The dragster is on the right.
Tidiness wasn’t really my forte. I probably wasn’t terribly careful about leaving food out and attracting animals. My mate had gone off to live in comfort with his uncle and aunt.
One night I went to sleep and woke up when I felt something touch my back. It moved about for a bit then settled down. I was too sleepy to panic so I reached for my trusty Dolphin waterproof torch and switched it on. There was a big brush-tailed possum sitting on me, munching a Bush Biscuit. At this stage, I’m going to link to a page called ‘The History of the Biscuit in Australia‘ because I am delighted that such a page exists. The Bush Biscuit also has its own Facebook page. Anyway, it’s a huge, hard biscuit and this possum was just sitting there, blinking a bit in the torchlight and chewing away. As far as I remember, I turned the torch off and went back to sleep.
I forget where I ended up on that trip. My brother eventually caught me up in his old Triumph 2000. I was knackered by then and accepted a lift home. I did a lot of riding in the Flinders before and after that.
North of Willochra
This is the road from Quorn to Hawker. I often got shadowed by wedge-tailed eagles on this road. They never did anything, just soared just above me.
These pictures were taken with a Pocket Agfamatic camera, an awful machine with picture quality limited by its tiny negative size.
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