Waxed cotton, pipes and two-strokes: a reminiscence by Ern Reeders

The good thing about doing stupid things when you're young is that you don't know they're stupid.

Take the big Easter tour my mate Rodney and I resolved on. A friend of his decided to join us. We were going to head through Gippsland, loop through the Snowy Mountains and come back down via Corryong and Benambra. In the day you either wore leathers which made you a mother-raping outlaw, or a waxed cotton jacket which demanded you smoke a pipe. Mine was one of those, a Belstaff. Apart from that, we wore denim jeans and gloves of course and just a jumper under the jacket. Gloves had no high tech waterproof breathable insulating liners but a breathtaking innovation had just hit the market. Kangaroo fur mittens! They had a vinyl palm and the fur was on the outside. Boy they were warm. Only wrinkle was trickling through country towns looking like you had your hands inserted into some road kill. Not cool.

At some point on the first day the red mist descended and Rod and I cracked it on through some fast downhill sweepers. I was on a trail bike with block pattern tyres and he was on a 650 BSA twin tricked out as a cafe racer: rear sets, clip-ons, the full monte. He won but not by much. Rider no. 3 thought we were mad and turned back the next day. The camp that night was subdued. And felt endless. Thirty buck K-mart tents, thin sleeping bags and a tin of baked beans for dinner didn't make for any kind of soothing luxury. We slept on the ground. We were young. Did I mention stupid?

The mountains revealed new things, as they're meant to. Like altitude changed the fuel mixture. The BSA suffered more from this than my steed and I gained an advantage in the competition stakes. It wasn't much help though as the road over Kiandra was being sealed. When we reached it rain had turned the compacted dirt surface into a thin, tan slurry and a few hundred metres down it had us covered from head to toe in the muck. We rolled into Talbingo looking like choc dipped ogres and borrowed the servo's water hose to wash ourselves down. We went from dirty and soaked to just soaked.

Luckily I had contacts up there and we dossed down in one of the hydro scheme barracks. By morning the gear had dried out some and there was sunshine. Time to fire up the machines and blast off. With my 360 cc single two-stroke this was a combination of art and athletics. You stood on the left peg and eased the piston over the top of the stroke with the kick start lever under the right foot. Then you'd jump up and come down on it hard and hope for a spark. Observers thought you were up high to better view the female fauna in the neighbourhood. Keeping the pipe clenched between the teeth proclaimed your guilt of only minor perversions.

Now if you kicked down before the top of the stroke, the donk could fire and fling the lever back into your calf hard enough to split the skin. Burly motocrossers were known to walk away from this machine biting their lip. But this morning the kick start dance was successful and we followed a back road to Corryong on our way to Omeo.

We knew that most of this road was dirt and a challenge for a cafe racer but what's a challenge at that age? More than we thought actually, as drizzle had turned the road greasy and inevitably Rodney went down. No damage apart from a broken gear shift. That left several hours of road for Rod to negotiate stuck in second. Slipping the clutch around tight bends and all that. We made it to Benambra as the light was failing and inquired at the pub about who could weld the gear linkage. The local pilot could. Next morning probably. This is the pilot who lost his license later flying his plane between the pylons of the bridge over the Snowy near Orbost but that's another story.

We were directed to the footy clubroom at the local oval and spent the night tossing and turning and pondering the physics of why sleeping on wood was harder than on dirt. Next morning, with the linkage fixed, we were off. But three days had taken its toll. We were colder and stiffer than a copper's truncheon. Stopping at a servo to fuel up became a matter of propping the sidestand and then laying down on the tank and rolling off. First rider off helped his mate lift his leg over the seat.

Well that was long ago and far away. Us old pharts can nod sagely when the virtues of today's bikes are debated. But you could drop that trail bike hard and all you'd get was some scratches on the footpegs, indicators and bar ends. You could rebuild the top end in a couple of hours in a dirt-floored shed, or adjust the timing with a cigarette paper and a screwdriver if you had to. I see two strokes may be in for a new lease of life, with the likes of Lotus seeing the benefit of simplicity and good power to weight ratios while reducing emissions with new injection technologies. Wonder if tobacco pipes will make a comeback?