News from Jupiter
From My Notebooks In 1976: Leaving Australia and the Passage to Singapore
July 14, 2024
Perth, Mid-April Before leaving the country I wrote this rather harsh assessment: Australian life does seem to have a dreamlike quality. Life seems to pass in a daze, as though one were just going through the motions. People do work, but never show the effect of it, and this underlying assumption of imperturbability seems to run through even their most drunken or excited moments. There […]
From My Notebooks In 1976: The Last Leg To Perth
June 23, 2024
Here’s a picture of Gurney’s hole in the ground that I wrote about last week – where he had his orchard. Thursday, April 8th To Norseman. Exchanged thoughts while riding. Carol was on a “bummer” about something she’d written home and wished she hadn’t. I was figuring out distillation plants from sea water using solar energy or burning slash from the bush. Much attracted […]
From My Notebooks In 1976: Crossing the Nullarbor
June 16, 2024
We left Ceduna, and André’s garage, on April 6th to take the road across the Nullarbor plain. Strangely there is almost nothing in my diary about this part of the journey, although after almost fifty years some of it is vividly memorable, so I will abandon the normal format of this series and just describe it as I remember it. The next township of any […]
How I Became a Jolly Good Fellow
June 9, 2024
Just like most bikers who have travelled any distance in the last forty years or so I have been well aware of the existence of Touratech. When I first saw some of their products back in the early nineties – tank bags, boxes, countless clever devices – it was with a very strange and confused mixture of emotions, part admiration, part envy, part regret and […]
From My Notebooks In 1976: Still edging along Australia’s south coast towards the Nullarbor
May 25, 2024
March 19th to 26th, Adelaide Our hosts John and Judith Brine were academics who enjoyed our company, as we did theirs, and they looked after us for a week while we explored the city. There was plenty to see but I made only one short note. Visit to Art Gallery. A quiet mood. Aboriginal bark paintings. The Pleiades and Orion in a T and Oval […]
From My Notebooks In 1976: Australia’s South Coast
May 18, 2024
Edging along the south coast towards the Nullarbor The Rises, 3rd to 13th March The Handbury family made us feel at home on their sheep station, and even allowed us to earn a little money doing labouring work. I learned a lot, but my most vivid memory was of watching the foreman kill and dismember a sheep. It was done with amazing speed and […]
From My Notebooks In 1976: Melbourne in February
May 11, 2024
We spent almost a month in Melbourne. Much of the time I was working on the bike and looking for a ship to take us away from Australia. With Darwin destroyed by a typhoon, I felt the least I should do to be able to say I’d seen Australia was to ride the two thousand miles across the south to Perth, but finding a boat […]
From My Notebooks In 1976: Lunch with the Dame in Melbourne
May 3, 2024
First, thank you all so very much for your many birthday wishes. I truly appreciate them. I made a bad mistake in last week’s pages. I said that Melbourne’s famous newspaper, “The Age,” belonged to Murdoch. Untrue. It is and always has been quite independent of Murdoch, and my error is possibly due to my own mild obsession with him. Not everything belongs to Rupert […]
From My Notebooks In 1976: Galahs and Snowy Mountains
April 28, 2024
Sunday, January 11th From Coonabarrabran. Very quiet on the roads and in the towns. Passed along a section of dirt road to Cudal. Stopped a while to talk and look at parrots. Beginning to realise how many there are – oddly enough there are more to be seen in the South than in the North. The grey ones with red breasts and heads are everywhere […]
From My Notebooks In 1976: Gribble in Brisbane
April 20, 2024
1879 was a year in which the British Empire confronted some 4000 Zulus at the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, with tales of heroism and a splurge of Victoria Crosses to excite the British public. It was also the year in which George Lucas launched his bicycle lamp, which might seem of relatively little importance. Nonetheless his lamp, mounted on the front wheel of penny-farthings, went […]