It was well after dark as I came around the corner on the old Princes Highway south of Kempsey and the headlight, dim though it was as on all WLAs, picked out a rope stretched across the road at chest height. I slammed on the brakes, a pitifully useless act at the best of times. The narrow pads squealed while attempting to slow the equally narrow drums. At the last second, I ducked as well as I could. Just as well I didn’t have a windscreen on this bike, I remember thinking.

I must have managed to get under the rope, I thought, but when I looked in the mirror it was gone. The bloke in the servo in Kempsey to whom I related this tale, still rattled from the experience, blew up. “Those little bastards are at it again,” he said. “Hang on. I’ll call the cops. Where was this?” He picked up the phone and passed on the information. Then he said, “You know it’s white knitting wool, don’t you? The headlight makes it look thicker. It’s just kids.”

I checked in with him on my way back from Ballina on the North Coast, where my trip had taken me, and he was a happy man. “They caught the little bastards,” he said, “and they kicked their arses till they bled.” He may have been exaggerating, but back in the 1960s this was not just accepted, but generally approved policing.

My usual distance runs on all of my WLAs were from home in Sydney to either Melbourne where I occasionally had a girlfriend or Ballina, where my mother lived. With the bikes topping out not far above 80 km/h, both trips usually took about 12 hours, allowing for crap roads and fuel stops.

我有时间骑相当仔细,因为所有的night petrol stations were still rare. On one night run with a few mates we arrived at a servo on the Hume Highway in the early hours of the morning expecting it to be open, only to find that we’d be waiting three or four hours till it came to life. One of the blokes went across the road to the pub, woke the publican and returned with a slab of tinnies. It was the law in those days that pubs had to serve “bona fide” travelers at any time of the night. At least I think it was the law…

Faced with riding another WLA, this one fitted with a sidecar, to Melbourne overnight in the middle of winter for a student conference I decided I would take the coast road, the Princes Highway, rather than the inland (and presumably colder, though shorter) Hume Highway. Helen, my girlfriend, rolled herself in a blanket and slipped into a sleeping bag. I then wrapped her in a tarpaulin and inserted her into the sidecar.

If the Hume was truly colder than the Princes, it must have been polar. When we rolled into the little town of Carcoar, I swear the bike pulled itself over into the parking lot in front of the pub and stopped. I attempted to climb off and found myself frozen in a half crouch. Still in that position, I fell over backwards and lay on the icy ground with arms and legs in the air like a dead wombat. A couple of blokes on the pub veranda had watched me roll in and came to the rescue, carrying me into the pub amid much laughter and propping me up in front of the open fire before dosing me with overproof Bundaberg rum. Coincidentally, the logo of this brand is a polar bear…

After some time of this I finally remembered Helen, still stuck in the sidecar. I need hardly say that when I finally unwound her from her swaddling she was not in the best of moods. We got a room in the pub but slept well apart from each other, even though I pointed out that proximity would allow us to share warmth. Women, eh.

第二天,我们到珀丽维克toria. The temperature was almost pleasant by now, but fate was not finished with us. As I turned into a petrol station to refuel, there was a bang and the bike stopped. One of the conrods had made itself independent, and a substantial hole in the bottom of the engine casing was pouring hot oil onto the forecourt. Once pushed onto the unfortunate grass beside the concrete, the outfit revealed itself as finito. It would have to go on the train.

As fortune would have it, a bloke in a ute offered to tow us to the railway station. I had never been towed on a motorcycle before, never mind an outfit, so I tied his rope firmly to both the car and the bike. Anyone with any brain at all will set it up so they can let go of the rope from the bike, of course. I had asked our good Samaritan to keep it slow, but he was too engaged in trying to chat Helen up, who was traveling in the cab with him. As a result, I ended up first throwing my weight across the sidecar to keep the wheel on the ground in one corner, then desperately trying to get the bike to turn as the front wheel crabbed frantically across the road looking for traction in another. Fortunately the railway station wasn’t far.

Don’t get me wrong. I have happy memories of my time with my various “Liberators”. I wouldn’t have kept buying them otherwise. But although they were cheap they did liberate a considerable amount of cash from my pocket, spent more than once on railway transport.