A Life of Pride. Alan G Pride
worst thing was the trouble this caused between my parents. Dad hated debt and disobedience: Mum had gone guarantor for me behind his back, using ‘his’ money, as he saw it. He’d never been demonstrative or indulgent with her – when challenged as to why he never took her out or went on holidays, he replied: “You don’t chase a bus once you’ve caught it.” I think he was also jealous of the way she doted on me. (Having her mother living with them didn’t help either, as they had little privacy. At least Sophia provided company, Dad being the workaholic he was.) So they drifted apart. I planned to fly the coop as soon as my apprenticeship was finished, but Mum was stuck there.
The next bike I owned in Broken Hill was my favourite, an International Norton. I had so much fun and adventure on this bike! It was powerful and reliable, built, I reckon, from the plans of a road-racing bike, a smaller brother of the Manx Norton. That really is a racing bike; the difference being its full set of lights and lower compression engine.
I did thousands of miles on it over the next 18 months. Its first long trip was down to Victoria, including the Great Ocean Road, a demanding route that weaves back and forth along the coast. In places it’s cut into the cliffs far above the sea; and back in the 1940s, it was mostly dirt and gravel, with no fences or armco barriers between me and a long drop. I concentrated hard as the Norton slid on the gravel - it was like riding over marbles.
It was on this trip that I had another of my Lucky Escapes. I was en route from Adelaide to Melbourne via the Coorong, a vast length of straight, flat, dirt road beside the sea. My mind wandered in the late afternoon and my speed crept up. A big rear-engine bus was chugging along in front of me, throwing up blinding clouds of dust. Absent-mindedly I pulled out to pass it, needing a minute to draw level with the bus. Then through the dust I saw a huge truck, barrelling head-on towards me! I couldn’t drop back behind the bus in time to avoid crashing into the truck, or the trees on my right, so I leaned flat on the bike, squeezed every last bit of speed from it, and swerved in front of the bus just a second before the truck roared past.
I never forgot that moment of absolute terror, but it didn’t put me off riding, nor did the dust and discomfort of the trip. Indeed, I was so pleased with the bike’s performance that I could hardly wait to ride it all the way to Perth when the mine shut down for three weeks at Christmas. Several friends promised to ride with me, but it was going to be the height of summer and one by one they wimped out. Everyone assumed that I wouldn’t do such a long ride alone – thousands of k’s each way – but this just made me more determined.
In preparation, I bought a set of knobbly tyres which could better handle gravel and dirt, though they made the bike look clumsy. I made and fitted a frame over the back wheel to hold a gallon (4.6 litres) container for petrol on one side, a gallon of water and a pack of tools on the other. A haversack was fastened over the rear wheel. On my back I carried a rolled-up swag - a blanket and piece of canvas. Off I went.
It was a hard but very satisfying ride. From Broken Hill down the Barrier Highway to Peterborough, across to Port Augusta, then down the Lincoln Highway to Port Lincoln and up the Flinders Highway to Ceduna. Then the 1200 kilometre run along the Eyre Highway from Ceduna, across the Nullarbor Plain to Norseman, and finally a 700 k meander into Perth.
The roads were mostly dirt and sand, hot and deserted. The Nullarbor was the worst. It had originally been made with a grader, but the distances were so vast that no council could keep it in repair. So drivers would just make their own roads, by driving alongside the original once it had become impossibly potholed and corrugated. Along the way I’d pass abandoned cars, many in good condition apart from broken axles or crankshafts. Even though cars were much dearer then than they are now (compared to a weekly wage) it just wasn’t worth getting them towed out. I remember one Vanguard which, but for the dust, looked as though it had just come out of the showroom.
Mile after mile I rode, with the ocean of the Great Australian Bight on my left and the flat desert on my right. A breakdown or accident on that long empty road in summer could have been fatal, but of course I had a teen’s feeling of invulnerability. I fell off the bike many times, luckily without serious damage. At night I’d sleep on the ground, digging a hole for my hip and unrolling my swag, using my boots for a pillow.
I rode into Perth so covered in dust, I must have looked like a ghost. Digging into my filthy haversack, I found my camera and a startled young woman pushing a pram agreed to take a photo of me sitting there, in the centre of Perth (much more a country town than it is now) to prove I’d made it.
I spent a few days there before making the return trip, and by the time I set my feet back down in Broken Hill I’d had enough of dirt roads to last a lifetime. The Norton had performed brilliantly, though.
Chapter 13
Car Adventures in the Desert
Along with the bikes, I was also buying and selling cars. After the T-model Ford in 1948, I had a 1928 Oldsmobile tourer. It cost £120. It had been a four-seater, but someone had cut the back seats off and put a table-top on. I kept it for a year or so. Once I drove it on a hunting trip with half a dozen blokes on the back, and the axle broke as we bumped across country. We were way off the main roads, looking for ‘roos and rabbits, so I had a long walk back to the highway.
I finally got a lift back into Broken Hill, found a replacement axle at a wrecking yard and persuaded long-suffering Gloria to drive me back out with it in her lovely car. She wasn’t too happy about it, but I could always count on her to help me. (Years later, after our father had sold his car, she’d drive him to Broken Hill Tip in her Jaguar, so that he could scavenge to his heart’s content. I think she found it quite embarrassing, though with the scrounged wood and metal, he'd make things for her daughters Marie and Julie – a cubbyhouse, a miniature clothesline. He also resoled and mended everyone's shoes with recycled materials. )
I still managed to make a profit on the Oldsmobile and my next car was a 1936 Ford ute. A very smart-looking car, but difficult to work on, because it hadn’t been designed for easy access under the bonnet when anything went wrong.
I took it as far north as the dingo fence on the Queensland border several times, driving with friends on hunting trips. We’d go way off-road, which was asking for trouble, and on one of these trips I hit an old tree stump full-on. This dented the sump and bent the front suspension.
We hobbled back home, and the repair job was one of the toughest ever. I had to remove the whole front suspension and take it down to Neejame’s repair shop in Blende St. They had hydraulic presses and oxy cutting rigs; it cost heaps to take the axle off, straighten it out and get the dent out of the sump, because the steering box was in the way. Then it all had to be put back together.
Nevertheless, I was a glutton for punishment and kept taking the Ford up near the border.
Another time, we were bouncing along there with a bunch of blokes perched on the back, guns at the ready. Everyone fell about when I hit a pothole, and one of the rifles, an automatic 22, banged its muzzle against the tray floor and went off – straight through the petrol tank.
So there we were, miles from any made road, with the petrol running into the sand. I jumped down, raked the prickles out from under the Ford and made the gun’s owner lie there with his thumb plugging the hole in the tank, while I considered what to do. Finally I went over to the dingo fence with a pair of pliers and cut five or six metres of fencing wire. We plugged the bullet-hole with a piece of soap, backed it up with a shirt as a tourniquet and wrapped the wire around the tank, tightening it with a screwdriver.
Luckily we had enough fuel to get home, but as always with that Ford, the repair was complicated. The fuel-tank was mounted on top of the chassis rails and the body atop of that, so to remove the tank, I had to jack the body up off the rails before getting Neejame’s to weld a patch over the hole.
Another time, I was out with Pro Hart and Laurie