Wizards Of Oz | Antique Harleys Take a Lap Around Australia

The next leg of the trip was a journey of contrasts. Heading south from the tropical green and humidity of Darwin the guys turned west at Katherine, travelling through the “red centre’s” pizza-oven heat to Kununurra, the irrigated food bowl of Western Australia. Then it was through more heat and loneliness to the quirky tourist paradise of Broome, once a chaotic frontier pearl diving town. “The days rolled one into another,” said Bill M. “We’d be up at 5 a.m. packing, leave at 6 a.m. to avoid the heat and knock out 250-400 miles a day at 50-55mph. It got so hot that you couldn’t touch the oil tank (on a WLA the oil tank is part of the gas tank). I got really absorbed in the countryside. I’d always wanted to see boab tree (locals call them the “upside-down” tree as their branches look like the roots of a tree torn out of the ground). We saw hundreds of them.”

The small team headed south from Broome to Perth, another five days of riding covering around 1,500 miles. “We were really motoring by now, but we had a few struggles with severe headwinds and the heat,” said Bill B. “We were sitting at a lonely roadhouse in the pathetic shade of a tiny tree in the late afternoon. Someone came up and told us that it had cooled down to111F so it must have been well into the 120s when we’d been riding. But these old dungers of WLAs were going beautifully.”

Peter’s 1946 Harley is in another league to the flathead WLAs. Called a Knucklehead because of the shape of its cylinder heads, it has modern overhead valves and displaces 1,000cc but has iron heads and a lowly 6.5:1 compression ratio. Sometimes with H-D it seems the company took two steps forward but one back. Largely original, it had not run for 35 years at one stage before Peter bought it.

Peter’s 1946 Harley is in another league to the flathead WLAs. Called a Knucklehead becaus

The turn left from Perth back toward the eastern coast and home marked the beginning of the end of the trip. But as an indication of the vastness of Australia, the riders still had 15 days and 4,000 miles to go. They rode along the southern coastal cliffs of the Great Australian Bight, the famous barren Nullarbor Plain, then the cropping flatlands of South Australia. After following the spectacular leafy curves of the Great Ocean Road to Victoria’s capital, Melbourne, they followed another coast road home to Sydney. “South of Perth we hit the bends, and after weeks of straight roads initially it was hard to lean the bike over,” Peter said. “It was great riding though the tall trees with branches that join overhead after spending so long in desert-like conditions.”

After weeks of heat and dust the Nullarbor Plain was a different experience. “How many people can say they got rained on crossing the Nullabor?” Peter said. “We did. I had a bit of a moment when a road train passed me. I was off to the side of the tarmac and caught a divot as the truck’s wind blast hit me. It just blew me into the dirt. If this had happened earlier in the trip I would have been a goner, but I felt so at one with the bike by now that instinct took over. I rode out of control in the dirt at 50 mph toward a post then screwed it on to get back up to the road.”

The start of the famous Nullarbor Plain, in Western Australia, which has Australia’s longest section of straight road.

The start of the famous Nullarbor Plain, in Western Australia, which has Australia’s longest section of straight road.

As the group reached Victoria and headed toward the Great Ocean Road, the pastoral countryside and plummeting cold of the southern spring brought home the reality that their trip was in its final stages. “As we hit Melbourne it felt like the trip was over,” said Bill M. “Riding over the Westgate Bridge, where you can look down over the Melbourne skyscrapers, was bumper-to-bumper traffic and I was already missing the long easy riding out in the country.” Eventually the group “turned the corner” of eastern Australia to follow the Pacific Ocean coast up to Sydney, past brilliant white beaches that range from small coves to 12 mile-long stretches of sand. But the guys had done this ride before and were battling the reality that their dream ride was ending. “I felt like it was the end of a dream,” said Bill B. “These days I get as much enjoyment in the workshop as I do riding, but I love big trips and this had been a cracker. I hadn’t been in a car for six weeks. It was what it was like as a young fella, riding all the time.”