At Large
AT LARGE
Report from Oz
FOR YEARS, HOLLYWOOD SHAPED THE view the rest of the world had of America. Maybe that makes it fitting when our view of another country is almost exclusively shaped by its movie-makers. Case in point: Oz.
Oz isn’t where Dorothy and Toto went; it’s Australia. Down Under, it’s called “Aussieland” or “Oz” for short. If the island-continent weren’t so dramatic, so wild, so much a land of extremes, maybe the name would be nothing more than another media invention. But as I found out on a Yamaha FJ1200, it really is Oz.
Not that I did more than skirt the tiniest edge of the country. But even so brief an encounter as the Yamaha provided in 1500 miles and two weeks of riding gave me some glimpses of Oz that the Crocodile Dundees and the Mad Maxes never showed us.
Numerous other Aussies—non-fictional ones—have showed us something of the character of the country. Those men have names like Jack Ahearn, Kel Carruthers, Gregg Hansford, Wayne Gardner and Kevin Magee; but it’s possible that most of us simply figure that these guys represent nothing more than the cream of their country’s racing crop. Fast riders, period.
Wrong. There’s more to it than that. I learned that fact this past summer, first at the Isle of Man TT, and then a few months later in Oz itself. Because Team CYCLE WORLD was racing in the TT, I was more than usually interested in our competition; and more than a few of the international-class pro racers in attendance there were from Australia, while I was the only American.
This struck me as odd. There are more than 240 million of us and only 16 million of them, and yet just about any international race grid (or national race in the U.K.) shows a significant Aussie presence. Why? What was it about Oz that generated such enthusiasm and training that these guys would trek around the world to race, while so few Yanks managed to do likewise?
The Yamaha, some insightful Aussies and the country itself provided some answers.
The FJ showed me the truth of what the books said: Most of the population lives on the east coast or just inland from it, clustered around large cities—Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra. A host of smaller satellite towns and villages surrounds these metro centers, whose size rivals the megalopoli of Europe or America. Connecting these widely spaced metropolises and townships is not a multi-lane expressway system like America’s or Europe’s but a capillary-like network of small, twisty, bumpy and demanding roads. To get from here to there in much of Oz, you never set a wheel on a four-lane freeway.
This has interesting ramifications for motorcyclists. First, as Mike Esdaile, Editor of REVS magazine, noted when I asked him about differences between Aussie riders and Americans, it means that turn-key luxo-tourers like Gold Wings are not very popular. Second, as dryly observed by Bruce Walton of Yamaha of New South Wales, it also means that Aussie riders get lots of opportunities to go around lots of corners.
The FJ1200 bore this out. Less than a half-hour north of Sydney’s suburban sprawl, a newly built expressway straightens out rough terrain that the “old” highway winds around. The expressway is full of trucks and cars, while the old highway is full of bikes—bikes going very, very quickly.
“Take Wayne Gardner,” Walton expands. “He’s from Wollongong (south of Sydney), which is in the bottom of a bowl. To get anywhere from Wollongong, you have to climb out of the bowl on roads that are a perfect training ground for any motorcycle racer.” He pauses, grinning. “It’s like that all over Australia.”
Toss in the element of kangaroos that freeze in your headlights, wombats that blunder into your path, monster trucks with not one but three trailers in tow, and backroads that go from tarmac to gravel to roo dung and back to tarmac, and you begin to see how even the average Oz rider has to develop pretty good riding skills just to take a weekend toot. When you add almost nonexistent outback policing of the speed limit (nominally 100 kph on all but expressway, where you’re allowed 110), it’s easy to see why Aussies have embraced sporting Ducatis and the new generation of high-tech “R” bikes from Japan, eschewing cruisers and turn-key tourers.
What’s not so easy to see is how a total motorcycling population estimated by Esdaile at less than 500,000 can generate so many world-class racers, even with this environment as their training ground. America has many more fine “training” roads, after all, and a much larger number of riders, not to mention many more racers.
The real answers lie in Oz’s culture. A rider who becomes a racer in Australia seems to have fewer options than an American for pursuing his sport professionally; here, the AMA provides a potentially lucrative series for the American racer, while in Australia, the same seems not to be true. To realize their full professional potential, roadracers must go overseas.
When they do, the payoff can be, paradoxically, greater than just money. While I was in Australia, a TV beer commercial featured Wayne Gardner in a long spot highlighting him as an Aussie who made good and “showed the world.”
Watching that commercial for the tenth time, I realized that it told me more about Oz than any Mad Max movie. And, not coincidentally, as I tried in vain to recall similar boostering TV ads for any American racers, I realized one more reason why I saw more Aussies than Yanks entered in the TT.
I don’t think this is Kansas, Toto.
Steven L. Thompson
