My First Bicycle

In the autumn of 1955 I was a 10 year old growing up in Cessnock, Maitland was known to me but more as a name than a place, it was a place that we had seldom visited. In February of that year the people of Maitland had been devastated by the biggest flood on record. Most of the business district had been destroyed and many houses went under the floodwaters and some were even washed away.

As a 10 year old boy I did not have much concept of just how much damage had been done nor of the heroic efforts of many to save victims of this still talked about event. I did understood a flood however and have quite strong memories of the 1949 flood, it was a big one too. I had personally witnessed its effect but our family had not suffered any loss. In this flood the bridge on McDonalds Road at Pokolbin had been washed away, it was only a small bridge and the creek was normally dry. I would not remember this but for the fact that I was at school on the day when it happened and our house was on the side of this bridge about a kilometre.

We normally walked the 2 kilometre to and from school, a little group of 5 girls and me, my sister, my cousin and 3 girls of the neighbours. On this day my father came to get us from school, not because the bridge was gone, he did not know that, as far as he knew it was just very wet and us walking home from school as normal was just out of the question. I can now imagine my mother saying “Raymond, get the car out and go and get the kids from school, they can’t walk home in this weather.” Dad would have been home because his work was an “outside worker” on my grandfather’s farm and it had been teeming all day.

My memory of this event starts with the sight of our dark red 1934 Ford Tourer on the road with its front lower than normal and water washing all around it. My father had found out that the bridge was gone, it was only a small bridge with no side rails. As my father drove into the water across the road the car dropped it front wheels into the gap where the bridge should have been. The next part of my memory is my father carrying us through waist deep water to the home side of the creek. Not just my sister and I but all the children from school who lived on that side, I even remember him carrying one boy’s bicycle over his head to the other side. Shortly after this event we moved to Cessnock, Aberdare to be precise and my father got a job with the local produce merchant.

Shortly after the 1955 flood, for reasons still unknown to me, the produce merchant that my father worked had bought the contents a nursery in Maitland that had been flooded. My father was going to Maitland on the weekend to collect the contents of this nursery. This was extra work which I assume my father took willingly as at the time my mother was expecting our family’s 5th child and the meagre wages paid by the produce merchant did not go very far.

I was to go with my father in the lorry and help with the task, it was quite an adventure, riding in the lorry was not new to me, I had often done that on a Saturday morning going to farms and even to some of the mines around Cessnock delivering stock feed, I was always amazed at how my father could lift a bag of wheat to his shoulder with the sharp pointed hooks and sling it onto the back of the lorry, chaff for the pit ponies was easy by comparison as a bag of chaff weighed much less than a bag of wheat. This trip to Maitland was something a little different and exciting. Maitland was beyond our normal travel.

We arrived at the nursery and it was something that I had never imagined, I don’t know what I had expected, I don’t know that I had been to a nursery before. There were low benches covered in pots with dead looking plants and everything was covered in the dark brown silt from the flood. We had to be careful walking as the silt on the ground was still wet and very slippery.

We had loaded everything that looked like it might possibly recover and some that I am sure could not and Dad was starting to look around for what else might be of interest to his Boss.

In the corner of the nursery was, what I now think must have been, the potting shed and we were investigating what was in there. It had benches at a level for standing to work and all sorts of things hanging on the walls behind. The only thing I remember was a bicycle, old and rusty but it was a complete bicycle and I did not have a bike. My father considered it and said “well it is contents of the nursery I guess” and I think he thought that his Boss would have no interest in it.

This rusty old bike was loaded on the lorry and taken home, my father painted it and did whatever to make it a bicycle that I could ride. My first bike!

Aberdare was fairly bike friendly being generally flat with big wide streets. The streets were mostly gravelled with only two tar sealed as I remember, Northcote Street and Aberdare Road, there was no kerbing and guttering. This made for good and bad bike riding conditions, it was easy to ride from the road to the footpath, it was easy to skid the rear wheel while braking and slide the bike sideways, it was also easy to fall off doing this.

Aberdare was a great place for young boys to grow up, we lived in Congewai Street, the next strret was Melbourne, it had houses only on one side and on the other was bushland. Low tea tree scrub with lots of Black Boys (Grass Trees) or kangaroo tails as we called them. This scrub was crisscrossed with tracks and a general dumping ground. One day while exploring in the bush I came across several bike components, the wheels were very attractive to me being much better than those on my bike from the nursery, they were the slim “racing” wheels from a racing bicycle. They even had tyres in good condition. I concluded that they must have been stolen and dumped and that I could just take them home which I did.

Down the back yard under the trellis with the grape vine and between the chook yards I set about rebuilding my bike with “racing” wheels. My bike would be much faster and look better. Well my father was always fixing or making and modifying something. I was delighted with my skills.

In the mid 1950’s Victa motor mowers came on the scene. If you were rich and really keen on your lawn you could even have a reel mower like the Bowling Greens had. We were neither rich nor all that keen on a manicured lawn but there was plenty of it and the push mower was hard work. Dad bought on old Acme motor bike, a little 2 stroke, the object was to make a motor mower from a push mower. That is a story in itself.

Resulting from the disassembly of the motor bike was the frame with handlebars not unlike the fancy handlebars on brand new bicycles, not chromed of course but they looked pretty racy. I set about removing the handlebars from the discarded remnants of the poor little motorbike and adapting them to my pushbike. I really had a pretty smart bike now, well at least it was different to what anyone else had.

I rode that bike everywhere, to school all through my high school years, home from my grandfather’s farm on Sunday afternoons, having got a lift out there on Friday afternoon with the milk lorry. I even once rode it to Nelson Bay with my mate, well we got a lift with a lorry as far as Hexham and rode the rest.

After I left school I got a job at BHP Steelworks in Newcastle and I do not remember what happened to my first bicycle, my only bicycle.

Lindsay Threadgate, November 2010