I have ridden motorbikes as a sidecar passenger, a pillion passenger, or as a rider all of my life. In late 1965, shortly after I turned 19, I joined my first motorbike club: the Ballarat Rovers Motor Cycle Club.

I fitted in straight away and found myself right at home there.  For several years, I never missed a meeting and was very active in the club. I became a regular rider in the club’s Stunt Team, was active at working bees, was the Minutes Secretary for quite a while, and was very involved in the re-writing of the club’s Constitution, Rules and By-Laws.

I made friends in the BRMCC who turned out to be friends for life.

In 1969, my employment moved me away from Ballarat to the opposite end of the state and I reluctantly had to leave behind my involvement with the BRMCC.

I joined the Morwell Motor Cycle Club and continued racing, but was never as deeply involved as I had been at BRMCC. I had other club involvements during the intervening decades, but never again to the same extent.

After working overseas for decades, I returned to Australia permanently in 2006 and became a member of the Historical Motor Cycle Club of Queensland and thoroughly enjoyed joining with others riding our motorbikes on Australian roads and attending a variety of motorbike-related events.

But I found myself wondering about my old number one club, the Rovers. Over the years I would drop in on my old mate Alwyn “Sobe” Sobey now and again and catch up with George Langley and a few others. And in all those visits to Ballarat, I never caught up with the Rovers as a club.

October 2015 saw me planning to be in Geelong for my mother’s 93rd birthday on Monday 19th. I would arrive in Melbourne on 13th and stay in Geelong for more than a week. I decided that while I was down there in Victoria I would plan to visit the BRMCC for one of their regular Thursday night meetings. I rang Sobe and arranged to stop at his home on Thursday 15th. I rang George Langley and verified that the Rovers would be meeting that night. I thought I would love to be able to go to the meeting by motorbike. But Ballarat has a very cold climate and I would not be able to bring all my warm riding gear down from Queensland on the plane. But these fears were unfounded as the weather forecast for Ballarat for that particular night was for a minimum of 16 degrees Celsius!

Thursday 15th arrived and I caught the day’s first V-Line bus to Ballarat. At Ballarat Railway Station I got off the bus and walked out to Sobe’s place in Soldiers Hill. The day warmed up and we pulled the historic BMW sidecar outfit out of the shed, and we toured all around Ballarat.

We spent an hour or two at George Langley’s place catching up.

In the evening we rode the bike out to Ballarat Airport where the Rovers’ clubhouse is located. We were first to arrive and had a few minutes to look around the airport before George Langley and Brian Fisher arrived on George’s outfit.

I was rather amused at the fact that, of the first four members to arrive by motorbike, I was the youngest at 69 years of age! Many more arrived later, but they were all younger, some by many decades. I was very pleased to see that my old club was being continued on by the younger generations ably led by the current president Neale Perkins. The meeting was in many respects conducted similar to the previous meeting I had attended about 47 years earlier: minutes read, correspondence attended to, committee meeting called, and so on.

In other respects it was pleasingly different: the minutes were   recorded on a laptop (I used to make notes and then write them out longhand in the big and heavy minute book), the photo identification badge was electronically produced by a club computer only moments after the joining fee and dues had been paid by a new member, and the club has a Facebook page for communication (it was by telephone, or by riding around to the homes of those others who had no phones, when I was active in the club).

Over all, it was a great experience for me to see my old club in action with younger generations now carrying the torch.

And even the weather cooperated: it was warm enough after the meeting to ride home on the motorbike in shirtsleeves – no need for a heavy warm jacket.

I shall save and publish this for now and write some more and finish editing it (especially formatting and setting out the pictures) when I can do so on a computer instead of a mobile device.