What struck me above the tales of sex and drugs in Monkey Grip, Helen Garner’s iconic novel of 1970s hippie living Melbourne-style, was her character Nora’s love of the bicycle: whirring along under trees in the Botanic Gardens, crunching across hot bitumen on the way to the pool, wobbling home after a late-night party. Bikes feature elsewhere in Garner’s writing: it’s on a bike that she criss-crosses between Ormond College, judges’ chambers, and the houses of unhappy academics in The First Stone. I don’t think this is just convenience or environmental friendliness—there is something in the philosophy of the bike that suits Garner’s style. Bikes are unpretentious, democratic, and don’t put on airs; you can’t be too sophisticated on a bike, it’s hard to wear a ball gown. They fit with Garner’s strategy of getting people to open up by placing herself at their level or below—a method that works not by impressing but by disarming, convincing your subject that it’s safe to trust you when it may not be. Garner’s style, descriptive and ruminative, also seems to flow from the speed of the bike. Even with the fastest peddling you have the chance to see details you miss in a car and it’s easy to stop if you want—no need to find a park, just jump off! Things start to fit together not by analytical thought but via the meandering byways and backstreets of association.
One of my earliest memories is of standing transfixed before a beribboned sky-blue bike, fitted with white training wheels, gleaming outside a toyshop in the Queensland timber town of Maryborough. At the age of three I existed in some state of non-consumption where certain objects could be viewed without desire: I had no presumption that I could ever possess such a thing, ever call it mine, and hence admired it with an open heart, no more imagining that I could park it under my house than I could the wind or the sun. Consequently the appearance of that same bike on my fourth birthday was astounding rather than gratifying. However, Sunday afternoons spent mastering it on rickety paths through an insect-filled park next to the Mary River, while my mother, oblivious, read under the Bunya pines, made me one with this foreign sacramental object, and my legs pumped furiously up and down, not simply to avoid the mozzies, but with the genuine joy of