Motor Cycle Trip to Sydney

Why "Eric the First" and why now over 100 years on?

This site is in some ways a tribute to my Grandmother and the all-round Loney matriarch, Betty.

We lost her last year (2020) and the current pandemic meant we didn't all get to give her a proper send off. Born the same year as the Queen and baptised as Betty Ernestina Beven (always Betty, has never been an Elizabeth or a Liz, despite the birth year shared with the Queen). I've always known her as Betty Zillman (or more accurately always Granny) as she had remarried after the death of her first husband (my grandfather) Eric Lancelot Loney (Lance) a few years before I was born.

When my son was born, I had always been fond of the name Eric, knew that it had some family history and chose it as Benjamin's middle name.

Granny was delighted with the choice and declared Benjamin to be Eric the Fifth in an extremely informal not-quite-a-ceremony at my parent's house on Bribie Island.

While explaining her reasoning and the chain of Erics via my grandfather, Uncle John, and my cousin Joseph, Granny referred to my Great Grandfather, Eric Absolom Loney as Eric the First and that is now the name I think of for him.

With Lance dying at the relatively young age of 49, we (in my immediate family at least) had lost the connection both to Lance's life as an early QANTAS mechanic and to his father's, grandfather's, and great grandfather's life stories. I'm hoping that I'll uncover some of these lost stories or even hints of what those stories might have been and breathe some life into the mythology of the Loney clan.

The Chain of Erics (According to Granny)

Men The Diary's Characters and History of the Loneys

Loney, with variant spellings, Luney, (O) Lunney and (O) Looney is an Anglicized form of the Gaelic Irish "O'Luanaigh", meaning "warrior".

E.A. Loney's diary of his journey has been shared around the extended family for a couple of generations now. I first read the diary when I was in primary school and have always been fascinated by the trip. I'm using the diary as an excuse to dig into the history of the early Loneys, build a connection back to this part of the family's history and investigate the family connection to the first world war.

The prevalence of school teachers, the Loney Estate (possibly the family's first property developer) in East Ipswich / Booval, back to a small townland in Ireland.

Machines A Bold Trip on a New Machine

The two British motorcycles that the pair of adventurers used would have been a relatively new invention at the time, but not yet so sophisticated that they couldn't strip the engine, remachine a piston and still make it a further 100km down the road by the end of the day.

The two Motorcycles companies could not have been any more different. The Abingdon Motorcycle was a side project for the King Dick tool works in Birmingham that still produces tools to this day, whereas the Zenith was a small garage project with quite an innovative Continuous Variable Transmission (CVT) arrangement at a time when most bikes had a single fixed speed. To be fair, all of this era of pre-1910 Motorcycles looked like an ordinary bicycle with motor driving a belt to a massive rear pulley. The evolution in design towards the classic look of WW1 or even the more iconic WW2 era motorcycles was still a few years off.

Places A Slice of Australian History

The story of E.A.'s 11-day trip to Sydney is a facinating look at what Australian rural life was like shortly before the first world war. Many aspects of trips would have been so normal and common place to someone of the era that they warrant no more than a passing comment. The state of the roads at that time. Where bridges had existed vs where punts or ferries were required to cross major rivers. How most of the olds roads followed old Cobb n Co trails.

For my first job out of university, I was living in Woolloongabba and commuting to Currumbin, just south of the Gold Coast, so one leg of my daily commute when I was roughly the same age E.A. was in 1913 took him and his travelling companion over a day and a half. Around the same age, I drove a rented van to Sydney in one night to attend a friend's engagement party, so the state of Australian highways really progressed between the early 1900s and the early 2000s.

I currently work for the company that designed the Woolgoolga to Ballina upgrade of the Pacific Highway. Which as best I can tell is upgrades and bypasses to the highway that, over the course of the 20th century, upgraded and bypassed the original route E.A. took.