Still rolling at 80 years young

At 80 years old Brian Clark is still getting around on big Harley motorcycles and believes it’s the key to his continued good health

When Brian Clark tells people he’s 80, the reaction is usually a double take. He hears it from strangers, he hears it from the woman who runs the local gym and he even heard it from a pair of police officers who pulled him over after their number plate recognition system flagged his age. One of them decided he didn’t have the demeanour someone his age ought to. As Brian recalls, “They thought the bike could be stolen.”

He took it as a compliment, and fair enough. He still rides several days a week, still handles a sizeable Harley motorcyle and still keeps himself in shape to do it.

“I still go to the gym three days a week for that very purpose. I keep upper body strength,” he says. Riding remains part of who he is. “I love motorcycles. That’s what’s kept me going.”

Brian grew up in a family where riding was the norm. “Mum and dad never had a car when I was growing up, they only had a motorbike and sidecar,” he says.

He was 17 when he and a mate rode through the Southern Highlands in winter, freezing in the open air, long before helmets were required.

“I was freezing… I said to my mate, let’s just drop down, get down as quick as we can, to a bit of warmer weather,” he recalls. The road led them down to Hampden Bridge – these days a heritage-listed suspension bridge in New South Wales’ Kangaroo Valley – here they snapped a photo and unknowingly set up a moment he would return to again and again during the next 60 years.

Thirty years later he found himself back in the same spot on a Harley^® with his wife, Diane, and again with a camera. Diane put the two photographs side by side for his birthday some time later.

“And you wouldn’t believe it, it’s almost in the same place. It must be the same time of year and day, because the shadows on the chains are almost identical,” he says. “And I said, ‘wouldn’t it be good to get another one?’ So I did, another 30 years later in 2022!”

Those decades between the photographs were marked by years of long rides and family miles. Brian and Diane toured the country on their Ultra Classic, towing a trailer he built himself and finished to match the bike with H-D^® decals, mag wheels and white-wall tyres. “I would love to have had a dollar for every photograph people wanted to take sitting on that bike over the years,” he laughs.

The Ultra is still in his garage today. It carried them through every state and never failed them, even in the punishing heat of northern Queensland. Brian remembers riding toward Cairns with his legs lifted above the crash bars because, as he puts it, “my legs were cooking,” only to discover that the plates on the rocker covers had twisted with the heat.

“And I thought, ‘oh, that’s not good – we’ve got to get to Cairns’,” he said. “Well, we got to Cairns, did another 1,000 kays around the Atherton Tablelands, then rode home 3,000-odd kays and they never leaked.” he says. That dependability is why he has never thought about selling it. “It never let us down.”

Brian and Diane raised three boys who all ended up on Harley motorcycles of their own. Over the years he helped customise their bikes. When the boys married, their wives then all followed Brian’s lead into Harley-Davidson ownership, as demonstrated by the two impressive line-up photos taken for a story in HOG magazine back in 2017.

“Different paint jobs, a lot of chrome, stuff like that,” he says. The work won prizes at local shows before life took its usual turns. Houses, marriages and young families often meant the bikes were sold, but all three sons found their way back to riding. He still joins them on the road when the opportunity comes up.

At home he keeps another record of those years in the form of H.O.G.^™ patches, each one mounted behind glass to protect it from fading.

“A lot of people will put them on their jackets and then they get all road grimed and in the end they discard them, but I wanted to keep them pristine… it’s sort of a feature wall for me.

“I’ve got 33 of the yearly patches, but I’ve got the anniversary ones and life member ones and stuff like that. And I’ve left a spot for the 35-year anniversary patch.”

The Ultra is parked alongside a Softail^® and another Harley he rides most days and he has no interest in swapping to something smaller or lighter. He still meets up with his sons when their schedules line up and still prefers the bike for every errand.

“I don’t have a car. I go everywhere, do all my business on the bike. I just don’t know of any other way,” he says.

The three pictures from Hampden Bridge sit among the patches and the memories of the miles behind Brian and his family. They show the same rider across sixty years of motorcycling.

And for Brian, it’s keeping him in shape physically as well as mentally. “We’d ride from home to the border of South Australia,” he recalls of his travels over the years with wife Diane. “From our house, it’s 900 kays, and I’d get off the bike and want to party. Now, we have a motorhome. If I drive 600 kays in a day, I don’t want to know that motorhome! I get so bored.”

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