How I became a FRAT

(Highly sought after FRATS patch)

This is a long and rambling story full of how I came to get mixed up with a crowd of what turned out to be a great bunch of people. A bloke at the Mountain View Hotel near Gordonvale QLD told me today that a pre-requisite to owning a Guzzi was to have an "ugly head". Now that's not necessarily true and this bloke (a Harley Rider) wasn't particularly lucky in the looks department so there was a little bit of the pot calling the kettle black there. Anyway not every Frat has a Guzzi and we come in all shapes and sizes (and genders). Anyway, I'm sure all our mothers are certain that we are an attractive lot... I digress...
I was raised in Adelaide where I bought my first "real" road bike, an R3 350 Yamaha. It was an old hand me down from one of my brothers and I remember it seeming pretty big. It was a piece of crap but this probably had more to do with my 16 year old lack of any meaningful maintenance skills... I digress...again. I lived in a suburb called Rostrevor and it was snuggled up against the base of the Adelaide foothills. I cut my teeth on those hills and spent countless hours in them. You can ride those hills all day and never re-trace your steps.
There's a road for every occasion from tight twisty scraper type roads to fast and graceful cambered sweeping bends. I love those hills.

I wont bore you with details of all the bikes that have passed through my life but I will say that as the years went by and power and technology advanced I discovered new aspects of the hills, my abilities and the number of cosy pubs dotted through those hills.

It was in 1992 and I think I still had a 72 Norton Commando 750 when my mate Dave, (Guzzi V7, Norton Commando) told me of an ad he had seen in the paper for people who liked Guzzis to meet up and go for a ride... A bloke called Hendrik Gout put the ad in. Nice fella, rode a V50 Monza and claimed he had no need to exaggerate. Now I'm a little bit fuzzy on the exact details of  how it all progressed with only a handful of us turning up  those first few rides. The numbers waxed and waned but it grew and it was after one such run up the Gorge road and subsequent refreshing ale or 2 at the Cudlee Creek Hotel that Moto Guzzi Appreciation Fraternity of SA was born.  We all appreciated em, and that was true even for those of us on other breeds. We were a fraternity with a common interest and a feeling of camaraderie, so it all seemed pretty obvious really. The Latin Motto "ABITE IN COLLES" (Latin for "Head for the Hills") came later... Hats off to Hendrik for being a bit of a driving force here as it was he who was the collator of the details, organiser of getting some pretty cool embroidered patches made up and sporadically got the Fraterniser published and posted out at no charge to anyone.
Ahhh.... the Fraterniser, full of tall but almost certainly true tales, a list of everyone's names and bikes and phone numbers to refer to for runs and the Comprehensive Social Life Organiser where the most organised of us who had planned a run well in advance or knew of something coming up somehow got it in there. It seemed to happen by osmosis....
Those were heady days, countless runs through seemingly endless hills roads with always a pub stop or two to warm up by the fire on the chillier days or quench the thirst on the hotter ones. Always different roads, different mix of people and bikes, always worth the effort.
Somewhere in here I heard of a Le Mans Mk III for sale in Melbourne and after some negotiation bussed over there to pick it up and ride it home. Luckily it came with the pretty full on full fairing of a MKII on it coz it pissed down with rain the whole 8 hour ride home but as long as I kept moving and only pulled up in covered Servo forecourts I remained mostly dry. Mind you with the big Mo Fo windscreen I felt like I was riding a cop bike but I was VERY appreciative of the protection, it being winter an' all.

The original MkIII top fairing that came with the bike received a matching paint job and it all seemed to work in well so I left the MkII lower bit in place.
After the old 72 Commando the power and handling of the MkIII was almost surreal in comparison and it was the start of a fine relationship.... which was rudely cut short a few years later for reasons too painful to retell (I will say it involved a woman). I digress once more....
I left Adelaide in 1995 after deciding that Adelaide was too damn cold and wet in the winter and far too bloody hot and dry in the summer. Cairns sounded nice... packed up, sold up,  put one box on the bus and the rest of my kit fitted snugly on the guzzi and off I went. I haven't looked back except for one thing that I missed more than I knew. Those easy meets with the Frats and those easy relaxed friendships that developed. Feel like a ride, have a list of Frats to call, too easy, always someone around with the time and the will to ABITE IN COLLES.
Now 16 years later and pretty settled in Cairns my ownership of bikes has been sporadic. I had a Triumph Daytona for a bit but it was pretty hard on the wrists and I needed cash for renovations....(haven't we all heard that flimsy excuse before). The intervening years have been a blur of working in remote communities, marriage, trips to my wifes home country of Laos and driving around in cars...Cut a long story short, I acquired a 2006 Griso 1100 recently and me and my psyche have rediscovered what I've been missing.

I pulled my old leather jacket out of hiding to discover the ravages of the Tropics had done its worst. First purchase, a new jacket which promptly got my old Frats patch sewn on. Not long after this I was talking to an old friend from Adelaide, and fellow Frat, the aforementioned Dave, who told me about yet another Frat who had been living up here in Cairns for a long while and he threatened to send me his phone number. In the meantime he posted me up a copy of the latest Fraterniser complete with ride calendar and contacts list (40 names with details of bikes and phone numbers). It got me thinking about the whole Fraternity thing....Plenty of Guzzis and other tasty machines up here so why not give it a whirl. There's a whole bunch of people who are already members of the Fraternity, they just don't know who all the others are...YET...