driven to distraction.

A love of all things exotic has taken Geoff Hocking on a multicultural mechanical journey traversing roads across Europe and Australia.

I am looking at a photograph on my sideboard. It is an old photograph of my grandparents, taken in 1935, showing my grandmother being presented with the keys to a Chevrolet automobile she had just won in the 1935 Bendigo Easter Raffle.

My grandfather is standing by her side looking slightly bemused, even apprehensive. More than likely he is thinking, ‘Strewth. Now I have to learn how to drive. Now I will have to get a driver’s licence’.

As a family, we were never mechanically minded. While the ’35 Chevy was a big, strong and commodious vehicle, it was very reliable and needed very little attention in all the years it stayed in the family. However, for most of us, we traded in and out of a lot of different motor marques over the years until we finally went Japanese.

If I ever responded to one of those questions such as ‘What advice would you give to your 18 year-old self?’ before today, I would answer ‘Buy a Holden ute’. Don’t muck about with French cars, or Italians. Eschew the elegant British. Forget about the Germans, the Danes and the Swedes – buy yourself a trusty workhorse. Buy yourself a Holden ute. But I wouldn’t have listened. I was enamoured of the exotic.

My first car was a Fiat 500. It had a fold-back soft sunroof. The car was so small that I would drive along sitting on the back of the driver’s seat, with my head out of the hole in the roof pretending that I had a sports car. So that is what I did next. I sold the Bambino and bought an MG.

Built in 1949, the TC was almost the same age as me, at that time. It was beautiful to look at; a devil to drive along in a straight line, and almost useless when it came to carting things about. Eventually I gave it up and traded it for an Austin Healey Sprite. My first modern car, it had wind-up windows, a heater, doors that locked and a hood that didn’t leak (much). It started every time and was a joy to drive. Small but nippy and I loved it.

In 1971, we drove the Sprite to Sydney on our honeymoon and came back in a proper family-type car, a Fiat 124 Sports Coupe. It was a beautiful-looking vehicle. Sleek, Italian styling, it looked fast even when parked. But within a year, that was sold and funded our first flight to London.

The first car we bought in the old country was a VW Beetle. Although it was probably past its best already, we drove it to Scotland and back, tootled down to Cornwall and Lands End, toured the Home Counties, slept in the back seat in a country lane near Stratford-on-Avon, but were forced to park it outside our flat in Shepherds Bush with its backside facing south in the often-vain hope that the engine would be warmed enough by the morning sun, otherwise it wouldn’t start until midday. I didn’t know the Germans would feel the cold so badly.

The Beetle was disposed of and replaced with a Kombi. The musthave vehicle for the intrepid young Aussie abroad. Ours was a retired Dutch post office van. It had no side panel windows, and its amenities consisted of the front seat, steering wheel and an engine out the back. We threw a mattress on the floor, drove down to Dover, crossed the Channel and headed to Rome.

The best part about the Dutch Kombi was that it came with Dutch plates. So we drove about in London for almost two years with dodgy registration until I was pulled over by the police, who enquired about the plates and how long I had been a resident in the UK, then firmly advised me to register it properly or else. The rozzer told me he would be checking up on me; that he would drive past our flat in a week’s time, and if the van was still bearing the Dutch rego I would be deported – or sent to the Scrubs, which wasn’t far from where we were living.

I was freelancing from home at that time and working in the front room. After seven days, I watched as a police car came up the street, stopped at the parked Kombi, checked the new plates and drove away, satisfied. Such was the success of the earlier cross-channel adventure, I availed myself of some plans for Kombi renovations, had some windows installed, purchased a handsaw, a little drill, and a few sheets of plywood and constructed our first mobile home.

The old Kombi took us to Greece, to Scandinavia, through France to Portugal, Spain and Italy (again) and onto North Africa, where it dropped a valve somewhere on the edge of the desert north of Marrakesh (we were on the hippie trail, after all). What followed were possibly the worst days of our young married lives. Somehow, we managed to locate a replacement motor (don’t ask, that is a long story for another time) and with the help of some young German travellers, fitted it while parked in the centre square of Casablanca. There is little Hollywood glamour in our memories of that North African trip during Ramadan. It must have been ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’, if you will pardon the pun. We decided to go home.

Once safely back in the land of Oz, we needed transport. I found a Fiat 125 for sale in Eaglehawk and couldn’t help myself; my Italian love affair was not over yet. It was pretty and just lovely to drive. At the same time,