Jerome told few people of his plan. Those he did tell either laughed in his face or declared the idea impractical, indeed impossible. He even asked a few of his more adventurous friends to join him, but soon heard a lot of excuses why they were unavailable. The quest for a sponsor was met with a similar response. One agent explained that, if he succeeded, he would gladly refund the cost of the bicycle. But should he fail, he’d rather not have his name associated with the attempt.
So be it, thought Jerome. He would ride alone, free from any commercial interest. He arrived in Adelaide from his home in Broken Hill and purchased a bicycle, painted over the maker’s logo and replaced it with his favourite word: ‘Diamond’. He spent the next four days kitting out for his new ride, then testing his set-up in the Adelaide Hills.
The steel-framed roadster was a sturdy and sensible choice, weighing a shade over 13 kilograms without luggage or water. Jerome immediately replaced the saddle with an older, more comfortable one. To reduce the likelihood of punctures, he fitted a thick tyre to the rear wheel and glued an extra strip of rubber over the tread of the front tyre. A single gear of 62.5 inches (roughly equivalent to a 34 x 15 set-up today) made for slow going over flat ground, but it would allow him to spin a little more easily over the sandy unformed trails he expected to find. A luggage-carrier attached to the handlebars held a waterproof sheet, a change of clothes, socks, a towel and other personal effects. A small waterproof bag protected his journal and other papers. A leather satchel slung over his shoulder contained food, tools and other bits and pieces.
Jerome spent a night at the Pier Hotel in beachside Glenelg. In the morning he rode down the firm sand and straight into the water, until the bike was completely submerged. The local postmaster, whom Jerome had approached to bear witness to his official departure, watched the bizarre spectacle from the shore. He dutifully signed and recorded in Jerome’s notebook what he had seen.
With Diamond baptised in the Southern Ocean, Jerome was ready to begin. On Wednesday morning 10 March 1897, he shook hands with the proprietress of his boarding house and told her that he might not be back for tea. Jerome Murif was clearly a trifle eccentric. And his idiosyncrasies extended well beyond an ambition to pit himself and his personalised bicycle against the Australian outback.
That morning on the streets of Adelaide a good many working folk must have caught sight of something not easily forgotten. Jerome rejected conventional cycling attire and had instead decided to wear a set of pinstripe pyjamas. The lightweight cotton outfit, he rightly observed, would be comfortable and protect him from the sun. He tucked the loose bottoms into his socks. To this already arresting ensemble, he added high leather boots, a fashionable homburg to shield his head and a revolver. With his swarthy complexion and an enormous ringmaster moustache, Jerome looked like a Mexican bandit on his way home from a slumber party.
If he turned heads, he didn’t notice. He proudly rode out of town without a single person to see him off or wish him good luck. After less than half an hour, the good-quality city roads came to end, replaced by a mixture of clay and gravel. But Jerome’s spirits would not be dampened. Flushed with excitement and energy, he felt a wonderful feeling sweep over him. He recalled ‘a glad feeling of being alive, untrammelled, free. And so we gaily sped along. It was a very dance on wheels. We are on the track at last!’
The first few days were indeed a joy. The weather was mild, the roads good, and Jerome reached the end of each day in high spirits with a hearty appetite. He travelled to Burra via Gawler and Kapunda, over undulating farmland dotted with peppermint gums and box trees. Only the ruins of the copper works broke the pleasing scenes. But such pleasantness was about to end.
In the late 1890s Australia had not yet recovered from a crippling economic depression. In South Australia the economic recovery was further delayed by drought. The country beyond Orroroo, the gateway to Central Australia, showed the ravages of both. Jerome recorded in his notebook how he pedalled through a ‘sunbaked’ wasteland populated by cattle that looked like ‘barrel-hooped skeletons held together by rawhide’. In hotels along the way, he overheard barroom conversations, tales of ‘helplessness’ from ‘drought-harried men’.
Riding through the wind and sun-blasted landscape near Carrieton, Jerome was caught in a blinding dust storm. A man passing in a horse-drawn cart offered the struggling cyclist a lift. Although tempted, Jerome was a man of honour so he declined. He needed to ride every inch of the way if his ride was to have integrity as the first purely human-powered traverse of the continent. He consoled himself that the storm would pass and that, in a few days, he would be somewhere other than here.
At Cradock, some 350 kilometres north of Adelaide, Jerome reached the ‘outskirts of the kingdom of the bicycle’. From now on, the sight of a man pedalling through the empty spaces would be a cause for wonder, celebration or alarm. Accommodation, too, was becoming harder to find. Weary from riding 100 kilometres into a headwind, Jerome arrived at Hookina just on dark. Red sand had piled up against the walls of the local inn, threatening to overwhelm the entire building. No rooms were available, so he decided to ride on, contemplating his first night camping ‘wild’. Riding by lamplight, he passed a cottage where the owner happened to be in the front yard. Stunned to see a bicycle on the road at night, he offered Jerome supper, bed and breakfast.
Random acts of kindness afforded to those travelling on two wheels were to become a hallmark of Jerome’s long journey. But such hospitality, however genuine, was invariably tinged with a degree of pity for this wretched soul on a foolish quest. None of this mattered to Jerome, of course. Grateful for any comfort, in the morning he bade his host farewell and pressed on.
The Flinders Ranges filled the eastern horizon. Riding over bad roads, Jerome arrived at Parachilna for a late lunch before following the railway line to Beltana Station. Here, for the first time in his life, Jerome encountered a group of Aborigines. Surprised to find the four women fully clothed, he rang his bell and doffed his hat. They grinned widely. ‘We parted company the best of friends,’ he recorded in his notes. ‘It may not always be so,’ he half-joked; ‘the painful necessity may arise presently to shoot some of your male distant relations.’ Such was the callousness of the times.
On 16 March, after six days on the road, Jerome spent a day luxuriating in the comfortable hotel at Hergott Springs. There he overhauled the bike, repaired the slow leaks in his tyre tubes and collected a rug he had sent ahead by train from Adelaide. However, keen to keep his load as light as possible, he left the rug behind, planning to use fires to keep warm whenever he was forced to sleep rough. The locals, while kindly, had no hesitation in questioning the wisdom of his journey. Some were familiar with the roads to Alice Springs, but never beyond.
When it came time to leave, even the elements were against him. A howling headwind seemed a warning to reconsider. ‘Go, back! Go back!’, it whistled in his ears. Jerome redoubled his efforts. On this day, he recalled, ‘I wasn’t taking any warnings’. Then things got even worse.
Jerome had ridden plenty of stony tracks thus far, but nothing like this. He was now in gibber country. With angular rocks ranging in size from a marble to a fist, the gibber plains of Central Australia are purpose-designed to stop a cyclist. Bicycles sink into the tracts of smaller stones, either bringing the rider to a standstill or sending him skating over the top until he crashes. Fields of larger stones force the rider to carry or push his vehicle.
One device that softened some of the blows to Jerome’s buttocks was a sprung saddle. In an era before the invention of suspension forks, steel springs fixed below the bike seat helped absorb vibrations and jolts. Over lumpy ground, the springs had the effect of bouncing the rider up and down. This hopping motion may well have been what inspired some Indigenous Australians to call the bicycle the ‘kangaroo machine’.
After pedalling and pushing his bike all day, Jerome had covered a mere 34 kilometres. Dejected, he camped at a waterhole and wrote in his journal:
Plugging away, barely moving, against a viciously strong