was first and foremost a racer, from the time he acquired a Kawasaki H1 in 1970. “I was never really interested in bikes at school, and I started hanging around just down the road from where I lived in Burnie (northern Tasmania), and doing up cars,” says Bernie, now 71 and a long-time Queensland resident. I bought a Morris Minor which we put an Austin Healey Sprite motor in, not that it made much difference – just two carbs that were harder to tune. Then I started to work at Hobart at the Zinc works – Electrolytic Zinc Company or EZ Co – as a trainee instrument technician. It was a great job but I got into partying more than studying the tech work, so I dropped out of that. I still had the bug to go racing but I realised I couldn’t afford to race cars so I got my bike licence while I was still at the Zinc Works. They used motor bikes and had a Suzuki with a sidecar on it for transporting stuff and getting around the plant to service the instruments and so on, so I actually got my bike licence there at the plant. We also had Vespa scooters and some of us used to go for races around the super phosphate, which was a by-product. I used to do all right at that and I started thinking
