Jeff Fereday
Jeff Fereday was an Australian author, artist and playwright. From 1985 to 1991, he wrote the Random Lines column for Two Wheels. Jeff died in 1996, aged 35.
This tribute to Jeff was penned by Grant Roff, in his Groff column, in Two Wheels, October 1996.
Jeffrey Fereday has carked it. He died of cancer a couple of months ago. The name will be familiar to older readers of Two Wheels through his column, Random Lines, which ran from about 1985 until 1991.
Fereday walked into a cafe I was frequenting in 1983. The cafe was next door to the Bike Australia/Australian Motorcycle News office in South Melbourne and we were having our customary 11am breakfast. He had been a cadet on the Adelaide Advertiser and had written the paper’s motorcycle column. He wanted to move to Melbourne and had walked in on the remote hope of some freelance work. Someone from AMCN had just gone overseas and the then owner, Michael Hanlon, hired him full-time on the spot. Large chunks of his life were like this – wherever he happened to be at any particular time, something significant would happen.
We became mates and put up thousands of kilometres together, some of it for work and some of it because we were both always desperate to ride. We played together, too. Cricket at midnight in our pyjamas – Fereday and Guntrip versus Groff and the rest. I suppose we smoked and drank a bit as well.
He possessed a fierce concentration when he was riding, allowing him to be an extremely fast nonÂcrasher. Hanlon toyed with the idea of providing him with a race bike.
There’s a T-shirt doing the rounds at the moment which says “It’s not if, it’s when and how bad”. Jeff’s big one was on a 750 comparo in the Adelaide hills. He said after the crash he was just going too fast. The corner tightened and the Suzuki he was riding left the road in spectacular fashion. The impact on the embankment tore the front end off the bike and Jeff flew home with a left knee the size of a basketball. It took months to recover and the experience dampened his previous enthusiasm for ultra-quick, public road stuff.
Fereday left AMCN shortly after to do a full-time course in playwriting at the Victorian College of the Arts. It’s easier to get a works ride for Honda than to get into this course, and his developing writing skills were reflected in his Two Wheels columns which started around the same time under the patronage of ex-editor Bill McKinnon. Between them, Fereday and Peter Smith changed the rules about what was and what wasn’t acceptable as material for motorcycle magazines.
They introduced elements of literary sophistication previously denied to Two Wheels readers, although Fereday wasn’t always popular. Bill McKinnon is of largish demeanour, and when he was asked by strangers why he continued to run Fereday’s apparently meaningless drivel, he would draw himself up to his considerable height and say menacingly “because I like to read it.”.
Fereday wrote short stories and plays which were produced in Melbourne to mixed reviews. He didn’t care much – he was an artist and took the view that praise from philistines wasn’t necessarily a compliment. Vincent Van Gogh only managed to sell one of his paintings while he was alive.
Jeff and I had a falling-out. I still don’t know what it was about – perhaps something I said or did. My private life is littered with social blunders but most of them are innocently unintended. Jeff was sensitive. We didn’t see each other for a couple of years but he mentioned me in a column devoted to the virtues of small capacity bikes.
” … perhaps my favourite all-time ride was a race along the Great Ocean Road from Port Campbell back to Geelong with fellow bikescribe Grant Roff. I was on a CB250N of all things, and Groff had a GSX250. Each of us was pretty evenly matched both with machinery and in our capacity for inspired lunacy on two wheels given the right circumstances.
... No matter what might come between us, we’d shared a Richly Affective Ordeal where complete trust had to be confided upon the other’s obvious insanity. We’d ridden close to the point of no return (in fact we passed it on the wrong side of the road) and ended up in Geelong laughing while the officer wrote our speeding tickets. “
Because he’s now dead and can’t contradict me, I’ll give you my version. He was on the Suzuki and I was on a Kawasaki Z250 test bike which had been prepared by Neville and Peter Doyle. I’m not saying Kawasaki used to prepare ‘specials’ for their road test fleet, but if the Doyles ever go into the preÂdelivery business, the queue starts here. The truth is Jeff was always faster than me. I led for the entire length of this duel because I was on a bike which was quicker out of corners and had a stronger top end, but I couldn’t shake him because he was a better rider.
We lost the social responsibility plot completely after about 100 kilometres of flat-out dicing. I remember going down the main street of Torquay during peak hour lying on the tank at 150 km/h. The copper who eventually stopped us was booking someone else as we passed and we’d slowed down a bit when he finally caught us, otherwise it mightn’t have been so funny.
Jeff rang me about a year ago and invited me over for dinner, which was a clear sign that he’d forgiven me for whatever I’d done. I said yes but I got busy at work and left a message on his answering machine saying I couldn’t make it and that I’d drop in at a later date with a couple of bottles of red. I dragged the chain on this and missed seeing him again. He probably knew about the cancer when he rang.
I often tried to catch him when we rode together and sometimes I’d get close, only to watch him pull away. I got close again this time but now he’s pulled away forever. The ancient Greeks said that when a great man dies, his body leaves his soul behind. On mild, spring evenings, I can decant a glass of red, sit on my verandah with a bunch of old Two Wheels, and commune with the soul of Fereday. He wrote about 60 columns and they’re all gems.
This isn’t an obituary – it’s really just a suggestion that you find some of his work and read it. His writing and his life are part of the essence of motorcycling.
In 2013, Jeff’s wife Susan published the complete collection of Random Lines in a book of the same name. Priced at $35, you can order a copy here.
