Jeremy Bowdler
Jeremy Bowdler was Two Wheels’ longest serving Editor. He took over from Mick Matheson in 1995 and ran the magazine for 17 years until his death in 2012, aged 51. Jeremy had a deep appreciation of the role Two Wheels had in Australia’s motorcycle culture, and he was an Editor who did his job with great love and care.
This included producing a special anniversary magazine to celebrate Two Wheels’ 35 years in production, in 2003. This is his editorial from 35 Years of Two Wheels.
I guess we all remember the first time. Mine? It was November 1980, the day after my first ever ride, very untrained and completely unlicensed, aboard Damon Bidencope’s Honda CB400/4. November 1980, my very first copy of Two Wheels. It had a piece about the Honda CX500A which, I remember, fired my imagination. The other stand-out issue in my early memory was August, 1981, with the gorgeous Moto Martin on the cover and a test on the Morini 500 by Lester Morris which made me want to go out and buy one at once.
I did go out and buy something eventually, and it was Italian, but a Ducati S00GTL possibly was not what he would have recommended.
Anyway, like most blokes who buy special interest magazines, I figured I’d buy a couple of issues, bone up on the jargon so I could shine at the bikeshop and then I’d have the bike and it’d be goodbye to the magazine. Twenty-three years later, I still haven’t made that farewell.
I got hooked. If I had to say what it was that hooked me it’d be hard, but if I had to say who, in retrospect, I’d say it would probably have been Lester Morris and Geoff Hall who stoked the fire in my mind with motorcycling back then. Lester, because he writes so entertainingly and because he first led me to the notion that motorcycling didn’t just begin when I bought my first helmet. He has a knack of putting things into context, of pointing a reader to other areas of interest within an article, and, particularly with Fred, a means of letting a whole new generation of riders into some of what it was like for the personalities in the old days. Lester opened the world of motorcycles for me.
And Hall? His In the Wind column fostered an ambition for, and later a love of, long-distance, high-speed, cross-country riding – the 400km before breakfast, 1600km a day stuff. If Lester showed me a glimpse of the world of riding, Geoff showed me what to do with it. My thanks to you both.
Never in the world did I even fantasise that I’d ever meet any of the TW team, much less become friends with them and, even better, work with them to help create the magazine. I would have said at the time that I would have been more likely to walk on the moon.
I remember heading up to the Bathurst races in ’83 and meeting up with a bunch of guys up there, one of whom was repeating stuff he’d read in TW as if he’d thought of it. I recognised it – about how better to dry your bike after you’d washed it than by going for a ride – because I’d just bought and read the same issue cover to cover. Years later, I was on a ride with another group of guys and one of them did the same thing, only he was repeating to me something that wasn’t just in TW, it was something that I’d written. Goosebumps or what?
So, as I said, I became hooked. I bought Two Wheels and REVS and AMCN. I needed it all. REVS and AMCN were the weekly fix, but Two Wheels was the meat and potatoes. I still have the files of stories on bikes that interested me, stories I clipped from the fortnightlies, but I kept whole issues of TW.
I began to dream of writing for a living and then of writing about motorcycles for a living. I managed to be in the right place at the right time three times. Once when I got my first job on a bike mag, thanks to ex-TW staffer Bob Guntrip. I owe him my professional life. The second time was when BIKE Australia, the magazine I was working on in 1993, was sold to FPC, home of TW. And the last? When Matho decided that enough was enough and he needed out. The TW chair was empty and I was hanging about the office with not much to do.
I had to pinch myself. And I’ve been pinching myself ever since. When I picked up that first issue of the magazine, I had no idea what was in store. I had no idea that 100-odd pages of words and pictures could breathe into me the spark of an abiding passion which would lead me in the direction my life has taken.
Motorcycling can do that to you. Once it bites, you stay bitten. And, for me, motorcycling and Two Wheels are so inextricably linked that I can no more think of one without the other than I can imagine day without night.
I know that everyone will have his or her own memories of the magazine, stories to tell and rides to share. Many of you will have collections of Two Wheels, some from Number One, others may have started hoarding them this year. With this celebration, we have tried as far as possible to tell the story of the magazine from the inside, throwing wide the doors of the office to share some of the secrets, some of the joy, some of the pain and a lot of the skeletons in the closet. Even in a book like this, we cannot hope to include everyone who has made a contribution to the magazine; and so I apologise in advance if we have left anyone out. Besides all the ‘names’, there have been scores of people who work on the magazine, designers, sub-editors, production people, advertising reps, secretaries, marketing people, even management – unsung heroes without whose contribution, the magazine would never have been born, let alone have grown in the way it has over the past three and a half decades. You know who you are, and I hope you now know how much of a debt we realise we owe to you, one and all. Thank you.
And now, I should add that it has been an absolute pleasure and privilege to rake over the history of Two Wheels, delving into the photo archives and finally meeting, if only in print, some of the larger-than-life people who have made Two Wheels the best motorcycle magazine in the world.
I hope you enjoy the ride…
By Jeremy Bowdler, 35 Years of Two Wheels, 2003.
