My lot on here seems to be nostalgically picking over the debris of my younger days for the entertainment of the drooling perverts who make up the vast majority of the readership. I’ve got the feeling the quality and quantity of experiences are going to make it necessary to divide this into several parts
When I left school at 17 I’d already started to live the adult life and when I left university aged 20 my life became almost unbearably full. Working full time – usually 10 hours a day – I also studied for a professional qualification. Evenings were full as well – Tuesdays and Thursdays were football training and Monday and Wednesday was playing indoor cricket at a fairly high level. Friday was out on the piss with your mates and then the girlfriend came into play on Saturday evening and whichever weekend day didn’t involve a competitive fixture. Throw in going to gigs and seeing comedians and I didn’t really have the time to breathe.
It was the best time of my life for multiple reasons. Mostly because the people I knew seemed to be capable of doing all sorts of daft things. Nothing violent or really criminal but turning up to footy training on a Tuesday or a cricket match at Saturday lunchtime I was almost quivering in anticipation to find out what idiotic things people had been up to on the Friday or Saturday night.
The main sources of problems were threefold – cars, women and nightclubs. Unauthorised nudity at inappropriate moments played its part as well. And excessive drunkenness. And, on occasion, a complete disregard for any kind of authority particularly that exercised by petty officials in drinking establishments.
On reflection cars presented the most immediate danger usually through speeding ( and by extension racing) and drink driving. A secondary consideration was the possibility of getting someone pregnant on the back seat in a car park somewhere.
The racing started at school. Australia is rather like the US in that it’s almost impossible to operate without a driving licence and a car. So people get licences in their teens and some rusty banger soon after. Hence in the last couple of years at school quite a few kids drove in.
As you can imagine this was an endless source of entertainment. Lower level stuff included hanging around at the nearest set of lights watching inexperienced 17 year old drivers trying to do hill starts in a 15 year old Mazda with a gearbox where the cogs were more well worked than Katie Price. Another popular activity was identifying a schoolmate’s car and relocating it so that the rear wheels were not touching the ground – unless you had 4WD its quite difficult to get a car moving in such circumstances.
Racing was the thing though. Once the gauche 17 year old version of Niki Lauda had managed a hill start and negotiated the traffic lights he was on the main road and the fun could begin.
The road was a 2/3 lane affair without a median strip so a bit of driving on the wrong side of the road was always a possibility and speeds of up to 80mph made it somewhat dangerous. Emergency stops and veering into driveways to avoid an accident added to the thrill of the chase and resulted in residents complaining to the school on more than one occasion.
The school had some kind of crackdown the details of which escape me over 40 years on. Technically this stuff was not on school premises but did involve getting home from the place. I think they threatened to prohibit offenders from driving to school and this calmed matters down – people did not want to swap a 15 minute drive to a journey three or four times longer involving the antiquated local buses.
To this day I am amazed no one I knew was killed or seriously injured pulling these stunts. A few cars were written off and dealers in clapped out Fords, Holdens, Mazdas, Toyotas, and Datsuns could look forward to a steady stream of teenagers looking to replace one wreck with another for a few hundred bucks.
In my last year of school a few enterprising individuals organised a car rally. This event was not sanctioned by the school but we did all throw money into a local charity the school was supporting. The event commenced early one Sunday morning at the school – fortunately none of the senior staff lived in the immediate vicinity.
It wasn’t like this
The format was that one of those who owned a car was accompanied by one who didn’t as navigator ( I was in the latter category). A couple of clues were provided directing you where to go next where either someone or something would be present to give a clue to the next place. The teams set off at a few minutes interval and it took over an hour to get everyone on their way. A lot of planning had gone into this and the course took upwards of four hours to complete.
We bombed out about three quarters of the way through where the clue was hidden under a rock on some mud track. I suspect someone who’d been there just before us had removed the clue so those of us following on were stuck. The saving grace was that a sealed envelope had been provided at the outset. Opening said item disqualified you from winning the event but also gave directions to the final destination – a beautiful riverside picnic ground where beer and barbecues were in full flow.
On arriving we discovered we’d missed the best piece of the rally. The last bit was driving 30 or 40 miles up the main freeway north of Sydney and back again. It’s not the M25 but still pretty busy and people were reporting being overtaken by fellow ralliers while doing 100mph. We’ve all probably topped the ton mark on occasion but doing this speed in a high end BMW or Mercedes is quite different to teenage loons doing it in clapped out 10 year old Toyota Coronas, Datsun 180Bs and Ford Escorts.. Foot flat to the floor with the vehicle vibrating like the space shuttle re-entering the earth’s atmosphere at the wrong angle I was again surprised there was no major blowout.Somehow the speeding stopped about mid way through university. We all seemed to treat speeding tickets as an inconvenience of life unless you got close to losing your licence. This was a massive inconvenience in suburban Sydney as you will find out in the next piece about drink driving.
I started this piece thinking I’ll do a bit about my younger days but there’s so much material that it’s descended into a narrower piece about people doing lunatic things in cars. I enjoy writing this stuff as memories just come flooding back and at various times I find myself in fits of laughter and, occasionally, tears.
© ArthurDaley 2026
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