The Members - Dave Grant

Dave lived around the corner from Monkey and Me.
He was a couple of years older than us and was the first to get his license, a car and his bike.
Dave lived in a downstairs part of his mothers house. It had its own entry and for a long time it was the gathering place for all of us younger guys. It seemed that half the neighborhood used to stop in there after school or work, have a couple of smokes before going home. I became a part of this group when I arrived from Melbourne and quickly became good friends with Dave. A group of us would always be doing something at his place. He had an old FB Holden Panel van, it was purple and he hotted it up as much he could afford to. One day we nicked one of his mothers lace table cloths and gave it a "lace" paint job with a white spray paint can.
We used to push his mothers car out of the garage in the dead of night and drive down to Coolongatta on the Gold Coast, do a U turn at the border and drive home again. Probably full of piss.
I and probably most of the other blokes learned to drive in his old purple van and a group of us developed a leaning towards bikes at the time. When I was 15 or 16 and still at school, I joined the Surf Life Saving club at Pacific beach on the Gold Coast. It was there that I met John Jerrins, a mad bikie. He had a Kawasaki Mach 3, a two stroke rocket and sometimes he  took me down to the coast on the back of his bike. It was maybe his influence that steered me towards the bikes, maybe the radical element sub culture thing was another influence.
Dave bought a brand new Yamaha TX 650. It was bright green. The Brisbane Dogs, being the local MC,  took a keen interest, not only because Dave was a local lad but because the more members the club had, the more prestige and cred the club had. There were several other clubs in the neighborhood at the time.
The Confederates, a bigger membership than ours, had two chapters, the Northside Crew and the Southside Crew. More on the Confederates later.
There was a club called the Dogs and Daughters. I met the president once and from memory he was a charismatic and good looking bloke with a mysterious air about him.
The 2nd Foundation was a club from around our way but they came and went pretty quickly.
There were others but the names are too distant memories. I dont know what became of them.
The Rebels, The Finks, the Black Uhlans and the Hells Angels where a major force in Brisbane at the time as well but the smaller suburban clubs like ours went fairly quietly compared to the press these big outlaw clubs got.
You have to remember, we were all really young, probably the second generation of bike gang members in Australia. The Old Guys from my memories, were in their 40's, revered and notorious.
Anyway, Dave joined up with the Brisbane Dogs. I cant remember when this was and I cant remember in what order, but I joined at about the same time along with Monkey and a few other locals.
Dave met the love of his life, Jeanette, during this period and they are still happily married with 2 adult sons and grandchildren. Dave was by no means a violent or radical man. He was placid, I cant remember seeing him angry or in a fight and I know he rarely broke the speed limit. Like all of us, he drank a lot and smoked but I dont think he smoked anything other than Winfields.
When he and Jeanette were married, I was his best man and I have a photo somewhere of us in white suits and long hair. Dave was out of the club by then.

There will be a distinct lack of pictures from this era. Although a lot of stuff was photraphed at the time, I lost all my albums in the Ash Wednesday Bushfires in 1983. Ocaisionally, I will get a few pics from someone going through an old album, but none specifically of the Dogs, or not yet anyway.

The Members - Dave "Monkey" Balcombe

Sadly Monkey is with us no more. He died early, at about 42 years of age.
I lost touch with him after I left Brisbane in 1978. He lived with his family across the street from me in the Brisbane suburb of MacGregor.  We hooked up the day my family moved in to our house and became realy good mates.
I finally got in contact with his family about ten years ago. I was thrilled to be chatting to his mum and dad, Lenny and Gloria Balcombe who are great people. After about 5 minutes of catching up, Lenny said "I s'pose you'd like to talk to Dave? unfortunately Olly, he died about 6 months ago". He was coming home from a party somewhere, he was a passenger in the back seat of a car. He fell asleep, no-one paid any attention to that, but he never woke up, just slipped quietly away. That was how I remembered Lenny telling me.
After all the times I had tried to track them down, I was 6 months too late.
I havent heard from Lenny and Gloria since. I will get a bit further into this Blog and try and contact them again.
Monkey became good mates with Michael "Stevo" Stevenson and Stevo kept in pretty good contact with Len and Gloria.
I heard that Monkey had been married and had at least one child. He had a younger sister as well, Annette.
Lenny Balcombe owned a fleet of trucks and he bought Dave a Triumph Bonneville. Dave was a lunatic on that bike, but he could ride it fast and it handled well and that helped. I remember once we where on a run and the bolts came out of the front mud guard and it rolled forward over the front wheel. Not much traction after that happened, and about a dozen bikes went down in that particular spill.
Later on, Lenny got him a Honda Four, an ex cop bike. He was a loony on that as well. He painted it and put on a "Harley" back wheel, a 16 incher with a "wide" 130 trye.
One night coming back from a piss up somewhere, he hit a wet patch in a bend on the highway and aquaplaned off the tar at about 100 miles an hour and hit a tree. That didnt kill him, though it did fuck him up pretty badly. I remember that his head hit the tree so hard, all the fillings in his teeth fell out, and a dentist had to visit him in hospital to fill his holes back in before he could eat properly.
I distinctly remmber the Honda after that prang, there were bits of the tree protruding from the crankcase.
I also remember one day we visited him in hospital after that prang. There was a kid in there who was driving a car that crashed, killing four of his mates. Those must have been painful days for the Old folks.
We did crazy things in those days. Death defying, out of control, booze fueled and all of the Gods must have been on the look out for us.

As This blog grows, more or less of these stories and memories will come to the surface and maybe people will see the blog and want to add to it.

I recently recieved an email from Caroline Abel, the daughter of  Dave Balcombe. I will post the email she sent me here, as soon as I can find it.

The Clubhouse

We had a clubhouse somewhere in Beenleigh. It was someones rented house but the Dogs all used to meet there once a week.
The first time I went there, there was a heap of blokes there, all about my age, all half pissed and full of bad manners. I cant remember anybody specifically at the first meeting, apart from James Devlin.
I probably went there with Dave, possibly Stevo (Michael Stevenson) and maybe Monkey (Dave Balcombe)
The club had a weekly fee, from memory it was $2 a week from each member. Not a lot of money these days but the mid 70's it was plenty. A pack of cigarettes was less than 50 cents so compared with todays money it was around $40.
The money was used for beer and I'm not sure what else. There was a club secretary and a Sargent at Arms.
One of the secretaries was holding the money collected from dues, we were also having meetingas at his house, in the downstairs area, common in houses in queensland.
 He "lost" the club money and  was excommunicated from the club, his father had to come down and break up the fight.
I remember the club President at that time was George. He took over from James. I dont know why James quit the posiition, possibly he was sick of looking after a bunch of beligerant children. I dont remember any ceremony or voting process. Someone can probably fill the bit of info in later

The Brisbane Dogs Motorcycle Club

I was a member of the Brisbane Dogs Motorcycle Club in 1974 - 1976.
The exact length of time I was in the club and the actual dates are not 100% clear but that was the approximate time.
I was about 18 at the time and most the other members ranged from 18 to their mid to late 20's. The president at the time, was James Devlin.

One of the Devlin brothers, of which there several, James was the most charismatic and certainly had leadership skills and the qualities needed to be the leader of a gang of teenagers.
We all drank too much, smoked weed, rode our bikes too fast and had to deal with all of the consequences of our actions.
The other Devlin brothers also had their fair share of charisma.
Dibbles ( not 100% sure if that's right) or David, was a leader of the pack in the school yard. That's where I first met him.
I had been transferred to the Macgregor high school in Brisbane's outer suburbs from Balwyn High School in Melbourne. My mother had re-married and her new husband had been transferred to Brisbane to open a new branch office.
The first day at my new school was"formative". I was put into a nearly all boys class. There was one below average looking girl and later in the year we got another girl, definitely an above average chick who, upon being thrust into our midst, must have wondered what she had done to deserve this lot of smart arse little bastards.
At lunch time I noticed the all the usual suspects race down to a spot blow the school oval, shaded from view by a row of trees. I guessed that down there was where all the action was, so I wandered down there to have a look. Sure enough, there was Dibbles, holding court and smoking a cigarette with all the attitude of the Marlborough Man. They said shit, there's the new kid, and at that, I produced my own pack of cigarettes and was immediately accepted as a rabble rouser and brother ne'er do well.

The first one of all my new mates in Brisabne to get a bike, was Dave Grant. He was the oldest and we all used to hang out at his place after school, smoke, bullshit and pick on any poor girl that wandered past.
Dave bought a brand spanking new Yamaha TX650.

This is me and Dave Grant. Dave is on the right.
This was taken sometime around 1975

These where the Japenese answer to the dominant Triumph, Nortons and BSA's motorcycles of the time.
There wasnt a lot of choice in those days. The Honda Four had only been around for a couple of years, but the Yammy was a real prize.
The Dogs had been a club for a little while before Dave got his bike, but as it was the neighborhood gang, it was kind of expected that he would start hanging out with them. Not long after Dave got his bike, I bought my frst road bike, a Yamaha TX 500 8 valve twin. It was second hand when I got her, but she only had 500 Klms on the clock. It was still under warranty.
I bought it off the brother of a school mate. I dont remember why he sold it, but I took it back to the dealership where he bought it, and they gave it, it's first service. During the service, the apprentice who was working on it, let it vibrate off the work stand and it fell onto the floor, damaging the bike but also chopping off the finger of the poor apprentice who was working on it.
the dealer fixed the bike, but I never heard what happened to the apprentice or to his finger