AN ARTIST IN ALL THINGS

Allan Tomkins has been around motorcycles all his long life. He bought his first bike when he was 15 and has owned one or many simultaneously ever since. During the ‘90s, he was best known among the racing fraternity as the man in the chequered pants who made Phil Christensen’s Supercross Masters run smoothly, as if it were a large space inside the hardly cavernous Sydney Entertainment Centre.

But there’s a lot more to Al than funny pants and two-strokes. As a country boy from Mudgee, he was dunked early into the country and western life and his love for the life and the music has never left him. He crafts hand-made guitars for fellow musicians and friends such as Keith Urban and Tommy Emmanuel, and in his spare time, when he has it, restores Kawasaki motorcycles and fashions intricate guitar straps and belts from hand-tooled leather. They’re all objects of beauty, like so much this clever craftsman touches.

Al can do so many things well that even after knowing him 45 years I don’t know them all. And can’t do any of them. We thought it was time to talk to this modest and much-loved craftsman of all things one week before his eightieth birthday, in a home overflowing with musical and motorcycle memorabilia.

Might as well start at the beginning, Al. How did you get into this motorcycle thing in the first place?

When I left school at the age of 15, in 1954, I bought a Royal Enfield two-stroke from a schoolteacher, so that was the beginning of all that. It was a little road bike with rubber bands for suspension, a little hand-operated gear change on the right-hand side and three gears. Someone invited me to take it out to the local racetrack in Mudgee where we used to do what was called dirt track or scrambles.

I was born in Mudgee and lived there for 30 years, but after we moved to Sydney I got