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Newtown’s Bike Club, a two-wheeled success story

Newtown is now host to a thriving bike project where locals and bike enthusiasts get together to repair bikes and socialise in a warm community environment writes Alex Serpo in the South Sydney Herald February 2007.

The Bike Club, operated by local residents Briana Rocheta and Tash Verco, functions as a co-operative, where nothing is bought or sold. Rather, locals donate old bikes, parts, tools and time and in exchange can leave with a well-serviced secondhand bike.

The bike workshop is also a highly economical alternative for students or those on a low income. Briana comments: “The one time I got my bike serviced, it cost me one hundred and fifty dollars!” She is shocked by this, considering that it is something she could easily do herself. However, the workshop is about far more than economics. Tash comments that the workshop also has philosophical and ethical roots,

seeking “to challenge throw-away culture.”

Ironically, it is throw-away culture that feeds the bike workshop. Regulars of the workshop are always amazed by the endless abundance of expensive bikes ready to go to the tip. Briana says, “During Council clean-up we find a bike on almost every street. Often they just have two flat tyres so we pump them up and ride them away.” Bikes are also often bought from Council auctions for as little as ten dollars.

These activist philosophies have made the Bike Club more than just a place to repair a bike. Tash, who runs the Bike Club out of the spacious backyard of her women’s share house, “The Nunnery,” comments that the Bike Club is “a place where people can get together that isn’t a pub or a shopping mall.”

Many come to the bike workshop simply for the satisfaction of bringing an abandoned bike up to working condition. Others come to take part in the co-operative learning environment, either by sharing their bike maintenance skills or to learn skills from others.

The Bike Club grew out of the July 2005 “Students of Sustainability Conference” in Melbourne. Activists sought a way of both promoting sustainability but also fostering a sense of community.

From here it only took a few spare parts to give birth to Bike Club. Beginning with only a few regulars, Bike Club now sees as many as forty people on a busy night. In the future, organisers hope to provide community bikes for Newtown. Bike Club has also given birth to many forms of bike activism, such as creating a bike fleet of more than fifty bikes used to travel to Peats Ridge Festival, which occurred to celebrate the new year. At the festival a bike tent was set up, hiring out bikes from the Club to promote cycling as a sustainable and healthy alternative.

Mark Pate, another activist who attends Bike Club “just to help out,” was involved in a project in 2002 to send seven thousand bikes to East Timor. He is currently working on a project to send even more to Ghana in Africa.

For Tash, however, Bike Club is really about the confidence someone can gain from learning to fix a bike: “If someone can learn to do something for themselves, then they can take that into other parts of their lives.”

To find out more about Bike Club visit the website at bikeclub.wordpress.com

Source: South Sydney Herald February 2007