privilege

Rock and Nicky teach at one of Melbourne’s more exclusive schools. It offers students a ride from Thredbo to their Melbourne campus. Today they’re training together.

Nicky picks me up and we motor out to Yarra Glum, bikes on the roof of her family 4WD monster. She pulls the bikes down because I can’t raise my left arm over my head 29 years after a motorbike hurled me into the earth and smashed my shoulder.

We pedal the Healesville-Yarra Glen Road, twelve undulating kilometres of crosswind, warm sunshine and green grass. A short grunt up and over Mt Rael drops us in Healesville. We join Rock and 25 student cyclists milling around in a car park. Parents stand watching beside their latest 4WDs. A mother kisses her son as though he were off to war rather than a bike ride.

A knot of five or six boys in new lycra and pristine white cleated shoes suggests serious capability among the students. Rock briefs the group and we roll out along River Road in three smaller bunches.

I have no official or other tie to the school, the group, or the event they’re training for, but Rock assigns Nicky and me to lead out the lycra bunch, enjoining us to stay together until Chum Creek primary school then climb at our own pace up the hill to Toolangi. I fear they’ll embarrass me pretty quickly.

The bunch sticks to my wheel eight clicks and two stiff bumps to the primary school. I peel off to let the bunch go but the bunch is one boy. He hares off and I dicker around waiting for Nicky and the others who are not in sight. I chat with a girl and two boys as they pass me. None is a rider, a regular cyclist. But they are riding classy machines and look the part.

We reassemble at Toolangi. A limit of 55kph is set for the descent of Myers Creek Road. I lead off because 55 doesn’t interest me. If I’m first to the bottom no one will know I’ve fanged down at over 60.

We gather again at a swanky Healesville bakery. I pace up and down the verandah while kids and parents and teachers take coffee out the back. Mothers—I don’t see one father—load their sons’ and daughters’ bikes into the 4WDs. One MILFy mum is pornographically pneumatic.

Nicky and I pedal back to Yarra Glum on the more challenging Old Healesville Road. I ask if her students realise that of all the kids in the world, less than half go to school and of those, less than half a per cent go to the privileged establishment these kids attend.

She says she thinks that although they know it, it doesn’t stop them complaining that someone has it better than they do. And whenever anything breaks or goes missing, whatever it is, whatever it’s worth, it’s soon replaced.

Rock on.