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Chapter 2

ACROSS THE CONTINENT IN PYJAMAS

At first, it merely irritated him. He tried to push the thought from his mind. He tried to ‘pooh-pooh it’, he said, to laugh it off as vanity. But this desire would not be pooh-poohed. Jerome Joseph Murif needed to do something.

At thirty-four, the time was now. He searched the record books looking for a space where he might make his name before he ‘dropped out of sight and out of mind’.

The year was 1897, right in the middle of a golden age of Australian bicycle exploration. Only the year before, the Nullarbor had been conquered by Arthur Richardson. On the eastern seaboard, in 1893, Percy Armstrong had ridden more than 4,000 kilometres from Croydon in far north Queensland to Melbourne, via Sydney. As Jerome researched, an idea took hold, as audacious as it was preposterous:

There was the continent. No bicycle had crossed it. That was my something … To cross Australia on a bicycle, piercing the very heart of a continent, facing dangers, some known and more unknown — it was the very thing.