Bikefest connecting people! Meet Gerard – art director, rave band member and life time bike rider, who fortunately lent his helping hand to this year’s Bikefest:
How did you get involved with Bikefest?
I found out about Bikefest by speaking to my mate Jay, who runs the Shadow Electric cinema. I figured that it was something I would like to be involved in. I am quite passionate about public transportation and the integration of bike culture into Melbourne’s transit system. I’d like to see safer roads for Melbourne’s bike community.
What was your festival highlight?
The Bikefest Treadlie Market had a great collection of bike stores and innovative bike products, it was also great to see the top rides from the Best in Show. It’s good to give people a look at rides that take a step away from the common commuter ride.
What’s your personal bike history?
My father was a track / road racer in Williamstown in the 60’s – 70’s. This meant that my brother and I were brought up riding bikes from a very young age. Instead of training wheels, dad tied a broom handle to the back of our bikes and ran along with us until we had our balance. It stuck and has been my main form of transportation ever since. It took me 10 years to get my license because I’d always just ride to get around the city. My bike was stolen last week from Chapel St, so now i’m riding an old road bike.
What do you do if you’re not supporting Bikefest?
I am an art director at a small advertising agency. I play music in a rave band called ‘Keith! Party’ and am also about to start working with a bicycle recycling program called BACK2BIKES.
How does bike riding feel like in Melbourne?
I used to live in Antwerp, a small city in Belgium. Everyone rides bikes for transport. There were countless bike dedicated thoroughfares across the city, lots of bike infrastructure. Helmets aren’t necessary there as the dangerous roads have completely separate bike lanes. Bike riding there is a way of life. Melbourne’s lack of initiative when it comes to bike riding annoys me. I feel that the ‘car owns the road’ mentality is ingrained in this countries DNA.
What would you change about the city to make it better for bike riding?
It’s not a quick fix by anymeans, but I would start by separating bikes and cars from main traffic routes like St Kilda Rd, Sydney Rd and Lygon St. My friend was doored last year and ended up in a coma for months. This wouldn’t have happened if we had Copenhagen style lanes. That being said, I’d like to see an immediate advertising campaign to educate drivers about the dangers of car dooring in order to change their thought process.
Any requests for Melbourne Bikefest 2013?
Some group rides, some bike polo and some alleycats would be alot of fun.
See more of Gerard’s projects here and get updates on Keith!Party here or here.
Some people are born to bike. We were lucky to work with one of them and want to introduce you to Henrik, Bikefest volunteer and great new addition to (Bike Town) Melbourne.
How did you get involved with Bikefest?
I had just moved down to Melbourne after spending some time up in Sydney and New Zealand. Coming from a strong bike family tradition, I knew something like Bikefest would be a great way to get a head start and get to know Melbourne from a cyclists point of view and a guaranteed way to meet good people!
What was your festival highlight?
The opening weekend at Birrarung Marr was probably my personal highlight, where you had to chance to meet many of the other volunteers and also the whole organisation and other people who had businesses strongly connected into the bike culture in Melbs.
As one of the organisers behind “Bike In Tweed“, the first annual Swedish tweed ride held in Stockholm, it was also a great opportunity to meet fellow riders who had interest in this and hear them out on their experiences! Doing a ride all dressed up in heavy tweed in 29 degrees in Melbourne is great but such a different experience than ours in early october when we have mild 14 degrees!
What’s your personal bike history?
I’ve had a strong relationship to bikes all through my life. Growing up in the burbs, bike was the way to get around and my father was always tinkering with old trusty steel horses in the back yard and many of our family vacations took us around Sweden on bikes.
Since 2004 my family runs Gamla Stans Cykel (‘Old Towns Bicycles’) in Stockholm, Sweden which originally opened up in 1917 on the same location and has grow into being one of the institutions you as a bike-enthusiast need to pay a visit if you’re there. Many of my ideas around the bike culture and riding comes through thanks to the shop and the people to come to see us. It is a fantastic to share the same philosophy on transportation with the girl next door who just wants to have the flat fixed and the couple who have biked for the past 5 months across countries and continents and stops by to debrief about their experiences during the trip.
What do you do if you’re not supporting Bikefest?
Many different things! I have, together with two friends, just started up FREDBERG & CO, for which we design nice and long-lasting leather goods, many of them bike-related such as wine bottle holders, bike-locks and bag-straps. Been doing some work to get the marketing for Bike In Tweed running, some photography and been working on the side as a bike mechanic and restorer. Along with being a first time visitor to Melbourne, I’ve been doing loads of exploring of local gems in the city and the surrounding areas, taking my foldable Brompton bike on tram, train and rideshares! I’ve been studying interior architecture and furniture design back at Konstfack in Stockholm, which kind of brought me down here in the first place.
How does bike riding feel in Melbourne, compared to other places?
Riding in Melbourne is often a great sensation! Just zooming by cars, who I find are very considerate towards bike riders, and feel the city is so accessible just you invest in some time on getting there. There are many infrastructural solutions I really admire and some I don’t get at all, such as the bike lanes who just leads you right into the boot of some parked car. The city of Stockholm is slow, but still working to keep up with massive number of people who rediscovered the bike as the spring season is getting closer. Being stuck in an old city planned with quite narrow streets with a dense population living on urban islands, it needs some drastic thinking in moving the car out of the city and giving the bikes more room.
Offering public events like tweed rides, picnic, street markets, partys, movie screenings which puts new light on the human powered transportation is a great way to get more people involved in this positive change that need to be made!
You might have been flipping through the Bikefest photo sets reviving warm fuzzy late summer Bikefest memories, wondering who were the talents that captured those 4 weeks of bike moments. We took a look behind the cameras and found Shelley Horan, bike riding student of RMIT’s Photography Program.
What was your favourite Bikefest event?
I had a fun day at the Bikefest Picnic at the Abbotsford Convent. Chilling in the sun with mates and beers…heaven! The ride along the river to get there is delightful. But also the Chasing Rainbows Exhibition was so much fun. All of the finalists were such amazing people and getting to take their pictures and have a chat was really great.
Which is your favourite photo of all the Bikefest pictures you took, and why?
I took a close up of a gorgeous candy-apple red bike at the Bikefest Runway. The image is so vibrant and sums up the event pretty well. I didn’t even care that I nearly got run over a few times.
How does your profession and bike riding normally interact, if you’re not Bikefest photographer?
Tell us about your business, which direction are you heading with your photography?
I still have over a year left of my degree but I am quite interested in documentary and portraiture. It’s quite selfish, but photography opens up so many doors for discovery and experience.
It’s like, if you see someone interesting in the street you can literally walk up to them and have a chat and you aren’t ‘weird’ cos you have this camera.
Love this work? For more photos head over here or get in touch here.
No way, this year’s Melbourne Bikefest would have been the same fun and success without the many volunteers that came to help.
A huge thanks to everyone that contributed time and skills to ensure the smooth running of the events! In the next few months we want to introduce some of the great people we met during the festival: We had a chat to Jac Price, eco friendly photographer, bicycle rider and director of Your World in Pictures, who helped capturing our 4 weeks of bike celebration in pictures.
Which is your favourite photo of all the Bikefest pictures you took, and why?
My favourite Bikefest photo would have to be of the little girl who felt soooo much like a kitten after her facepaint, that she begun to act like one.
Of course, her rockin home-made outfit helped get her into the mood. There is something very magical about a child acting out their feelings…..I just love witnessing self expression, especially when it comes from such an innocent place.
What was your favourite Bikefest event?
I loved all of the Bikefest events because every one had such a unique concept. BUT, if I had to choose one, it would have to be the Bike Runway.
I think that mixing fun and fashion with such a practical and eco mode of transport is a wonderful idea and will hopefully inspire more people to get on their bikes.
How does your profession and bike riding normally interact, if you’re not Bikefest photographer?
I classify myself as an eco-friendly photographer. What I mean by that is, I do all that I can to render my business (and personal life) as green as possible. This includes not owning a car and using a bike as my main form of transport.
Tell us about your business, which direction are you heading with your photography?
The love that i have for our planet and all things natural, has a very strong influence on my photographic style and business structure and choices. My business ‘Your World in Pictures’ is simply about ‘Capturing real moments and telling your story’.
Melbourne Bikefest is over for another year. Held over 4 weeks, our intention with the 2012 festival was to set a clear benchmark for a celebration of bikes that positions their use as central to Melbourne cultural life. Through partnerships with some of the biggest festivals and events in February and March, we strived to show how bikes, (and the people that ride them) can be found in every pocket of the city, breaking down stereotypes of how, where and why we ride bikes. As noted by Broadsheet “Bikefest isn’t an event just for avid bike riders. With tonnes of events illustrating how fashion, food, film, art and community engagement contributes to our lives on two wheels, experienced cyclists as well as beginners will surely find something fun to see or do.”
Our major focus is a celebration of bikes as a means of transport, as we believe this way of appreciating bikes can contribute the greatest improvements to our health, our environment and our experience of urban (and suburban!) life. Whilst bikes can also be fantastic instruments for recreation, exercise and sport, it is their ability to contribute to sustainable cities and lifestyles that really gets our juices flowing. It was this thinking that saw us partner up with the Sustainable Living Festival and Treadlie Magazine to deliver the inaugural Bikefest Treadlie Market.
We wanted to create a retail and expo event for bicycle retailers, distributors, craftspeople and enthusiasts that celebrated bikes in a different context to the traditional bike expo. And it worked! This feedback from Robert Cook “Your team really do deserve congratulations for the Bikefest idea … any previous sort of bike show was all about the competition sector with very little acknowledgement of any other cycling interests. By linking in with the SLF, it has made the very clear statement that bikes are really a very viable sustainable transport option.While this is generally understood at the cerebral level, the connection with the SLF has re-stated this at the emotional level and is why everyone at Bikefest deserves a great big congratulations.” Thanks Robert! Of course the Bikefest Treadlie Market also included HEAPS of activities and events, including the Roller Races, Projector Bike Film Night, the Better by Bike Awards, dirtgirl and scrapboy’s Wheelie Workshop and Best in Show (check out the video for these events below),
Our activities at the SLF were not only attended by more than 100,000 people, they were also all HEAPS of fun. To top it all off, they also scored Bikefest Creative Producer, Pip Carroll a very surprising (and appreciated!) acknowledgement as ‘Australia’s Biggest Greenie’ in the inaugural Sustainable Living Festival Golden Greenie Awards.
For a great wrap up view the video below made by Better by Bike sponsor Onitsuka Tiger, and also check out images of the Bikefest Treadlie Market here, here and here.
Melbourne Bike Fest from Onitsuka Tiger Australia on Vimeo.
The next major event in the program was our concluding celebration for the My Bike Project, a skills development and community engagement initiative in partnership with The Huddle at the North Melbourne Football Club. The whole program and celebration were a great success, with participants, sponsors and members of the community enjoying the debut screening of the film documenting the project, check it out below and see more photos here.
The Bikefest Village Picnic was the next bike off the rack, and the weather smiled on us with a beautiful sunny day. Over cakes and coffee more than 350 community minded picnic punters relaxed on the Mercator Lawn at the Abbotsford Convent. Staged as part of the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival, the picnic celebrated the intersection between good food and two wheels. Read our wrap up of the event and check out the video below. As reported in Time Out Melbourne, “Hotties, hipsters, nannas, fashionistas and ankle biters alike gathered in the sunshine of the village lawn of the Abbortsford Convent to share, feast and celebrate all that is two wheeled…. As the crowd cycled off into the sunset at the end of the day there was a gentle sigh as everyone realised it was still possible to have wholesome fun on a weekend.” We look forward to making the Village Picnic a regular feature of the late summer calendar over years to come.
The Chasing Rainbows exhibition was a very successful collaboration with the 2012 UCI Track World Championships, with more than 70 entries showing how deep the appreciation for cycling extends into the design community. Read the feedback on Chasing Rainbows from David Culbert, Media & Marketing Director 2012 UCI Track Cycling World Championships in our post on the event.
The Bikefest Bike Runway was a celebration of the art of fashionable riding. Held as part of the L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival, the event celebrated the meeting points between fashion and bike riding, and helped show that a choice to travel on two wheels doesn’t require a style sacrifice. Says fashion blogger Christina Exie, ‘It was the first time I have experienced a bicycle fashion show, and it sure won’t be the last. Such a great way to promote sustainability in fashion. I had lots of fun and everyone was very free spirited! Loved it!”. Supported by Levi’s, the event launched their new commuter range, and showed that Melbourne leads the way in embracing the global trend for bicycle style. Read our post event post and interview with event supporters RMIT and view the video of the Bike Runway below.
The Bikefest BMX Jam was the result of a collaboration between choreographers Antony Hamilton and Bryon Perry, filmakers NON and the Riverslide Skate Park. It was supported by the City of Melbourne Arts Grants Program and celebrated the not only the skill but the the irreverent and chaotic lifestyles of the riders, Riverslide regulars Adam Hough, Adam Stone and Jake Deering. Stay tuned for some documentation of the event.
You can read our wrap up of the BMX Jam and view more photos here.
Our Road Harmony Project with the City of Melbourne this year took the form of a collaboration between Oslo Davis and designers SouthSouthWest. The Move Mindfully in Melbourne campaign was designed around incident hotspots in Melbourne’s CBD. We distributed booklets containing 6 scenarios depicting situations that challenge road harmony, and worked with nearby cafes to disseminate the messages via disposable coffee cups. Read more about the project and Oslo Davis’ inspiration. The Move Mindfully Campaign continues, stay tuned to find out more….
Aside from these major project, the 2012 Melbourne Bikefest also included more than 20 Satellite Events, all produced and delivered by members of the bike riding community. The program included The Squeaky Wheel riders making use of the Melbourne Bike Share service in the Moomba Parade, the Summer Tweed Ride, that proved the weather is never a barrier to tweed (more photos here), the Pushy Women event at the Malthouse Theatre (festival partners through their Greenlight Program) the World Naked Bike Ride (which doubled in size this year!) and all of these awesome events and activities. Thanks to everyone for getting involved and sharing in the bike love.
Special thanks to all of our sponsors, and the amazing Bikefest Committee for your tireless work in making everything happen. Special thanks to our blogger Lisa Dempster for all of her updates to The Squeaky Wheel during the festival.
The next Melbourne Bikefest will take place in February/March 2013. That’s just 11 months away! The Bikefest team will be taking a sabbatical over winter, sleeping lots and stocking up on energy to return fighting fit and ready to make the next Bikefest even better.
Until then, enjoy the ride.
xx
