120 | AUSTRALIAN ROAD RIDERTHE FACELESS MAN
Isaac Oosterloo’s trip into motorcycling
began in Asia and expanded into India
along with revelations, drugs and an
ever-expanding awareness of what a
wonderful world we live in. For him,
bikes were as much about the inward
journey as the outward one, a happy
beginning that has given his version of
motorcycling a unique and spicy fl avour.
Long-term travelling by motorcycle
reached such a crescendo that Isaac gave
himself what he says was a “complete
DNA upgrade”.
And of course it didn’t take long for
him to grow restless once he came back
to Australia and its regulated way of life.
With a licence, Yamaha V-Star, a minimal
amount of kit and no itinerary, Isaac set
off from Byron Bay to Broome.
The Faceless Man is all about this
ride. It is wri en by a “typical wild
Tasmanian boy” who has experienced a
much broader part of the earth with an
aversion to materialism and the ability
to think for himself. It’s honest, heartfelt
and philosophical, as well as being
very well wri en. Any ARR reader who
read Isaac’s recent features and guest
columns will know his style and have a
good idea of what’s in store when they
read the book.
Isaac rides with Monkey, his best
mate and a practical, cynical man who
balances Isaac’s “airy-fairy, creative,
hippy side”. They set out with no plan
except to take things as they come, and
Isaac brings you along without giving
any hints of what’s coming up in the
book. You’re always heading towards
the same horizon as them, not seeing
beyond it.
The pure joy of being on the road
— the novelty of it in the early parts
of the journey and living with it as
the ride went on — comes across so
clearly in Isaac’s words that as I read
I kept recalling my own moments of
bliss, some that had lain dormant in my
memory for years. This was a surprising
and fun aspect of reading The FacelessMan. One moment the emotion of being
alone in the outback on my motorcycle
would well up inside me, the next I’d be
anticipating the rolling road and wide
sky somewhere on my next big tour.
This trip wasn’t Isaac’s fi rst
adventurous ride — not a er his
formative travels in Asia and India —
but this one is new and big for him, the
“most epic journey of my life”. There’s
an innocence, even a bit of naivety in
Isaac’s words. Despite all his previous
travelling on and off motorcycles, so
much on his Australia odyssey is u erly
novel to him. The fact that this comes
through provides The Faceless Man with
a refreshing tone that’s sometimes lost
in other travelogues, wri en a er the
event and tinged with the hindsight of
an experienced traveller.
You feel for him and Monkey when,
a er riding full of confi dence to their
very fi rst camping spot, everything went
pear-shaped. They made the classic
mistakes: arriving a er dark to set up
a beach camp, having underestimated
mother nature’s potential. They werehammered by a storm and were almost
hypothermic through a miserable night.
Their reaction when the sun rises again
is to shrug it off and have a laugh before
riding on, wiser and now more cautious.
“When you are soaked to the skin in a
small, grey town with no shelter around,
it looks completely diff erent than when
you discuss it in a bar over scotch,” Isaac
writes. Probably a good, if hard, lesson to
learn early in the piece.
On the road heading north, then west
and fi nally down to Broome, WA, Isaac
and Monkey meet good towns and bad,
snakes and wasps, girls and drinkers, old
friends and new ones. They encounterTESTING,TESTING
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