Born of necessity – the human story behind Melbourne’s remarkable Naked Racer Cafe

CAPTION: Johnny Gee with a few of the 300-odd motorcycles at The Naked Racer Cafe

Most Melbournians are aware of the Naked Racer Cafe – a museum/cafe/restaurant/bar in Cheltenham about 20km from the CBD. We found it online some time back, and recently had the opportunity to drop in for brunch. The food was perfect and the service excellent. And the bikes … wow! But the most interesting part for us was meeting its creator, Johnny Gee, and learning the story of how it all came to be.

NECESSITY, they say, is the mother of invention. Give a difficult problem to a clever person, and they will almost always come up with a creative solution.

And sometimes the solution — the invention — far outlives the necessity that it was created to meet.

Consider this. It’s 1993. Thirty-one-year-old Johnny Gee, a motorcycle mechanic by training but a man with many work-and-life experiences under his belt, finds himself as a single parent to a four-month-old baby. As anyone who’s ever had responsibility for a four-month-old baby will tell you, it’s not an easy task — and it’s not a task that sits well alongside a regular nine-to-five job. It’s a job in itself. So how do you look after a baby and also make ends meet?

Good question. But before we see Johnny’s answer, let’s back up. Because, long before there was a Naked Racer Cafe or parenthood in Johnny’s life, there were motorbikes.

Munich to Mulgrave

Johnny emigrated to Australia from Munich with his family in 1964, settling in the Melbourne suburb of Mulgrave.

“Mulgrave was mostly potato farms and quarries in those days,” he said.

“It was a great place to ride bikes; and that’s what we did.

“Dad bought me a ‘Gran Prix’ bike – it was pretty basic and had a lawnmower engine and 10” wheels. I guess that was my first bike, but my first real bike – the first bike I paid for with my own money – was a Honda XR75. It was the last of the grey tanks, 1974 K2 if I remember right. We all had bikes, all the kids in the neighbourhood. We’d ride for miles and miles, roaming around like a bunch of Jessie Jameses. Our parents were all pretty relaxed; as long as we were home when the street lights came on, all was good.

“I had to work for petrol money, so I had lots of jobs; pumping petrol after school, there was a paper run, all sorts of things.”

Johnny’s formal education had its ups and downs.

“By third form I’d had enough of my school and they’d had enough of me, so we did a deal. If they agreed to put me up to the next class, I’d agree to leave.  And that’s what happened. I moved onto another school and went from being a kid getting Es and Fs to a kid getting straight-As. It was amazing.

“I was doing much better at that second school but when I was offered an apprenticeship as a motorbike mechanic, I took it.”

Building skills

Working full-time time in a bike workshop enabled Johnny to build his mechanical skills and fuelled his passion for motorcycles. But it didn’t all go smoothly. In fact, it ended early and rather suddenly.

“One day I had a blue with my boss,” Johnny told us “and he sacked me on the spot.”

“So I bought a crashed Yamaha XJ 900, fixed it up, kitted it out, and headed off for a ride around Australia. I was gone about five years; travelled and worked right around Australia, across to the mines in Kalgoorlie, a maintenance company in Perth, all sorts of things.

“But eventually I came back to Melbourne. That would have been 1988.  I didn’t get a job as such. I was buying bikes, fixing them up, and selling them. And I registered the business name ‘Antique Motorcycles’.

“At some stage I decided to go to the USA for a holiday, and I couldn’t help but notice how cheap old bikes were — old British bikes, especially — compared to Australia.

“So I borrowed some money against the house and filled a container full of bikes in the States, and shipped them back to Australia. I sold the good ones straight away, and fixed up the others. By the end of that first year, I’d sold them all — so I borrowed some more money and did it again. That went on for three years until I’d made enough money to fund it on my own. We’ve now been doing that for over 35 years.”

Johnny says his lifestyle in the early years of importing bikes from America was enviable.

“A lot of time I’d spend the day at the beach, take a few phone calls, then meet a buyer at the end of the day to deliver a bike. It was a great life. And that gap in prices was still there. I could buy some bikes in the USA for $500, do a bit of work on them, and sell them here for $5,000. I’d fill a container for about $20k and eventually make about $100k.

Fatherhood — and a solution

“It was about this time that I became a single dad. Getting a proper job wasn’t going to work so, instead, I just kept doing what I was doing; bringing in British bikes — Triumphs, BSAs and Nortons. It was generally one container-load a year, but sometimes two.”

And so Johnny found his solution and his vocation; self-employed motorcycle importer, restorer, repairer and salesman — and single dad.

Things took an unexpected turn in about 1996 when the authorities knocked on his door. It had come to their attention that he was selling bikes, quite a lot of them, without a dealer’s licence. And that wasn’t on.

“I told them they weren’t motor vehicles at all. They were pieces of art, and most of them were going into old blokes’ living rooms. They’re not motor vehicles until someone licences them, right?

“Anyway, the authorities were amused but not convinced by my argument. As it turned out, they were keen to help me get my business above board and helped me do it. I guess that was the moment when my profitable hobby actually became a legitimate business.”

The Naked Racer Cafe

And, today, what a fascinating business it is. At it’s heart, it’s still the business created by necessity all those years ago when getting “a proper job” wasn’t a realistic option. Buying, fixing and selling bikes is still the hub of the business wheel. But the wheel has multiple spokes.

For one, the Naked Racer is Victoria’s only Brough-Superior dealer. (Johnny has just returned from a training course in France, where he got to visit the Brough factory.)

Then there’s a workshop that employs five mechanics with a combined 150 years experience. “We actually repair motorcycles here,” Johnny says. “We don ‘t just swap-out parts. We work on things that other bike shops won’t touch.”

There’s apparel too, and hard parts including exhaust systems, slip-ons and tail tidies, especially for Indians.

There’s a bar/restaurant that’s open seven days a week, with live music and dancing on Saturday nights.

There’s the museum – a glorious collection of bikes that has been a lifetime in the making. Some of the museum bikes are for sale, some are not. But with bikes coming and going all the time, it’s a moving feast.

And, of course, there’s the cafe embedded and surrounded by the museum.

“At some point along the way it occurred to me that I had a lot of people coming to look at all our bikes and chew the fat, but with no intention of actually buying one. I figured there must be a way to get some money out of them while they were here!

“We tried cool drinks, sandwiches, that sort of thing, but it didn’t really work. Then coffee, and more substantial food. It grew until it worked. Across the enterprise, we now employ about 50 people.”

The day we visited, the cafe was busy but not overly-so. We managed to meet Johnny and spent some time admiring his collection.

Here’s some of what we saw.