1983 Suzuki Sierra Type 2 Soft Top

Fun and dangerous.  I had a bull bar, luckily.

My family lived in Prospect, not quite close enough to Blacktown station to really walk in the morning to catch a train to Uni.  Not having a car wasn't really an option.  I had a part time job at night cleaning banks.  When I was 13 and playing cricket in my dads team one his mates Mick started a cleaning company and won a tender to clean a bank in Blacktown. I started working for Mick pretty much straight away doing a couple of hours a night two nights a week for bit of pocket money.  As I got older I gradually worked more and more. While I was living at home I had saved a little bit of money, but I was never able to save enough to buy a car so I used my cleaning income to get a loan of $5000 from the very bank I was cleaning in fact (where my dad incidentally worked also).


A good friend of mine Peter, was driving around in a yellow 81 4WD Suzuki Sierra hard top and showed me some cool 4wd places you could get to in Blacktown, such as "The Greens" in Prospect, and the old brickworks at Marayong which had jumps and was perfect in the rain when it was muddy.  He really gave the thing a thrashing on and off the road.  His most infamous affair was when he tipped it on road, plowing through four lanes of traffic and down the stairs of the Blacktown Tafe.


I really wanted an old land cruiser, but they were too expensive so the Sierra sounded like a good option because I could get one in my price range.  Not knowing anything about cars, I thought it best to take someone along to assist with my search and so my dad came along.  I didn't know that my dad knew about as much about cars as I did, which was fuck all.


To demonstrate this perfectly, we forsook the trading post and found ourselves in a car yard at Burwood on Parramatta Rd, which i will not name for legal reasons.  Before long I had put pen to paper to purchase a red 5 speed manual Suzuki Sierra soft top with three months rego for just under five large.  It rattled along quite nicely, and I was back in business again.


Three months later I took the car to my mechanic Paul, a tall moustached ex-junkie who lived in Doonside, and he delivered unto me the news that I would not be able to register the car.  Apparently, the standard engine for this car was 1.0 litres and my car was 1.3 litres.  Someone had put one of the newer Sierra engines in. There was (and possibly still is as I wouldn't know) a rule that any car whose engine capacity exceeded 10% of its original needed an engineers certificate or roadworthy certificate or something else that I didn't have and wasn't told about.  I was told to go back to the yard and that I did.


At first someone had a look at the bonnet and told me it was all right and I should be able to register it, so I sparked what could be described as a heated and passionate exchange which ended with the good folk at Burwood agreeing to fix any defects and arrange the appropriate paperwork.  I left the car with them, walked to the station and caught the train to Blacktown.  I phoned every day for nearly two weeks until I was finally told I could come and collect it.


I took the paperwork back to the RTA but heads were shaking on both sides of the counter, so I drove my now unregistered and un-registerable 4wd back to Doonside like the criminal I was.  I remember thinking that it was odd that I could be pulled over and charged here for driving an unregistered vehicle given the circumstances. Paul had a look and confirmed my suspicions.  Absolutely no work had been done whatsoever.  I'd been had again.  I called the yard again but it was pretty clear they were taking the piss and there was nothing I could do about it.  This was confirmed by a call to the department of fair trading who said I didn't have much of a case.


One of the upsides of living in Blacktown was that there were no shortages of current and ex criminals who knew a way around most problems one could encounter in this life, and I was able to arrange some dodgy paperwork and scam a years rego.  Now I just needed to find someone as dumb as me to sell it to, but first I wanted to get some use and enjoyment from my hard fought car.


Knowing I would have to sell it within a year, the dear thing copped a merciless thrashing over the next 6 months.  I tipped it once off-road, sent it over speed humps at maximum speed and rarely washed it.


One Friday night I quietly smashed a six pack of Coopers and a bottle of scotch with my good friend Dean.  Later in the evening I rather foolishly and unethically drove to another mates house and soon after again we were in a typical Blacktown back yard party where binge drinking was par for the course.  It was late by this time and the crowd were dispersing, all the fun had been had.  Ever helpful, I offered another 2 friends a lift home.


With the blood alcohol ever rising, there I was in the soft top with one friend Peter in the front with me and not wearing his seat belt, and my other two mates Brendan and Nath.  Right out the front of my old prestigious high school I hit a speed hump at tremendous velocity.  All four wheels left the ground and upon these wheels returning to earth I heard an urgent "RIGHT HERE!!".  All too quickly I obliged.


Time and sound blurred and in slow motion the soft top begun to tilt and I remember screaming out "HANG ON!!!!!!" before landing very hard on the passenger side of the car. My two mates in the back roll out the back onto the road while the car slides into the kerb of the street were turning into.  When the car slammed to a roaring silence I was still hanging onto the steering wheel with my right hand.  Somehow I was on the window side of Peter, which was now also the gravel and broken glass side of Peter.  We quickly scrambled out the driver side window.  Brendan was already running away down the road screaming "Just report it stolen man, fucking leave it!!!" as he disappeared into the night. (Later, we found him hiding behind a scrub in someones front yard, and managed to coax him out).  I looked at Peter who was fine somehow, and while my head was bleeding somewhere, I felt fine as well - no pain anyway.  My other mate Nath however, was in a fair bit of pain and was kind of Quasimodo-ing up the street away from us holding his shoulder. His arm seemed to be hanging impossibly low in the socket.  We were only a block from his house which is where we were heading.


Not being insured, stolen was simply not an option, so Peter and I tipped it upright, got back in, and started off around the corner to Nath's.  Anyone within a 5 km radius who wasn't woken by the crash, would have woken up from the sound of the bumper bar which was screaming due to being wedged into the front left wheel, so I imagine a few people were watching by this time, especially the people whose yard we gatecrashed but nevertheless we got it down the drive, covered it in a single sheet. Nath went to sleep while Peter and I went back round the corner to where we stacked to have a look.  It was a good thing we did because Brendan's wallet was still in the gutter with all his ID in it and the police did go sniffing around he scene not long after, driving past us while we were walking back.


Now I is was in what you would call a bind.  A car with some serious and hard to explain damage, full debt outstanding, and a mate with a dislocated shoulder.  We got Nath down to Blacktown hospital and passed it off as a skating injury.  Poor Nath had a snowboard trip planned for the next weekend which I had now fucked up for him and was obviously cancelled - and I'd put him in a lot of pain. I will never forget the look of sheer pain on his face as the doctor forced his joint violently and abruptly back into place.  To add insult to injury, Nath was a council worker and had to take time off work although he did get put on light duties which was kind of a silver lining - but not really.  This was for this and other reasons one of the major low points of my life.


I think the fact that no one got killed, and that we evaded police effectively used up all my next 7 years of luck in one go, as I continued from bad to worse over that time with cars.


Post-Crash Sierra

The question now was what to do with the Sierra?

At this point in my life I was studying and my parents were charging me rent so while my loan was small by today's standards, it was still enough to make things quite uncomfortable budget wise.  My girlfriend was pretty annoyed at me understandably.  I had told her the truth about the crash but I told my parents I had totalled it off road.  Not sure if they believed it but they didn't really give my account of events much scrutiny.

I was convinced to fix the Sierra, mainly because in terms of costs to get back on the road again this still seemed to be the cheapest option even though I had to replace the whole left side, as well as parts of the engine and the front bumper.  I did have a bull bar but decided not to replace it. Overall it cost just over $3000. If I could sell the car, it was unlikely I would get much more than a grand so I would then have nothing to show for a debt of nearly $4000.  If I fixed it I would still owe alot more than I owed, but I would have a car and a way to get around.  I also scored a weekend job at a computer supplies shop in Seven Hills and was paid in cash to pirate software and relabel the floppy disks so the owner could sell them as originals.  I did the copying and the shrink wrapping.  Probably if my dad didn't work in the bank that loan would not have been approved and I would have had to sell it and take the loss.  But he did, so now I had a loan of $8000 somehow.

Slugging out the last semester of uni I managed to pass all my subjects, most comfortably enough except for one which I really scraped though, so this was overall a pleasing result given everything that had happened.  The pressure on the budget was becoming a little intense, and my board was pretty much the same as what I would pay elsewhere in rent.  The Sierra had not been so reliable since the prang. It was time to reassess the best way forward.


The options were, rent with my girlfriend - we could get a place for the same as what we were paying between us - or stay at home.  Also whether somehow to get another job or not?  In my breaks I would work full time in my cleaning job.  My hours were generally 6pm to anywhere from 11pm to 3am depending on how many banks we had to clean, and how late Mick was picking me up.  He was always late, it was just a question of how late.


Often the bank manager at the first bank we cleaned ever night in Blacktown would still be at work when we arrived, sometimes when we leaved.  One day as I was cleaning out the glass ash tray in his office he mentioned that my dad had told him I was thinking of looking for work and suggested I apply at the bank for an entry level job.  To be honest I hadn't remembered mentioning that to my dad but there you go.  He gave me the details of where to do an aptitude test.  My weekend 'work' had dried up already and it did sound a bit tempting the idea of working full time for a while.  I thought maybe at least even try and work until the start of the next semester and clear some of the debt?

So I stayed at home for the time being as I had the garage to myself which was fairly private, and after a bit of mucking around got a job as a teller Monday to Friday.  I got a payslip on the second day I worked there which was cool, but when I read it saw my annual salary was $16,000 I realised there was nothing cool about it.  I hadn't actually asked about salaries in the interview because I thought it would be rude. An assumption had been made bankers earned alot more than this!  I also started to question how I would be able to make a dent in this debt on this kind of salary.  

The first thing I did was take out a staff loan and got on a cheaper rate.   The second thing I did was find the pay rates in the big dusty green Staff Manual, which I was one of my jobs to keep up to date by filing the circulars in.  OK, so I was in the top left hand box of the matrix, as low as low could be, but the only way was up.  Plus, there were some seriously impaired people in the bank which I saw as a possible opportunity.  Most of them seem uninspired and depressed, and after speaking to a couple I wondered if I would be able to get anywhere in only a few months but I didn't plan to stay long so just plugged along.

After only a month I was moved to Blacktown branch (where I was still the cleaner at night!), and got a bit of a pay rise - surging to $19,000 to $21,000 only a couple of weeks later.  My girlfriend worked at a skate shop in Westpoint, which was quite handy, and we saw more of each other.  She wanted to move out and I did too, but I was still too worried about the budget.  I started to think about how tight it would be once I went back to uni.  It was OK for my girl, who had a few jobs really, some in cash, a couple a bit dodgy (but they paid well) and of course she didn't have a loan to pay off.  In fact ironically she wouldn't have been able to get one even if she wanted to - even though she had more money than me.  Soon I had made a decision to defer uni for one year while I sorted this out and tried to get some sort of stability or breathing space or something.

Meanwhile my car continued to have it's moments.  I didn't find owning a 4wd as enjoyable as I thought.  I was overpaying my loan and knew I had to sell the car before rego became an issue again.  By June, I had worked my way up to the esteemed position of 'Cashier' - my office being a bullet 'resistant' glass cage (which basically meant the first shotgun blast would shatter and face some sort of resistance, the second would be the last thing you ever heard) in the bank at Blacktown.  

One day at lunch I was pulling apart a crumbed thigh from Red Lea, discussing my distaste for cars, and mine in particular, with one of the ladies there. The greedily overweight woman suggested I go and see her husband who worked in a car dealership in Five Dock.  Thankful that I now knew an insider, I took her up that on offer and headed down to the yard in question.