Lambretta Club Meet, Castlemaine 2026

Castlemaine, the last weekend of March, and the car park behind the pub sounds like a swarm. Two-stroke, mostly: that flat, busy note that a Lambretta makes at idle and the blue haze that goes with it. The Australian Lambretta club meets once a year somewhere with a good road out of town and a hotel that does not mind the noise, and this year it was here, on the goldfields, with the autumn light coming in low across the oval.

The machines are the excuse. A Series 2 the colour of a Tooheys can under half a century of stickers, Los Wankas S.C. next to The Prodigy next to a smiley face. A cream LI with a SKA badge and a Trojan Records badge and 54-46 across the horncast, which is a Toots and the Maytals song and a way of saying what you listen to without saying it. A red one with a Technics sticker and a supercharger decal that is almost certainly a joke. A pale blue one that has lost most of its paint to weather and gained a kind of dignity. A seat in leopard print. Somebody's Free Palestine sticker on a red flank between a tiki bar and a record label.

And the people, who are the real subject. A bloke in a Sheffield United shirt with English By Birth, Yorkshire By The Grace Of God inked around a white rose on his forearm. A Wulfsport jacket with England across the shoulders and three lions down the back. Vespa Club Sydney on a sleeve, under a constellation of enamel pins from rallies on three continents, and nobody seems to mind that it is a Vespa patch at a Lambretta meet. A T-shirt that says Ride It Like You Stole It From A Mod, worn by a man built like he could. Adidas tracksuit tops, Gazelles, pudding-basin helmets, a leather jacket and wraparounds for the ride out, brogues at a kerb with a cigarette and a dropped pack of Marlboros at the end of the night.

Most of them are of an age. The first wave of this came out of Britain in the sixties, the second out of the late seventies with the Jam and Quadrophenia, and a lot of the people here arrived in Australia carrying one or the other and never put it down. What you see at a meet like this is a subculture that has grown old gracefully without growing up: the same tribal care about the right shoe and the right badge, the same soundtrack, and underneath it the engineering, because a sixty-year-old Italian scooter does not get to Castlemaine without somebody on their knees on the tarmac with a spanner, which is where I found a good few of them.

I shot it the way I shoot everything, with primes and whatever light there was, close enough to read the stickers. The run out of town on the Saturday morning, the pack of them coming through the trees with the exhausts sparkling, is the picture people expect from a scooter rally. The rest, the hands on the chrome, the patches, the tattoos, the two of them head to head over a headlight that would not come on, is what I will remember it by.

Castlemaine, Victoria, 27 and 28 March 2026. Shot on my own account.