I spent most school holidays in primary school hanging off the back of a quad bike while grandma did the afternoon chores. If you clung on tightly you could get all four grandkids and a dog on the bike in addition to the driver. The three oldest kids and Silver the kelpie would sit on the rear carry rack and the youngest would be up on the fuel tank in front of the driver. The biggest risk, in my memory as a six-year-old, was that you’d drop the eggs and cop an earful.
The best spot to be was in the middle at the back, because you could put your legs on either side of the driver and, being wedged in, you were never asked to jump down to open the gate.
We never thought it was dangerous, but we also swung from the rafters of the hay shed using rope made of nine strands of baling twine plaited together. Danger is relative – or in this case, your relatives.
Mum once raised the idea that we should wear helmets and was laughed out of the house. Grandma drove at a snail’s pace; she wasn’t going to flip the bike.
Except she did, once. There were no kids on the back, and it was the three-wheeler, which even in the early 1990s was recognised as a fairly unstable design. She was bringing in the house cow, driving across the hill, and the bike tipped over. She was stuck underneath it for several hours until a neighbour driving past saw an upturned bike in the paddock and decided to investigate.
They stopped using the three-wheeler after that, but the four-wheelers stuck around. They were just as safe as riding in the tray of the ute, which is to say not safe at all but just what everyone did.
On most family farms, the safety upgrades are generational, just like the change in management. My great-grandfather was a horseman, but my grandfather was one of the first in the district to switch to tractors and later motorbikes. The draught horses were dangerous, he said.
Sixty years on, my uncle has the farm and his own kids and the quad bikes have been switched out for side-by-side vehicles – those little buggies that look like all-terrain golf carts.
Just as the risks of working with horses were too great for my grandfather’s generation, the risks and regulatory burden of using four-wheel motorbikes has caused another shift.
In 2021, when the laws mandating rollover bars on all all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), both side-by-sides and quad bikes, came into effect in Australia, quad bike accidents were the leading cause of death and injury on Australian farms. In the five years to 2022, 74 people died in quad bike accidents. Motorcycle manufacturers have since withdrawn their four-wheeler bikes from sale in Australia, but they are still in high demand on the secondhand market.
Now there are growing concerns about the safety of side-by-side vehicles, which offer inbuilt rollover protection in the form of a cabin and have additional safety features, such as seatbelts, that no one seems to use. The safety guidelines from the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries state that anyone driving any ATV should be over the age of 16, ideally hold a valid driver’s licence, be tall enough to brace on the floor and the hand hold if needed, and always wear a helmet and eye protection. The doors and side nets should also be closed and the ATV should not carry more passengers than there are seats.
I read this and thought of how many times we stacked six people into the Suzuki Mighty Boy that was our farm ute (four in the cabin, two in the tub), with the driver’s age ranging from 10 to 14, and wondered if the authors had ever been on a farm.
When we first got the quad bike for the vineyard I was 12 years old and had to stand up and throw all my weight into my left foot to change gears. When the grapevines grew bigger, Dad mounted a little orange bike flag on the back so we could find him above the rows. He also mounted a wooden pole on the front, to which he strapped a hedge trimmer controlled by an electric window mechanism salvaged from an old Toyota Camry. He’d drive it up and down the rows, blades whirring, to cut the vines that stretched across the aisle. It was terrifying, but a great time saver.
Most readers will be horrified by that anecdote, but the farmers among them might be taking notes. Australia’s farmers are ageing, time-poor and usually work alone. They’ve also been taking massive risks since they were first thrown on the back of the ute as a toddler, and they haven’t died yet. It’s a difficult environment in which to make the case for proactive occupational health and safety reform.
But it shouldn’t be, because the rate of death and injury remains high. Fifty-five people died in farm accidents in 2022 and 1,705 have died since 2001, according to data compiled by Agrifutures. Eight of those cases involved quad bike accidents and 11 involved tractors, and those two vehicles have been involved in the majority of fatal farm accidents in the past 21 years. A further 158 people were injured in farm accidents in 2022, with most incidents involving quad bikes (33), horses (21), motorbikes (14), or side-by-sides (13).
We don’t have a quad bike or a tractor on this little piece of land that’s not really a farm. I’ve gone back to horses. But I wear a safety vest now, as well as a helmet. And while Dad still wields a hedge trimmer like a polearm, it’s no longer on a moving vehicle. Glacial change, but change nonetheless.
