Being the daredevil passenger leaning out of a racing motorcycle sidecar outfit, her left shoulder 6cm above the tarmac at 160km/h, wasn’t how dress-cutter Jean Kilpatrick saw her future when she left Melbourne with her racer boyfriend Ray Foster late in 1958. Nor was living on packet soup when funds were tight at race meetings. But her willingness to try anything made her Australia’s first female competitor in motorcycl e grand prix racing.

Sydney department-store buyer Margot Terrey sailed to London for the 1950s’ version of the Grand Tour. It was simply part of the adventure when Margot and her friend Dorothy Tonkin made a spur of the moment decision to join Australian motorcycle racer Bob Brown for the grand prix season, his bus being both abode and transport.

Margot only played a cameo in the so-called Continental Circus, that loose collection of racers who criss-crossed Europe for five months each year in the 1950s and 60s, racing at a different circuit each week. She wouldn’t have missed the gypsy life experience for the world. Within a month, she met leading Italian racer Duilio Agostini and has lived beside Lake Como ever since.

And accounts clerk Gwen Wheeler never imagined her trip to the Queen’s coronation in 1953 would lead from a shipboard romance on the voyage home to two more summers in Europe with husband Keith Bryen, including scary episodes with Russian border guards in draconian East Germany.

All three tales are true as are many more. A dozen Australian women were part of this freewheeling professional motorcycle racing scene in the 1950s, most joining the tour with their