Daryl Pursey and his family have a long and rich history with the Northern Rivers which includes working and owning the iconic Harris Cycles shop in Keen Street for well over 30 years before moving to Bridge Street, North Lismore in 2020. Sara Browne sat down with Darryl to listen to a fascinating local story.

I was born in Coraki in 61. Our family has always been in Coraki since settling in Australia in the 1860s, out at Bungawalbin at the family dairy farm. It goes back to the days when you selected land.

When my great grandfather came to Australia from England he did a few different things, he even went over to New Zealand for a bit, he and his two brothers. I always thought they just came here, settled and that was it. But they actually came here and looked for gold and went to all sorts of places, did a fair bit of travelling, one of them stayed in NZ. Two stayed here and eventually settled down at Bungawalbin. One had a shop on the river.

I pictured it being a tiny little store. When there was a reunion for the Bungawalbin school they put out a book about it which said the store was quite big, it even had a haberdashery department. Maybe that’s where my retail thing comes from.

So he had this store on the eastern side of the river and apparently the retail lifestyle didn’t sit well with him. Where he selected his land was straight across the river from where he had his store on a hill. He must have sat there in his shop looking at this land and that’s how he decided to choose it.

When he passed away it got passed onto his sons and the farm got split three ways between my father’s uncles. There were two of them that were never married so their farms got passed on to their nephews and the farms ended up being owned by my father and his two brothers.

In those early days in dairy, there was no money. You didn’t get paid for milk, you only got paid for butterfat - the cream - so it was all about making butter. But in the bad times, there wasn’t much butterfat content. You’d work on the farm 7 days a week and maybe once a month get a cheque. The cost of freighting the cream from Bungawalbin to Lismore was more than what it was worth so after working for a month you’d get a bill!

I can remember as a really little kid hearing my Dad fuming and not knowing what it was all about. It was after he passed away, going through some of his old paperwork it all clicked – now I know why he was so angry. I don’t know how we survived.

We left the farm when I was about six but we all helped. I was the youngest of the five. We moved into Coraki then and share-farmed for a while and then Dad started as a car salesman and did that until he passed away at 56. I was 21 when my Dad died. I thought, like you do when you’re young, I thought he was old. It's not until I got to 56 myself that I realised how young he was.

My first job out of school was in the bank in Lismore, I was 17. I was there for three years and then got transferred to Tamworth in the middle of winter. I was a very outdoorsy, beachy sort of person. When you’re brought up here that’s what you did every weekend, you went to the beach, rode your motorbikes, always outdoors. Then in Tamworth, it was freezing cold, no one did anything outdoors, I hated the place and I lasted three months. I left the bank and came back down here.

That three months is the only time I haven’t worked in the CBD, only three different jobs in my whole working life.

I came back from Tamworth and had few weeks off work until my money ran out. Back in the early 80s in a regional town like here you still could get work. And Dad knew people. I probably only got the job I got because of someone Dad knew.

I got a job at Grangers which was a hardware store on Carrington Street. It was a pretty ordinary job, nothing flash, just on the floor in the kitchenware department. Stayed there for a couple of years and then there was a vacancy upstairs in the office. I didn’t really enjoy the retail thing that much. As soon as I got that job upstairs I enjoyed it, working as a debtors clerk.

At that time I started going out with Amanda Wotherspoon whose parents owned Harris Cycles.

The original partners in Harris Cycle Company were the Wotherspoon family and Cec Harris. They started the bike shop back in 1918 and then later Cy Wotherspoon bought out the Harris side of it. In 1985 Cy had a cerebral haemorrhage. He was very lucky, most people don’t survive that. It happened in October which in the bike industry is a very busy time, gearing up for Christmas, and Pam his wife could not have run it by herself. She couldn’t do Cy’s mechanical side of it, assembling the bikes.

I’d already been helping them out at Christmas time, putting bikes together, I love that sort of thing. Growing up on a farm you just fix everything yourself, we had no money, we never got anything fixed by anyone else. If you couldn’t fix it yourself you didn’t have anything. As kids, we were pulling things apart from a very young age so I always had that mechanical aptitude.

As soon as Cy got sick I was going round there at lunchtime and after work doing small jobs, helping out as much as I could. It was looking like he was going to die, Pam asked me if I’d be interested in working at the shop and I jumped at it.

Early days at Harris Cycle on Keen St, L to R Cy Wotherspoon, Cec Harris, Harold Wotherspoon

I worked there for three years and then Amanda came and joined us too. It was busy times back then. Nowhere near as busy as we are now but little businesses were much more profitable back in those days. You had decent margins so it was able to sustain four people working there.

I enjoyed doing it but there was nowhere really for me to go and I was getting to an age where I was going to have to do something, I thought I can’t just be a bike mechanic all my life, there’s no future in that really. I either had to leave and re-educate myself and do something that’s going to have a future or buy the place. That was one of my dreams as a kid to own my own business.

We offered to buy it from Pam and Cy, initially, they weren’t interested because they were still a bit young to retire. Then about two years later I got to the point where I’d had it. We had a young family, two young kids ourselves, we weren’t making heaps of money, it was pretty ordinary. It came to a crunch point. I remember I said to Amanda I’ve just go to do something, we can’t survive like this. So I approached them again and they said yes.

I was always into exercise and trying to keep fit, when I was young I always played a lot of sport. I hurt my knee playing touch football and a mate said I should start riding a bike to strengthen up my knee. I always had a bike as a kid. But then you get your driver’s licence and you stop.

I did get back on the bike and I really enjoyed it. I was doing 10ks most afternoons, but I started meeting these guys that were doing 100ks. To me that seemed incredible, how can anyone ride 100 kilometres? I got intrigued by it. I started to ride more and got to know some of these other guys. It wasn’t til I actually started working at the shop that I took it to the next level and started training and racing and got right into it.

I haven’t raced properly for 10 years but I still ride every second day. We used to have quite a strong racing club years ago, Lismore itself hasn’t got a club anymore, Ballina has. Back when I first started racing Casino had a club so we’d race every Saturday at Casino, every Sunday at Wyrallah - road racing. If you wanted more competitive racing you’d go to Murwillumbah.

We had a boom in cycling about 15 years ago. The shop we were in (on Keen Street) had been one shop then during the depression and war years it got really tough so the only way they could keep the business going was to put a wall through the middle of the shop and split the rent in half.

That wall was there when I first started. The other half of the shop had been many things over the years, cane, jewellery…furniture. The last shop that was there shut down so it was vacant. Our shop was tiny, hard to display products and work in, it was very frustrating. I felt confident that we could take over the whole thing. It was the best thing I ever did. Overnight it just doubled our turnover.

It was as much luck as good management because it was just at the same time that cycling had a boom. It was when a lot of cyclists started to race overseas, Tour de France, that sort of thing, everyone over 40 jumped back on a pushbike for some reason. It was the biggest boom I’d seen in the time I’d been in the business. That was around 2005 to 2010.

I came into the industry just after the BMX boom. Cy (Wotherspoon) had been in that shop since he was 14 years old and he said the biggest thing he’d ever seen was the BMX. They sold more BMX bikes than any type of bike they’d sold before, ever. It was the first time the bike industry brought out something new that wasn’t just a standard bike. Kids had bikes but the BMX just took it to another level and then BMX racing took off.

We just didn’t see anything like that again until around 2007 with the boom of road bikes. It’s hard to explain just how many people bought road bikes. That allowed me to employ staff for the first time in my time of having the shop…and that allowed me to have a holiday.

Being my own business there’s a lot of benefits but the biggest disadvantage is you don’t get holidays. I went 20 years without a holiday. And then when my marriage broke up and I met Jo a couple of years after that, I started to realise I can’t do this - I can’t just work, work, work.

I took six weeks off. We drove to WA, took our bikes and just drove and cycled. That’s the only proper holiday I’ve ever had.

Jo and I run this ourselves, we can’t afford to employ anyone really. We had employed people up until we moved, always have employed people for years but its hard. You’ve got to work twice as hard to cover their wage as well as keep your own wage coming in. So we decided when we made the move over here it would be a good time just to downscale it a little bit, take the stress off. And I guess covid has been a part of that as well.

Jo is a massage therapist, the pandemic affected her work so she actually started coming into the bike shop just to help out and quite liked it so she is sort of here now too.

Going overseas has always been part of our plan. I can feel myself getting to the stage where I’m not as keen as when I was younger. I’ll still do it if we can but it won’t worry me if we don’t. I’d like to go back to England where my family came from, and round Europe.

I always said I was going to retire at 60 but selling the premises over there and having to move the business really threw a spanner in my plans. And covid too. We had decided we weren’t going to move the business just shut it down rather than go through the whole hassle of moving it. We were struggling to find anywhere big enough.

There was nothing in the CBD that we could afford. Everyone loved the history of the old place. And the condition the building was in suited the history. The minute we got kicked out of there it changed everything. We needed storage too. Bikes aren’t an easy thing to pack up in flood time.

This (new location) only came about through a bit of luck really. I know the guy that owns the building and I was just talking to him one day and told him our predicament and he said “I’ve got enough space over here, I could make room for you.” As soon as I saw it I loved it. There’s space upstairs up the front too so Jo has been able to move her massage clinic here. There’s more flood storage up the back.

We’d had a boom through covid so we were in a pretty good position and we could have just shut the doors, sold off what was left and walked away. The whole reason we wanted to retire a bit earlier was to go travelling but because of COVID we couldn’t. So we thought what else can we do? Work was the best option.

I thought I would have had more connection to the old building, being there as long as I was, but I didn’t in the end. The new place excited me and I was so keen to get into here and open the doors and see people’s reaction to it. I ended up with no emotional response to it really. You go into a place most days of your life for 30 odd years you’d think you would. That surprised me a bit.

About five or six years ago I really did get sick of the whole retail thing, just going to work every day, doing the same old thing for 30 odd years. I could see there was a need for mountain bike trails in the area. Our sales of juvenile bikes had been dropping off over the years because kids were just playing games, they weren’t riding bikes. We used bikes as transport, kids don’t use bikes as transport now, it's too dangerous. So there was no safe haven to encourage kids to ride bikes.

I did it off my own bat really, me and a mate, we started building mountain bike tracks down at New Italy in the State forest. We weren’t really supposed to be doing it but Forestry knew we were in there and they gave us the okay to build a few tracks and see if people were going to use it.

We didn’t have a mountain bike club because we didn’t have any mountain bike trails! We got a few trails built and the guys from Alstonville and Ballina started using them a lot and it just escalated from that.

The first day we went down to build New Italy we had an old shovel and a stick, scratching in the ground. We’ve got a couple of excavators now and some other machinery and we employ a guy so it actually turned into a business as well, out of nothing.

One of those mates is an agronomist working in the macadamia industry and he was looking for someone to help him drive his harvester. Because I was so sick of retail I said as a joke one day I’ll do it. I ended up taking a six month break from the shop for the maca harvesting season and did that for four or five years.

It was a real change and still a kind of semi-retirement plan. I needed a break from the shop, I’ve got that out of my system. I’m back here fulltime now and probably enjoying it more than I was previously.

It’s been close to 30 years since teenage boys have come in and drooled over bikes, not since the BMX days. And now…you see them come in here in groups and they’re actually looking at pushbikes, drooling over the mountain bikes.