I met Robert Lovell at LisAmore! with his wife Meryl as they proudly showed off their lovingly restored 1922 Fiat. During a brief conversation, it was evident that Robert has an interesting life story to tell which starts in Brisbane, moves to Mackay, back to Brisbane, Sydney and ends with a stellar career in Lismore. Robert has a passion for vintage cars and motorbikes that is unrivalled in the Northern Rivers. This is his story.

I was born in Brisbane in 1944, just at the end of World War II. When I was about four years old, Mum and Dad, in a 1938 Ford V8 Panel Van, moved north to Mackay where I grew up.

I'm not sure why we moved there. Dad was a Ford mechanic. It's very interesting as he almost came to Lismore instead of Mackay in 1948. He would have worked at Trevan Ford but big floods at that time turned him around and he went north. My mum grew up in Gympie in Queensland, and my dad was working in Gympie when they met.

At that stage, the road finished at about Rockhampton, there was no road from Rockhampton up to Mackay. Dad told me the story of how the tracks used to just go through a bush road where there would be an axe mark taken off the trees and you go through those and then there were creeks to go through.

Dad got out of the blue-collar work and bought a little business. The real estate agent that sold him in and out of it realised that he had a business head on him and offered him a job so he was a real estate agent for the rest of his working career.

Mackay was the sugarcane capital of Australia back then, there were seven sugar mills in Mackay at that time. Mackay itself used to produce more than a third of the sugar production of Australia. There were a lot of Italian and Maltese migrants living up in those areas so a lot of my mates were Italian and Maltese fellows and I've still got good mates up there that we go up and see.

I went to primary and high school in Mackay. I finished my senior year in 1962. In those days, most people left school in year 10 so at 16 everyone got a job locally. It was only the real smart ones, three or four of them that may have gone down (Brisbane) to university. We didn't know what a university was, it was somewhere in the south. The other ones often went to teachers' college. But the rest of us just got a local job around the place."

If you did go on to Year 11 & 12, you didn't really have a lot of choice in what subjects you did. You did two mathematics, maths one, maths two, maths two was applied mathematics, chemistry, physics, Latin, French and two English courses. The only choice you could make was history or geography, something like that. Otherwise, they were the academic subjects that you graduated with in Year 12. I still use the mathematics, the applied mathematics that I learned in 1959 and 1960 to design things.

When I left school, the first job I got was a message boy with an insurance company and that didn't go too far. I rode a push bike around delivering notices for insurance renewals.

The next job, which was mainly because I was building a boat at the time, was as a storeman and packer in a hardware store so that I could get the materials at staff prices to build this big ski boat when I was only 19. When the boat got finished I changed things up and worked as a clerk in an accounting office. I didn't know what accounting was all about, I was more interested in building boats, surfboards and surf skis and pulling cars apart which was part of my father's heritage. Right from when I was young, I was always in the engine bay of cars with him. I helped him bleed brakes when I was probably six or seven years old.

I worked in the accountant's office for a number of years and they said listen, you should do some studies and get some qualifications. Well, I thought I'd finished school.

At that time the Vietnam War was on. I was in the ballot to fight in Vietnam but I didn't get the call-up. A couple of mates of mine did go away and when they came back, they said Lovell what are you doing now? We've got scholarships to go for further training. Where are you going? We're going down to Queensland University. What are you going to do? Well, we were thinking of doing a business degree down there. Oh, well, I'm working as a clerk here, yeah, I'll come with you. It was as simple as that.

So, I left North Queensland after playing around for five years. I was in the Lifesavers, swimming and went away to the Australian titles. So sport and my ski boat, which I used to take up to Shute Harbour and go over to the Whitsunday Islands was my life at that time.

So, the three of us went down to Brisbane to uni and did a Bachelor of Commerce and Economics. I was 23 then. We just treated it like a job. We didn't get caught up in all the other issues that the younger ones were doing. We went to university, studied and did our assignments. Three years bang, bang, bang, graduated.

I was picked up by one of the big four American chartered accounting firms, Arthur Andersen and Company. The Big Four were Price Waterhouse, Coopers and Lybrand, Peat Marwick Mitchell and Arthur Andersen. Because I'd worked in an office doing tax work, I was in the Brisbane office doing taxation and I learned a lot there, but I really didn't like sitting in an office all day. So I said to them, look, I'd like to get out into the audit side of things commercial, corporate auditing etc. They said okay, we've got an opening in Sydney. Would you like to go to Sydney? Yep, that'll be fine.

(Robert as a young professional in 1970)

I was working on big audits like Coles Myer, Castrol, a lot of American firms and this was the Australian subsidiary of American firms working on those. BHP was another.

You had to do the professional year, as it was called, it was one whole year of study which was the admittance to the Institute of Chartered Accountants. Once you got that, you were then able to have public practice. I liked the audit side of it because I got out into all sorts of different industries and different accounting systems and management styles. I was with Arthur Andersen for six years.

The interesting thing was the Managing Partner used to race yachts on Sydney Harbour and he knew I had some experience so I was asked to be part of the crew. You could imagine the talk around the office that I'm the junior in the place sailing on the Managing Partners yacht on Saturdays.

(Robert and Meryl on Sydney Harbour)

We were based in Middle Harbour and we used to race all around the harbour then we'd go out down the coast to Botany Bay. And because I had mechanical knowledge as well, I used to service the yacht when it was downtime. I used to do all the winches and check all the rigging and things. I was accused of brown-nosing the boss.

I met Meryl down in Sydney. She came from Grafton and loved the outdoors like me. The boss used to let Meryl and I, it was normally a four-person crew, take the yacht out on Sundays by ourselves. We didn't put up a lot of the sails because there were only two of us but we used to sail around. Meryl and I got married pretty quickly after we'd met, I was 28 then.

(Robert and Meryl Lovell's wedding day in 1974)

At that point, I'd had enough of Sydney. I was only supposed to be there for a couple of years and I didn't want to live in the big cities so we started looking around for where we were going to live.

Meryl is from Grafton and my family were in Queensland so we just started looking around and I picked about a 200-mile radius around Brisbane. I didn't want to go into Brisbane, I was looking for a country area to get around. That was sort of Coffs Harbour to Nambour, Bundaberg perhaps and Toowoomba. I made up made all these applications and an opportunity came up in Lismore at Thomas Noble and Russell. The practice had a fair exposure to audit work and I had a lot of experience in audit and it was getting bigger than they could deal with plus I had taxation and other experience as well.

So, we sold our unit in Sydney and arrived here in 1976 cashed up. In those days I owned a car and didn't have any debt and so we bought into the practice in January 1976. I worked for one year to see if I liked them and they liked me.

There were two partners and 12 staff in the practice back then and it just rolled into the partnership after that.

We bought a house in Lismore Heights when we moved and stayed there about 10 years and then the babies started arriving. We've got three sons. Kurt, he's 46 now, he's a school teacher living in a city outside of Abu Dhabi in the UAE. Our second boy, Garrett is 44 and living in Brisbane. Both Kurt and Garrett did a Business Degree at Southern Cross University. Then the younger brother of theirs is Mitchell, he turns 40 this year. He didn't go academic as he wasn't interested, he's a tradie, a very skilled gear machinist.

(A family rally in 1985)

I was at TNR for 30 years before I retired. The practice had really grown. I was Managing Partner for the last eight years and there were now 10 partners and 52 staff. At the moment, I believe now there is about 80 staff and it's probably the largest outside of Newcastle and Sydney in New South Wales. Most of the partners down there now were young kids that I employed from school, so I go back and they do my tax return.

After I retired from the practice, in 2003, I left there by December 2004, one of the companies that I was doing business valuations and reorganising partnerships for was Ongmac Trading. Alec Marsh was the owner and I said, look I haven't finished doing all of this sort of thing. So he said, well come around and finish up here. I thought that would go for about a couple of months but by the time he reorganised finances and because he and his wife were separating, it turned out to be another six years. I was the Financial Controller at that time.

2010 was the end of my working life apart from just helping people do different things. I always kept myself open to helping people if they had any issues. In the recent flood situations, I've helped quite a few small businesses with government grants, what was available and what they've got to do to get that help. There's always legal and taxation issues that people want to know about and I tell them that I don't do any of this work but I can tell you what I know about it.

We really didn't get very much time off during our working years. We didn't have any overseas holidays or anything like that, we just worked in that practice. When you're working for yourself, you've got to work. No one comes in while you're away and when you come back, you've got a pile of work to catch up on. So it was often no more than a couple of weeks a year, just to get away, and then we would close the office from Christmas to New Year, get 10 days off and then maybe extend long weekends or whatever and that was it for 30 odd years. It was time to have some fun.

I still keep that knowledge going because the clubs that we're involved with, they're incorporated and there's there's incorporation law that they've got to comply with. So, I advise quite a few, which is all the car clubs and things like that plus there's taxation issues that have got you got to be aware that not-for-profit organisations can have a tax liability.

I love my hobbies. I've always been a hobbyist, right from when I was really young building go-karts. Anything with wheels, I was into it. If it had a motor that was even better. I built model aeroplanes, in those days radio control planes were only just coming in, these were the ones on the wires. When I was quite young, about 11 or 12, I had team races and I won North Queensland team race trophies for a little model aeroplane and I'd worked out how to enhance the performance of the little motor like supercharging it.

I've still got a plane in the shed out there, I built a twin-engine model of the Lockheed Lightning P38, a fighter plane from World War II. That was a really high-performance plane, it's got a wingspan of about three feet. It wasn't a kit plane, I'd got plans and I built it all from that in balsa.

(The Lockheed Lightning P38 in Robert's shed)

I could always remember getting into a lot of trouble. Because when motor mowers came out, Victor mowers and things like that, I used to pull the engine off dad's mower after school, put her on, try to get it working and then put the engine back in the mower before he came home.

Whilst I was a chartered accountant, mechanical engineering is probably more my natural skill. In my workshop, I've got lathes and milling machines and welders and things like that. I'm largely self-taught although I did go to TAFE here. I'd leave work at five o'clock, race home, take the suit off, put the overalls on and go to TAFE with the trade guys and did the trade course in oxy and electric welding and then machining and fitting.

I do a lot of my own engineering work for my cars like building the wiring harnesses, hydraulics do all that sort of work.

But it was always cars for me. When I was 19 and I built the big 16-foot boat, I used to tow that with my first car, a Morris Minor. The boat was twice the size but what I did was change the diff ratio in it which I out of a Morrie utility which was a lower ratio and then I souped up the motor with twin carburettors and Cooper S cylinder heads on it. I used to tow the boat from Mackay up to Proserpine and Shute Harbour.

The boat was built out of timber and plywood and then fibreglassed underneath and added additional skegs to make it turn. I had an outboard motor out the back of it. We got right up to trying to barefoot ski but the motor was a 40-horsepower Johnson back in those days so then I changed the back of it to put twin outboards on it. But that overdid it, it was too powerful, it used to stand the boat up and the kids would have to get up the front.

(Robert and the boat he built in Mackay in 1964 at age 19)

I lost a finger, building that boat. Back in those days, all the fittings were Bakelite and I had a lead cord coming down from the house because I built a table saw to cut up the timbers for the boat and I think a big piece of wood must have dropped and broke the Bakelite because when I reached down to plug it in my finger got tangled up and burnt it away. That was a bit of a shakeup.

When we moved to Lismore, I did some sailing in Ballina for a while but then the car thing became my fascination. The little Fiat that we had over the Italian festival, that was the first one. It is a 1922 Fiat which I got locally. That took me about five years to restore and it's been on the road 41 years now.

The three boys all got interested in the same sort of thing. They know how to service the old cars and we have the old motorbikes, they know how to tune the motorbikes and lace up the wire wheels and do all that.

At one stage we had the Fiat, I had Jaguars and then the boys had their cars. Garrett has a Mini Cooper S, he's had that for 20 years and the eldest boy Kurt liked the Ford Escorts so there's an RS 2000 Escort in the shed.

(Robert and Meryl's three sons at a rally Mitchell, Garrett and Kurt in 2016)

I moved away from the Jaguars because I just wanted to focus on the real old ones and that's when we went into the veteran cars. We had a 1907 Dedion-Bouton, which is a one-cylinder French car. It would get along too, 50km/h no problem on a flat road.

"In July 2016, we conducted the unveiling of our 1925 vintage Vauxhall which was the end of a long 26-year restoration project. It has been recognized internationally and at shows in Melbourne, Brisbane and Tamworth. It is the highlight of my restoration efforts and its unveiling is featured on YouTube."

And then we decided to move that on because we got an opportunity to buy a four-cylinder 1914 Fiat, and that's what I'm working on at the moment. It was restored back in the 1960s but it needs a lot of tidying up.

Then there are the bikes, again more classics. The oldest bike is a 1929 BSA Sloper, we have a 1939 BSA that's been waiting in the wind there to be done. The main bikes are Velocettes. So, we have an overhead 1938 Velocette, again waiting to be restored, but there are five bikes restored. The bike we get around a lot on is a Velocette Venom, it's a 1959 bike and we have a 1960 Norton.

(The 1929 BSA Sloper)

We've ridden the Norton around Tasmania, two 14-day trips around there. Meryl comes on the back with me all the time, she likes the bikes. But the one that we do most riding on is the Velocette Venom. It's a 500 cc and it's still capable of 100 miles per hour and it's 66 years old.

We go away annually to a national rally with the Velocette Club. Last year we went to Western Australia. We were on the road for nine weeks but not on the bikes. I engineered and built a caravan so the cars and motorbikes go inside the caravan. It looks like an ordinary Jayco caravan, except the back opens up and I drive the cars inside it and they lock down.

(The caravan engineered and built by Robert that fits cars and bikes in the back)

The bed folds up, the table folds up and the kitchen is across the front. We've been to Darwin and last year went to Western Australia for a big eight-day rally at Busselton just south of Perth. The highlight was they hired a racetrack on one of the mornings and we did three sessions one morning at Collie, which is just east of Perth. So they lectured us and said guys this is not a race, you know, but the problem was no one wanted anyone to pass them. So then in the third session, they said okay, we're going to break all the rules now. If you've got a pillion passenger, they get on the back and Meryl said I'm on.

(Robert and Meryl on the racetrack in Collie, W.A.)

We've done 117,000 kms in that caravan and 100,000 of those would be going to rallies. This year we've been up to Chinchilla in Queensland, we're members of the Queensland Veteran Car Club up there. Then we're off to Victoria this year for another Velocette rally at Beechworth down in the northern part of Victoria. It's a national club but each state by rotation is the host for each year. We see some beautiful country, we spend a lot of time in Victoria and South Australia.

So what we've done is we've turned our hobby into a lifetime retirement lifestyle.

(Robert and Meryl with their award winning 1925 Vauxhall that took 26 years to restore)