Diane Reidie on motorcycle

item details

NameDiane Reidie on motorcycle

ProductionUnknown; photographer; 1969; New Zealand

Classificationcolour photographs, chromogenic colour prints, portraits

Materialsdye, photographic gelatin, photographic paper

Materials Summarycolour photograph

Techniquescolour photography, chromogenic processes

DimensionsImage: 80mm (width), 80mm (height)

Registration NumberO.048388

Credit lineGift of Diane Reidie, 2019

Overview

This photograph shows Diane Reidie (nee Bligh) on her motorcycle in about 1969. Diane was an inaugural member of the Antarctic Angels, an outlaw motorcycle club modelled on Hells Angels, which was established in Invercargill in 1969.

Diane was born in Roxburgh in 1952. Her father was a hydroelectric worker, so the family moved frequently during Diane’s childhood. At 16 she went to stay with her grandmother in Timaru, and there had her first interaction with a motorcycle club. Diane recalls: ‘I befriended at school Valmai, reputed to be a "bikie" girl – I was hooked.’

Diane left school, worked in a bookshop, and hung out with the newly-formed Highwaymen. She quickly realised ‘that in the 1960s a girl on the back (or pillion) seat on a motorbike is only there for one reason’ [for sex]. She felt that women were treated like ‘second-class citizens’ and that wasn’t good enough for her, so she saved and borrowed for a deposit on her own bike - a Triumph (1967 Daytona). She took the bike for a ‘run’ to Invercargill and never looked back. Life was, in Diane’s words, an adventure.