The Indomitable Ekka Speedway Legacy of Barry Holmes

Under the warm Harvey Bay, Queensland sun, Barry Holmes clutches a thick, weathered scrapbook against his chest. Across the front of his faded black t-shirt, four bold words spell out the unwritten code of a bygone sporting era: NO BRAKES, NO GEARS, NO FEAR. Behind his tinted glasses and warm, unassuming grin sits a man who didn’t just witness the golden age of Australian speedway—he tore through its very epicenter, sliding broadside against the timber pickets of the Brisbane Exhibition Ground with twenty thousand people screaming his name.

Turn back the yellowed pages of his scrapbook, and the modern world evaporates.

In one black-and-white photograph from the early 1960s, a young, bespectacled Barry sits flat on the dirt track, his leather race suit caked in a cocktail of mud and motor oil, nursing a bruised leg with a wry, knowing smirk while mechanics scramble in the background. Directly below it lies the antidote: Barry’s outfit, emblazoned with his iconic initials “BH”on the front cowl, locked in a fierce, full-lock drift inches off the timber safety fence, his passenger suspended horizontally over the biting rear tire while dirt erupts toward the grandstand.

“The first night I ever rolled onto that starting line at the Ekka, I looked up into the stands,” Holmes recalls, his voice cutting through the years. “All you could see was a solid sea of faces staring back down at you. I remember thinking to myself: what on earth am I doing here?”

What he was doing was cementing his place in the folklore of Australian grassroots motorsport.

The Working-Class Gladiator

Barry Holmes was forged in an era when motorsport belonged to the backyard mechanic, the apprentice, and the working man. At 17 years old, working out of Barratt Motors in 1956, he watched local mechanics build stock cars from discarded parts and boldly pilot them unregistered across the Story Bridge in broad daylight just to get to the RNA Showgrounds before the police caught wind.

When Barry graduated to piloting sidecars, there were no corporate hospitality trailers, telemetry screens, or multi-million-dollar retainers. It was pure, unfiltered courage.

“You got about three quid to win a scratch race,” Barry smiles. “A decent working wage back then was ten quid a week, so three quid wasn't bad—it bought your fuel, covered your entry, and left you enough for a drink. But none of us were there for the money. You did it because once that clutch dumped and the rear wheel hooked into the dirt, there was nothing else on earth like it.”

The machines were mechanical beasts: 1000CC V-Twin engines running on pure methanol, and not a single brake in sight. Racing a sidecar meant entering a corner at sixty miles an hour, kicking the rear out, and relying entirely on engine compression, throttle control, and blind faith in your swinger to survive the turn.

In the Den of Giants

To run sidecars at the Brisbane Exhibition Ground in the 1950s and 60s meant sharing the track with ferocious competitors, none larger in stature or reputation than Ron Johnson, the revered “King of the Ekka.”

For Barry, racing against Johno was the ultimate proving ground. He held immense admiration for Johnson—not just as a competitor, but as a Renaissance man of Australian sport who excelled as a champion trotting trainer, buckjumper, and boxer.

“Johno was just an extraordinary natural athlete,” Barry says with deep, genuine respect. “He was always in front of me, but then again, he was in front of everyone. I had nothing but respect for the man.”

That mutual respect was forged in blood and bent steel. During one high-stakes scratch race, Barry had his “BH” outfit glued to Johnson’s rear wheel—tucked barely six feet off Johno’s tail on the bottom rail—when Johnson’s rig suddenly snapped sideways coming out of the pit bend and flipped violently onto the clay.

With zero time to lift or avoid the crash, Barry’s machine launched straight over the top of Johnson, his passenger, and the wrecked bike. Barry’s own passenger was thrown skyward into the infield dust.

When the engines finally stalled, Johno’s fierce rival Sandy McCrae sprinted out through the open pit gates with his hands outstretched, shouting gleefully to Barry: “Congratulations! You’ve killed the big bastard!”

Johno, of course, was indestructible. He dusted off his leathers and walked back to the pits. The punchline came the very next morning at Lakeside. As Barry stood among his mates, someone spotted Johnson marching directly toward them: “Look out, Holmesy. Johno’s coming. He’s gonna give you a touch-up.”

Instead, the towering champion looked down at Barry, deadpan, and delivered a line that became speedway legend:

“Jeez you’re heavy, Holmesy.”

Standing His Ground

While Barry was known across the paddock as an honest, clean racer, he had plenty of steel in his spine when tested.

When Sandy McCrae offered to fix a slipping clutch on Barry’s Vincent outfit—insisting Barry take his bride out for the day while Sandy handled the spanners—Barry returned to find the clutch working, but his bike completely neutered off the starting line. It was only years later that Don Johnson revealed the truth: Don had walked into McCrae’s shed and caught Sandy red-handed, covertly pulling Barry’s high-lift race camshafts out of the motor to strip Holmes of his trademark gate speed.

Their rivalry eventually reached a boiling point off the clay. After a long day at the Southport horse races that ended with heavy drinking at a Labrador hotel, McCrae demanded to take Barry into the car park to settle a score. Barry obliged, dropping McCrae with a single, clean right hand. When Sandy got back to his feet and swung again, Barry floored him a second time.

Holmes was a gentleman in the pits, but between the rails or out on the gravel, he was never a man to be pushed around.

The Reconnection: A Living Piece of Queensland History

In 1968, Barry packed his belongings and moved north to Townsville for work, stepping away from the roar of the showgrounds. For decades, isolated from the southern circuit, he quietly assumed that the sidecars he piloted had vanished into the pages of forgotten history.

“I honestly thought they were finished,” Barry admits softly. “I thought the sport had completely died out.”

It wasn’t until the 1990s, when his daughter overheard a mechanic in a Morningside barber shop talking about sidecar builds in Coorparoo, that Barry discovered the flame was still burning. Then, in 2009, Barry walked into a historic speedway reunion in Lismore.

“Every second bloke in that room was someone I had raced against forty years earlier,” he says, his eyes lighting up. “They welcomed me back with open arms. It was like no time had passed at all.”

The Torch Passed Forward

Today, Barry’s legacy is being meticulously preserved through the digital archiving initiatives of Nomad Dirt Culture and Dare Global. Standing shoulder to shoulder with the next generation of motorsport advocates, Barry Holmes represents the bedrock of Queensland racing.

He didn’t race for multi-million-dollar contracts, and he never asked for an easy ride. He strapped into a machine with no brakes, pushed his throttle against the timber fences of the Ekka, and left everything on the dirt.

For every junior rider pulling on a helmet today, and for every family that cherishes the rumble of an engine under stadium lights, Barry Holmes’ story is a reminder of what pure racing looks like: humble off the track, fearless between the flags, and forever etched into the dirt.

Editorial Credits & Archival Recognition

• Documentation & Interview: Conducted and documented on location by the Nomad Dirt Culture Editorial Team.

  
  

• Historical Sources & Photography: Archival race imagery, historic press clippings, and paddock records sourced directly from the private collection of the Barry Holmes Scrapbook.

  
  

• Digital Preservation: Now permanently digitised and archived under Nomad Dirt Culture Pty Ltd to protect, document, and champion the living heritage of Australian grassroots motorsport for future generations.

   

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