Coming back from Newcastle a couple of weeks ago we passed him somewhere between Nyngan and Cobar. Just poking along, and we thought, another person with time on their hands to cycle, not drive. Then nearly a week later, here at the ‘Club was the bike out the front and inside, the rider, being restocked with potable water by the Club staff.
And Mic Whitty’s story is not the usual push bike rider’s adventure story. Having moved from Australia to the UK and going through a rough trot, suffering from severe depression, he became a hermit in a remote area of Wales. By chance in 2015, going through a box that had been in storage, he found his grandfather’s 1916 World War I diary, complete with bullet hole in spine. The diary had saved his grandfathers life. And Mic’s.
From reading the diary, and remembering his family visit, when he was 8 years old, to the Adelaide War Cemetery at Katherine in 1974, he hatched a plan to cycle and follow his grandfather’s footsteps around the Western Front in France. Friends helped him put together the bare essentials for the trip, but Mic soon realised that if he followed the diary to the day he would be sitting around a lot. So the new goal was set. Having already visited every Commonwealth War Cemetery on the Gallipoli Peninsular, he would spend 2016 visiting the 440 scattered between Belgium and Switzerland, the Western Front. At the end of 2016 the goal posts moved again, he would now visit the some 2,000 war cemeteries across France, Netherlands and Germany. All the while Mic has been driven to meet anniversary dates, 2016 for his grandfather’s diary, 2018 for the centenary celebration of Armistice.
Through picking up casual jobs and speaking engagements as he travels, his way of life became sustainable, so the goal posts moved again. By the centenary of the declaration of VJ (Victory against Japan) Day, on the 14th August 1945, Mic aims to visit every one of the 26,530 Commonwealth War Cemeteries, as well as any other war cemeteries that he passes. By then he will be 80.
There are 907 war cemeteries in Australia and around 1,000 in New Zealand. At each, he photographs an Australian serviceman’s headstone with his bike in the picture if possible. Almost all Commonwealth War Cemetery headstones are the same shape, Mic finds this a help when visiting cemeteries where several nationalities are buried.
After visiting New Zealand, the US, Canada and Bermuda, where there are 12 cemeteries, Mic set off from Sydney in January on his current leg. Now riding an old French Post Office, single speed bike, he travels light, sleeps in a hammock, not on the ground and aims for around 100k’s a day, depending on terrain and weather. As of Easter Sunday, Mic was just south of Adelaide near the Coromandel Valley and has been on the road for 3,072 days. To follow his journey: https://www.micwhitty.com/.
This article appeared in Wilcannia News, April 2024.
