Happy Australia Day

G’day.

Australia Day on January 26 is Australia’s national holiday that commemorates the day in 1788 when sailors planted the British flag in Sydney Cove to establish a penal colony. Wednesday might seem like tomorrow, but Australia is on the other side of the International Date Line, where it’s perpetually already tomorrow, so Australia Day is today.

So let’s explore my hastily Googled carefully curated list of Australian web resources, shall we?

The most obvious thing to mention is the recently completed Tour Down Under, the professional cycling road race with nail biting action in its finishing stages. Lance Armstrong announced that the 2011 TDU was his last race outside of the USA. The young Aussie native son Cameron Meyer, riding for Garmin-Cervelo, took the podium by the barest of margins in the six stage race.

The bike blog Down Under I like to follow is Treadly and Me in Melbourne. Melbourne Cycle Chic is the Melbourne anti-lycra set.

Brisbane CBD Users Group.

Perth Cycle Polo.

Adelaide Cyclists seems to be pretty active for a Ning hosted site. There’s also Adelaide Bicycle Polo Club and Bike Adelaide.

Bicycle Canberra seems to feature bitter whinging about Canberra’s car-centric culture in almost every post. There was once a Canberra Bicycle Museum, but it appears they had to sell their collection off, so now it’s an online resource center on Australian bicycle history.

Tasmania is part of Australia. Bicycle Tasmania does “advocacy, advice, adventure” for locals and mainlanders. Cycling South gives info on places to ride, people to ride with and new bike projects in Southern Tasmania.

I couldn’t find bike resources for Wollongong, but I had to mention it because it’s such a cool name for a city. Wollongong is notable for early work in Unix portability, and I used to program network device drivers for the popular TCP/IP networking stack for Unix that came from a company called The Wollongong Group. Wollongong is a seaside university town with a healthy tourist trade, which to me spells “Perfect Bike Culture Candidate,” but oh well.

Life Cycle in Gold Coast, NSW.

Going back to that penal settlement by Sydney Cove: Cheeky Transport are “commuting and touring specialists. It’s a bike shop, but I like the name and they have some decent product information. It’s not too hard to figure out what Sydney Cycle Chic might feature. Bike Sydney is the bike advocacy group in Sydney. Sydney Cyclist is the Ning-hosted online community. There’s also the Sydney Bicycle Messenger Association. Situp Cycle in Sydney covers cycling issues throughout Australia. I once lived in Sidney, Illinois, which was probably named after Sidney, Ohio, which in turn has no connection to the homonymous Australian city though local legend suggests an eponymous link.

So there you go. What did I miss?

Australian bicycling photo credits: James Schwartz, Velovotee / Sydney Body Art Ride