He doesn’t even remember being in The Alfred hospital in Melbourne where he spent more than a month after being flown there in the HEMS 4 helicopter on December 17 last year.

“I still know nothing about laying on the road or getting to that hospital,” Bruce said.

“I don’t remember the motorbike tipping over or anything about it.

“I can’t remember what I was doing. The farm gate was open and I went out of it out onto the road and I must have been turning when the wheel let go and I went straight over the edge. I don’t know I can’t remember.”

Luckily for Bruce, a worker at the nearby gas plant on Callaghans Road at Nirranda South saw him drive past.

So minutes later when he went to lunch, and realising that Bruce had been gone a while, he decided to look up the road.

“He came down the road and he saw the motorbike upside down and he just rang 000 straight away before he’d even seen what was going on,” Bruce said.

“He took me the other day and showed me where the accident actually happened.”

Bruce landed partly on the bitumen road, his shoulder blade, ribs and head taking the brunt of the impact. He had probably been there about 20 minutes before anyone realised he had been injured.

His son Corey, who had been cutting a tree branch at the front of the farm house, was among the first on the scene. 

“He came down on the tractor and that was when he saw what had happened to his father,” Bruce’s wife Lorna, who was in Warrnambool at the time of the accident, said.

“I didn’t get back until they were loading him into the chopper,” she said. “By the time I got there Corey was all covered in blood.”

As Bruce tells it: “I had leaked a lot of blood.”

“When they went to put him in the ambulance they had to sedate him and put him into a coma because he was thrashing around too much,” Lorna said.

Bruce thinks it’s probably a good thing that he doesn’t remember anything about that.

The first memory he has after the accident is being at the Caulfield rehabilitation centre where he started to recover from his post-traumatic amnesia.

Since returning home to Peterborough in May, he has been finding out just how many people visited him in Melbourne – not that he remembers it because as they tell him, he was “in a very bad way”.

In those early days when Bruce was in intensive care, Lorna said they weren’t sure if he would pull through.

“We really didn’t know when he was in ICU because things were pretty serious...very serious, not pretty serious,” she said.

His list of injuries included two hemorrhages on the brain, temporal brain fracture, clavical fracture, scapula fracture on his back, zigamatic fractures, broken cheekbone, a burst artery and 10 broken ribs.

“He had a traumatic brain injury, left and right temporal lobe,” Lorna said.

“They put a filter into his stomach because he had a clot in the leg after he burst the artery. They had a drain under his arm to drain fluid from his collapsed lung.”

Lorna was on her way to Melbourne with her daughter after the accident when she got the call from the hospital seeking permission to “burr two holes in his head” to relieve the pressure.

“It had to be done,” Bruce said. “I’d have been no good it it hadn’t been done.

“There’s so much that I don’t know about and don’t want to know about.”

It was probably when Bruce was moved from ICU to the trauma centre after 11 days that his family knew he was going to make it, but they also knew the road to recovery was going to be a long one.

Lorna remembers a meeting with one of the doctors who told her to start thinking about which nursing home her husband should go to. “I just said ‘there will be no putting him in a nursing home’.”

By the end of January, Bruce was transferred to Caulfield rehabitiation centre where he spent 102 days.

“The memory has been the hard part,” he said.

Because of the short-term memory loss, Bruce would get in the shower at all hours, sometimes at 3am or even three times a day.

“I don’t remember doing that, even now I can’t remember doing that,” he said, but at least he can have a laugh about it when his family tells the stories. “Physically he’s made a brilliant recovery,” Lorna said.

“With the brain injury. With short-term memory it takes a long time for that to absolutely heal. It’s a long process but every day is better.” 

When Bruce was transferred to the Grace McKellar Centre in Geelong, he started to “feel so much better”. “I wanted to walk and I needed to exercise,” he said.

But he wasn’t allowed out of the room without help from a nurse, and a tracking device would make sure of that. “I wanted to go for a walk and they wouldn’t let me,” Bruce said. One day he got out of the room and within seconds someone was there. “I got into all sorts of trouble for not having a nurse with me,” he said with a laugh.

Since getting home on May 5 he has improved “out of sight”, and it also brought to an end the months of travel for Lorna who had to return home on weekends to play employee wages for their quarry business.

And most days, depending on the weather, he will take long walks along Peterborough’s coastline near his home, or he can now head out to the farm to tinker in the shed.

“When he first came home I used to walk with him, but now he’s OK to go on his own,” Lorna said.

His weeks though are taken up with physio, exercise and speech therapy appointments, and every month sees a nueropsychologist.

While his long-term memory is fine, it is the short-term memory that they are working on. Some days are better than others, Lorna said.

What had hasn’t forgotten are his his years spent on local government or his decade-long sprintcar racing career.

“I had a real bad accident one night on Boxing night at Premier Speedway. I went like a skyrocket. I ran over another car and just went straight up in the air,” bruce said. “I had a damaged head and the stackhat was smashed. I ended up in hospital.”

That was over 40 years ago, but he has forgotten that accident which happened in front of his children and left him with concussion.

Bruce has also been having vivid dreams about his younger years, including one about learning to drive road graders. 

“Because I had such good dreams about it, at 2am I woke Lorna up to tell her,” he said. “It was good that I was actually starting to remember things that happened when I was 18 or 19.

“It was all still in here,” he said pointing to his head. “That’s what surprised me, how exact it was that I was remembering,” he said. “I even remember when I first met Lorna.”

When asked if Bruce had changed since the accident Lorna laughed and said: “He talks more now. He was always a good talker, you can’t shut him up now”.

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