Joe, if you are talking about the same grey Malvern Star monsters that I used to see so commonly in the 1950s, they were mopeds, not motorbikes. You had to pedal them up to speed before you engaged the clutch. On most hills you had to declutch and pedal. Because they were monstrously heavy and only had one pedal ratio, getting them up hills was a pretty unpleasant process. They generally had a second-hand price of zero by the early 1960s. Mopeds never really worked out in Australia, because unlike Europe and the US, here they required annual registration as a motorcycle, and a full motorcycle driver's license - which was completely separate from a car driver's licence: extra driving test, extra annual fee etc, but if one was suspended, the other was also.
