outlaw motorcycle clubs - book - 2004 - The Brotherhoods: Inside the Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs

The Brotherhoods: Inside the Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs
Arthur Veno
Allen & Unwin
2004
300 pages

Arthur Veno is, along with Rebels author Daniel R. Wolf (whom Veno refers to as “the late”), one of the only sociologists to look at the outlaw biker phenomenon. Wolf has looked at the clubs in the Canadian context and Veno worked primarily in the Australian. As of March 2013 no one has published research, in book form, on outlaw bikers in the American context.  

Veno is currently either an adjunct professor of social sciences and psychology at Victoria University in Melbourne Australia, or he is an adjunct professor of criminology at Monash University in Melbourne, I don’t know which although he has held a number of other academic appointments in the past. Outlaw bikers appear to be his major research interest and all of his recent publications, according to his CV, are biker related, including a now out of print book about the women of the outlaw biker subculture.  

The book covers much of the same sociological ground as Daniel Wolf’s The Rebels, and Veno positions himself to his object of study in a similar manner as Wolf had, that is, as a cool outsider that the bikers can hang out with and talk to. In The Rebels, Wolf presented himself as a dedicated researcher who loves riding his bike enough that he was accepted by the club he researched. The Rebels ends with Wolf stating that he was ultimately rejected by new group of Rebels who he never rode with or made any agreements with regarding his research. Veno presents himself as someone who is, and will continue to be, an intermediary between the outlaw bikers of Australia, and agents from other social spheres, including law enforcement and media. The Brotherhoods is, at times, Veno’s personal account of life as someone who studies bikies (that’s the Australian term for bikers, by the way). Mostly, however, Veno’s book is a proper, albeit readable, sociological overview of the bikie subculture.

One aspect of the subculture I was hoping to read more about in The Brotherhoods were the self-mythologizing of the bikies. In the US and Canada, biker gangs emerged at the intersecting point between thrillseeking ex-air force returning from war, and delinquent youth gangs - but the myth bikers tell themselves and try to project into the world is that they’re the last living remnant of America’s wild west frontier. I hoped that the Australian bikies would claim to be living out Road Warrior fantasies but instead Veno’s book begins with a quotation from an Australian Hells Angel who claims lineage with Ned Kelly, an Australian bandit and folk hero of the late 19th century.