In particular he liked machines that didn't need to be plugged in, booted up, filled with fuel or connected like a leech to the grid. He liked:

And in Stanley's opinion, the epitome of elegance in machine design was the bicycle.

Stanley collected bikes and bike bits. Gears and pedals and wheels and chains were categorised in boxes in every spare corner of his house.

He dragged broken bikes out of the creek and bought old rusty bikes from op shops. He took them apart and reassembled them into more useful forms, like his battery charger run off an exercise bike.

His dream was to connect every exercise bike in every gym in the country to the electricity grid.

'All that sweat, all that wasted energy,' he told Mary-Anne. 'One day, Australia will be running off middle-class flab, not filthy coal.'