A retired spray painter and avid motorcyclist went for a weekend ride with a mate. He hit a pothole and never returned.
Peter Mason, 71, known as ‘Tiki’ was riding along a stretch of road on the Western Highway near Trawalla when his motorcycle struck a pothole at speed, causing him to lose control and fall over his handlebars.
He had been riding with a fellow member of the Eureka Social Riders Club, a motorcycle group based in Ballarat, of which he had been the inaugural president since 2019.
The long stretch of highway, located west of Ballarat, has been described as being in a constant state of disrepair, with motorists who are wary of potholes frequently avoiding the area.
Now, the much-maligned road has become a flashpoint of grief and confusion for a local community who have been left shocked following Mason’s unexpected death.
“As the club is still coming to terms with this tragedy, his wife is waiting for family members to arrive from interstate and New Zealand, they are asking for some time before making a statement, hopefully later today,” Eureka Social Riders Club spokesperson David Turner said.
“All I can say is that we are all grieving and at a loss for words about a man who commanded so much respect from his peers.”
Police investigators left the crash scene along the westbound lanes on the Beaufort side of the Trawalla overpass at about 10am on Monday.
Two major potholes remain.
The first is in the left lane, just before the overpass guardrail ends, and near where small yellow markings on the side of the road begin.
The second is 100 metres further along the road in the right-hand lane. It is rougher than the first, and police closely inspected it on Monday morning.
An apparent past attempt to repair it has been unsuccessful, with a patch of newer bitumen only loosely connected to the road’s surface, rising slightly when vehicles drive over it and crumbling away when tested by a slight pull of hand.
Meanwhile, the northern side of the road near Trawalla is much better and appears to have been resurfaced recently.
The fresh white lines and dark bitumen on the road to Ballarat stand out in overcast skies.
Jimmy Mat Elkan, a local motorcyclist of more than 20 years, said he almost came off his own motorcycle riding along the freeway near Ballarat last week.
“It’s bad everywhere. I just passed that area last weekend and I saw a car going over with a truck – there are sections that have been dodgy for ages,” he said.
Premier Ben Carroll has said the government would prioritise fixing roads heavily used by motorcyclists ahead of the election after Sunday’s crash.
“I’ll do everything I can to make sure Victorians know that I will bring road maintenance back inside of government,” he told ABC on Monday.
Labor has pledged to use minimum security prisoners to fix potholes as part of a radical plan to lift the standards of the state’s roads.
Data from a Victorian Auditor General’s report on the quality of the state’s roads released last week shows there were 10 open potholes along the 500-kilometre stretch of the Western Highway that runs through regional Victoria as of June 2026.
However, the data shows that in the two years to June 2026, a total 7405 potholes opened up along that stretch, from Moorabool on the outer fringe of the western suburbs to West Wimmera on the state’s border with South Australia, with all but 10 of them mended by the time surveys were carried out.
The data shows that the Western Highway was second only to the Princes Freeway when it came to pothole reports, but that road authorities were better at plugging them quickly compared with some other roads in the state.
In the month of June alone, a total of 773 new potholes opened up along the Western Highway, but all but nine were mended that same month.
The report also shows that almost half of the Western Highway that was surveyed was in very poor condition for remaining road life, with very poor being defined as roads with less than five years of useful life remaining. That represents a rise of 20 per cent since 2021.
In Pyrenees, the local government area where Sunday’s fatal motorcycle crash took place, 31 per cent of the Western Highway was in very poor condition in 2024, and 11.8 per cent was in very good condition (essentially, a road in new condition).
But in 2022, none of that section of road was surveyed as being in very poor and 48.1 per cent of the road was in very good condition.
According to the VAGO data, there were no open potholes along the Western Highway in Pyrenees as of June 2026, but a total of 1055 had been identified and fixed over a two-year period.
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