Commodore SV6 Sportwagon

In Adelaide last week for our unit reunion, I hired a car.

To be precise, I hired two cars - one after the other. The first was an Hyundai i30, the second a Commodore SV6 Sportwagon.

The car hire was to get me around beyond the Adelaide CBD where we were staying. One of my sons who lives in the burbs was having a birthday, and I wanted to spend time with him. The public transport is good, but I wasn't familiar enough with Adelaide to use it to commute between suburbs.

In addition, for health reasons I was having a non-alcoholic reunion (a contradiction in terms perhaps) and this meant I could chauffeur my digger mates around. Staying cold sober when everyone else isn't is indeed a strange and wonderful experience.

When it became clear that the i30 wasn't really big enough for five aging and largish sexagenarians with buggered knees (we're ex-infantry), and people were happy to chuck in a few extra dollars, I swapped it for a Commodore SV6 which happened to be a Sportwagon.

So here, gentle reader, is a road test.

I didn't spend enough time in the thing to test some of the more exotic features (the self-parking for example) but did a fair bit of driving in the rough and tumble of the city commute. Two issues made that same commute challenging. One was transitory - the fact that most of the roads seemed to be in the throes of reconstruction - and one was a constant - the madness of allowing parking in the kerbside lane of the clearways out of peak hour.

One feature, the blind side proximity warning integral with the external mirrors, came into its own in dealing with the latter.

On the other hand, the interminable beeping from both front and rear proximity warnings nearly drove me bonkers in the rather squeezy garage at our lodgings.

It's a Commodore, so it handles and rides very well. The interior fit-out is leaps and bounds ahead of my VE, although it felt much the same to drive. I didn't find the Bluetooth easy to connect - but that seems to be an issue with my Sony Xperia phone rather than the audio in the car.

The 3.6 litre donk is torquey and gets a nice howl going when it kicks down. I needed to accelerate a bit sharpish from time to time to get into the correct lane, which is an absolute necessity in Adelaide.

The Sportwagon body is practical and doesn't increase the size of the vehicle footprint, unlike Holden wagons of yore which always inherited the long wheelbase from the Senator or Brougham. At no time did the car feel unwieldy, although this may have more to do with my familiarity with the Commodore ute than anything else.

This experience has made me consider swapping the VE for a VF ute when the time comes.

It's a great shame that these things will disappear when local production ceases. They're a very accomplished machine, and although I didn't get the chance to use it as a long distance tourer, should always be the weapon of choice for interstate travel in this wide brown land.

The negatives?

I didn't like the electronic park brake.

And the fuel consumption was a bit profligate - in the high thirteens.

But it was carrying five large individuals in urban conditions most of the time, and I wasn't driving for economy.

An Opportunity

Famous pic of 5 platoon B coy 7 RAR - courtesy AWM

I've just returned from 7 RAR's Anzac to Adelaide 2015 Reunion.

It was a wonderful event, well-organised; and Adelaide is a great venue, with its Convention Centre, excellent public transport, and at this time of the year, good weather.

During the battalion dinner (which featured a live performance of "I was Only Nineteen" by John Schumann, something that was for me a very pleasant surprise),  Michael O'Brien, the President of the 7 RAR Association, gave a brief address.

During that address he touched on the story of Michael Berrigan, who was a member of 5 Platoon, B Coy in 7 RAR's first tour of duty in Vietnam in 1967/68. This had a particular resonance for me, as 5 Platoon, B Coy, was my sub-unit for the first part of my tour in 1970. 

This report from the Herald Sun covers the story of Michael Berrigan, probably the last Australian to die of wounds from the Vietnam conflict. Whilst he died in 2011 he is still a casualty of the war.

What makes his story tragically different is that his death occurred after a lifetime of suffering for himself and his family.

We've become accustomed to seeing politicians of all stripes attending funerals of diggers killed in recent conflicts. They are honoured by this, and perhaps it provides some solace for the families.

There was an opportunity for Michael Berrigan's sacrifice to be honoured by a political presence at his funeral. Such a presence may have also gone some small way towards atoning for the treatment of Vietnam Veterans prior to 1987. It provided an opportune time shift, in a sense. 

I wonder - was someone/anyone from government present?

Choices

Monday found me working in a largish school in a western town.

As occasionally happens, both students I was to visit were absent on the day - not an unusual occurrence on Mondays. So after working with their teachers for a while, I was left with about an hour to fill in before my next appointment.

There's always plenty to do (reports, phone calls etc) so with my trusty laptop I repaired to the school library where there is good Wifi .

The library (a swish structure built with Rudd's BER money) was a hive of activity, and I had some trouble finding a quiet corner.

Eventually I did, and settled down to work.

The table I was working on abutted against a partitioned wall, and on the other side of the partition was a pretty noisy year three class. I don't know what they were doing, but the teacher was having a hard time keeping them on task.

What was more of an issue than the noise, was the fact that someone on the other side of the partition was bumping it backwards and forwards, making keyboarding difficult. I have enough trouble using a keyboard that's perfectly still. Oscillation adds to the trouble.

I was about to scoot around to the other side of the partition to nail the perpetrator, when the bumping stopped. It stopped because the exasperated teacher had banished the bumper (a dark haired eight year old boy) from the class, and he was now wandering around the library, despite the fact that he had been told to sit on a chair in the corner.

He spotted me, and then began an interrogation. He wanted to find out all about me, and even after I managed to get him to sit where he was supposed to, he wouldn't leave me alone.

This was one little boy who obviously craved attention - any kind of attention, and I sensed something unusual in his frantic demeanour.

The lesson finished, and he joined the class leaving the library, but not before the teacher had to ask him three times to do so, and I had studiously ignored him to help her. I had a acquired a new best friend.

I caught up with this same teacher later in the day, and asked about this child. She explained that his father was in jail, and from time to time, his mother had been. The issue was family violence and drug use.

The behaviour was a reaction, I assume, to the disastrous family situation, and after forty years plus in the business, I reckon I can pick kids like this one on sight. Just identifying them doesn't help, I guess. Usually they identify themselves.

Some children make a poor choice of parents. I hope his life improves.

A Milestone

This humble blog just ticked over 100000 unique page views.

Thank you, gentle reader.............

Electric Dreams

This is one for the petrol heads - except that one of these vehicles doesn't actually use any petrol.

The future is already here.

You can now drive a Tesla from Sydney to Melbourne.

Hallelujah

It's time for some music.

I can watch Cohen's version of this over and over again, but this one by Allison Crowe isn't far behind.

Enjoy.

Obama is Wrong

This piece by Michael Pascoe nails the issues in relation to gun violence in the USA.

Some extracts - 

In his very fine speech this morning full of sorrow and frustration, President Obama made a mistake: Australia is not like the United States. We decided not to be. We decided to grow up instead and become a more reasonable, rational society that explicitly values human life and prefers to think the best of people, rather than the worst.

And -

The US is too immature a society to be allowed to play with guns. It has never shed its Wild West mythology. Americans still use their courts to kill people, which sends a message in its own way. Read The New Yorker's Account of the Rodricus Crawford case and see a state that thinks taking a life is a no big deal. It's a country that values property more than life.

And -

That was another mistake Obama made: talking of responsible gun owners having firearms to "protect their families".  The statistics have long been in – having firearms is more likely to endanger families than to protect them. Obama is not immune to the paranoia. And so, when domestic terror struck at Port Arthur and John Howard showed political leadership, we overcame our ratbags, our Leyonhjelms, and agreed to reasonable controls on firearms. They're not particularly tough, except in restricting access to weapons specifically designed for killing human beings. Only an NRA member could think that unreasonable.

Pascoe, at the end of his article, notes that he has a gun licence and enjoys clay shooting. I guess this is to counter the accusations of hoplophobia directed at anyone who dares to point out the paranoia driving the debate in the USA.

The same accusation is directed at me, when I blog on the issue. The fact that I carried an SLR on operational service in SVN counts for nothing in the asylum these lunatics inhabit. I am not afraid of guns. I can't say the same of paranoid gun owners.

They always do that, which is the best example you'd ever see of the pot calling the kettle black.