Bunfight

There's a Gary Shearston song called "It's On".

It was written by Don Henderson and released on Shearston's 1964 album "Songs of Our Time". I've got it hidden away in a cupboard somewhere - it was one of the first LPs I bought back when I was 17.

Part of it goes like this -

"All reason and logic are gone,
Winning the fight won't prove that you're right,
It's sad, it's true, but it's on".

Recalling this song reminds me of the current debate between true believers and sceptics about global warming. All reason and logic are gone because it's become a political issue rather than a scientific hypothesis.

To my simple way of looking at the world, there's no debate. Viewed as an issue of risk assessment and risk management, it's a no-brainer.

Given the consequences of continued warming, it makes a great deal of sense to take steps to avoid it, even if there are doubts as to the nature of the relationship between increasing CO2 concentrations and atmospheric temperatures. Besides, the carbon derived resources we use are finite, and we need to plan for a world where they are no longer available.

Let's just use our brains to make the necessary changes, and get on with it.

Otherwise, it will become the currency of conflict, and my kids don't need that. They'd like a world to live in.

Lunacy

It's 40 years since the first lunar landing.

Most of us who are old enough to have lived through it remember where we were and what we were doing on 20th July 1969. I remember it vividly.

I'd joined 7th Battalion about a month earlier, and was posted to a platoon. We were training in the Putty State forest area. It was bloody cold - we saw sleet occasionally. Training for tropical warfare in the middle of winter in the highlands is not necessarily logical, but this was the army, after all.

I remember one digger getting into hot water for wearing a balaclava. After a while, your ears got so cold that they went numb and lost all feeling, which was OK until you brushed against a tree or something - and they then hurt like hell. Because it was a tactical exercise, we weren't allowed fires or hootchies, so we were a bunch of miserable diggers.

The 20th, from memory, was the day the exercise ended, so we harboured as a company about lunchtime, and as the official exercise was over, were allowed to light fires and put up groundsheets to provide some sort of cover from the rain/sleet.

I remember putting my boots on the coals of a fire to warm them up whilst I dried my socks (and feet). I neglected the fact that the GP boots had a metal plate under the sole designed, I think, to protect feet from Panji spikes. When I put my boots back on, this plate was hot, and I had to unlace them and take them off again, to avoid burnt feet.The fact that I'd left putting the warmed-up boots on until the last minute, before we had to march off for some de-briefing or other was a problem.

I was abused by my platoon Sergeant because I broke ranks to take my boots off. This was a better option than burnt feet.

We were due to be flown back to Liverpool next day on board a Caribou, and were organised into "sticks" for this purpose. My mate and I got organised, built a carefully engineered hootchie, and put one of the blankets from our sleeping kit across the end of the hootchie to keep the wind out. Next morning, when we let the shelter down, the blanket eerily stayed up. It had frozen in place.

By the time we were due to em plane, a howling Westerly had developed, although the rain/sleet had stopped. The Caribou has a large vertical stabiliser, and as the motors were gunned for the take-off from the short dirt strip, the wind threatened to push it off the strip. We could see both pilots fighting with the control column to hold the ship straight. It wasn't reassuring.

We made it, but were the last flight out as the rest were cancelled that day. The best part of this was the fact that the platoon sergeant was on the next flight, and we had about twenty-fours hours of bliss when we did our own thing until he returned. We also spent the night in warm beds - more than could be said for those left out in the donga.

Somebody told us when we got back to Sydney that the moon landing had happened the day before. So it happened when I was freezing my tail off training for tropical warfare in sleet. Somehow the significance of the event was lost in the absurdity of my own situation.

Yep - I remember.

(The second picture is from the 7RAR publication " Seven in Seventy").

Update -In response to Wilbo43's comment, here's a pic of a "Hootchie".

Short Finals

At last - an excuse to post a video.

This sequence was shot using my very basic Olympus C-310 - hence no sound. I was in the right-hand seat of a Piper PA-42-720 Cheyenne III on short finals into Roma, in the late afternoon.

Thanks are due to Eddie (the Pilot) and our local (Western) bureaucrats who cooperate, and have broken down the silo walls between the agencies.

It saves a lot of driving, and the Queensland taxpayers more than a few dollars.

Bowen

Bowen has always been Somewhere Else.

When I was a kid in Carmila, I learned about Bowen in grade six. Apparently there was a time when it had been considered as the capital of Queensland. This was because of a combination of reasons to do with its central location, and its harbour.

Longreach has been viewed in the same way - it's a pity that the idea was discarded. Perhaps if either Bowen or Longreach were the capital, we might develop an ethos in government more in tune with Queensland's needs... but that's another story.

Later when I lived in Townsville, I often attended conferences in Bowen. Invariably they were held in seaside locations and there was plenty of alcohol consumed. It was usually warm, and always difficult to get enthusiastic about anything much. In hindsight - Bowen was probably not the right place for serious conferencing.

We also used to stay at Bowen on our annual trip north with children. We generally didn't have time to do much except transit, although I have unearthed old photos of the kids playing in the sand at Horseshoe Bay - so we obviously had a day or two there.

On this trip we decided to stay at Bowen for reasons of nostalgia, and booked a basic unit which fronted the bay. You could walk from your front door to the beach in thirty paces. It was warm, people ambled by at first and last light, and dogs and kids played on the beach. The walls were thin, and the couple next door were amorous and noisy. Somehow it seemed entirely in keeping with the environment.

Bowen was discovered with the shooting of "Australia". This has resulted in an influx of Japanese backpackers. They're generally decorative, spend money, and are probably good for the place. Bowen has an atmosphere of its own - a bit like an old woman - once beautiful - but now looking faded. Generally, it's charming and laid back.

We walked, ate, slept and enjoyed the seascape. I wonder what you'd pay for a block with a sea view?

An Experiment in Demographics

I've always maintained that northerners are different.

This is one of the reasons that southern pundits (those who don't live north of the tropic) haven't got a clue when it comes to forecasts of voting trends. The last Queensland state election is a good example.

I lived the early part of my life in North Queensland, went south as a boarder to attend high school, and didn't get to live in the North again until I was in my thirties. I married a northern girl, and spent two stints in Townsville as a school principal, and then went west (Mt Isa) for a few years.

Combined with the twenty or so years I've lived in the south-east corner, I've picked up what I believe to be an accurate understanding of the differences in attitudes of the inhabitants of the north and south of this state.

My dad, who had a similar experience as a bush schoolie, used to mutter, when we drove across the tropic on our annual Christmas holiday in the south - "back to the land of narrow minds, square heads, and shallow pockets".

I didn't understand what he meant back then.

I do now.

I conducted a small experiment in demographics on our recent trip north to examine this hypothesis.

I have an out-of-date concessional fuel card. It entitled me to 2c per litre off the price of LPG when produced. It's been out-of-date for a while, but this hasn't bothered me, as when home I can buy LPG cheaper from another outlet bringing the price paid to less than the 2c concession.

This is not the case away from home, and the further north you travel, the higher the price, so I packed it just for the hell of it.

Between Toowoomba and Rockhampton, the discount was refused, usually with a curt explanation, and a disdainful glare. At Mackay, the attendant said "That's out-of-date mate - you'll need to get it renewed". She still gave me the discount.

The same occurred at Bowen, Innisfail, and up on the Tableland. I got the discount every time. The other thing I noticed was that nobody up there wished me a "nice day" - very refreshing.

It has something to do with a characteristically northern approach to bureaucracy. They see it as something to be defeated - to be got around. It's not universal, but pretty close to it.

Up there, people generally can't be bothered with laid-down procedures of any kind. They make it up - very successfully - as they go along.

No wonder I feel out-of-place in Toowoomba.

Corrugated Iron

During our wanderings north, we called in on some rellies. As I’m one of six, and my wife one of eleven, there are plenty.

Two of them (a niece and a sister-in-law) have built homes in spectacular environments and clad them in corrugated iron.

My niece’s new house is a gem. It’s built on a hillside with sea views (and the all-important sea breeze) in the Mackay hinterland. There are also views to the west across the Pioneer valley. As the sugar cane season proceeds (called the “Crushing” up here) – the landscape changes daily. The perfume of the valley wafts up the slope when the wind is in the right quarter. In short – a beautiful environment.

The house is environmentally friendly, and is self-sufficient with the exception of electricity. My niece and her husband had intended to install a solar system, but were defeated by the bureaucracy, and the fact that the concept was a little too novel for the local council.

To me, there’s something quintessentially Australian about corrugated iron. It’s tough, durable, flexible, unpretentious and functional. These are understood as characteristics that are part of our national ethos.

It also looks pretty good when used by professionals, and recent refinements to how it’s finished have made sure that it lasts. It’s also lightweight, inexpensive and practical.
As a material, it has also been used by prize-winning architect like Glenn Murcutt. His Marie Short House at Kempsey has made us look differently at this once humdrum building material.
When I was a kid, we used to make canoes with corrugated iron castoffs. You needed tar to plug the ends, and they were buggers of things to cut yourself on, but they were light and easy to make.

Lucinda

There's something about the name “Lucinda” that has always held a special magic.

When we lived in Townsville in the nineties, we often drove north through Ingham to visit family on the Tableland. There were always two rituals – fish and chips on the beach at Cardwell, and a family debate as to whether we should detour through Lucinda.

We always managed the first, but never the second. This was probably because we never felt we'd arrived in FNQ until we did the Cardwell thing, and the fish and chips was inevitably of high quality. Lucinda remained a mystery.

This trip, however, was done for the first time without children, so we were a little less driven by practicality and a little more by whimsy, so we took the Lucinda detour.

I'm glad we did. The road narrows and meanders through a vivid green landscape of canefields, art-deco houses, and scattered cane harvesting machinery. Everything shrinks in scale, the road takes unexpected and eccentric angles, and the sights and smells take me back to my childhood.

The smells particularly, are something else. There's a mixture of the characteristic odour of decaying cane trash, diesel, sarsaparilla grass and mould. It's a unique combination – experienced nowhere else but here.

We drove through Halifax and finished up at the Lucinda Point Hotel where we had a coffee, outdoors in the fantastic sunshine. The boat ramp just down the road was crowded with people – it's a great springboard to the Whitsundays.

We joined the Bruce Highway and continued north. The rest of the trip was uneventful with the exception of a strange encounter with a tinnie sitting forlornly in the middle of the road near Tully.

There was a gaggle of fishy looking characters with anxious expressions standing around an empty boat trailer by the side of the road. I guess there were two issues under discussion. One would have been who forgot to tie the tinnie on the trailer – the other how they were going to get it off the middle of the road.

I had no ideas and there were more than enough of them to lift it, so we kept driving.

The best fish and chips at Cardwell can be found at Annie's Kitchen.