Tag Archives: Australia

Summertime in W.A. ’92

Posted on by

Rumor has it that a glowing orb might appear in the sky tomorrow. If so, almost the first time in this odd-weather start of the year. Still, whatever else has happened, overcast skies have been the norm. Last Thursday, according to the NWS, it was fog from here to the Gulf Coast.

Australia Day has come and gone. For the occasion, I wanted to scan a 1989 uncirculated set of Australian coins, but the coins themselves, encased in plastic, don’t lend themselves to it. Details are indistinct and the lighting of coins seems weird no matter what angle, though not when you’re looking at them with your eyes. In that case, they have the shiny look of uncirculated coins.

Pretty to look at, but not especially valuable. That’s what you should expect, since there’s not a lick of silver in the whole set. I bought it a few years ago, as a kind of retroactive souvenir, since those were the kinds of coins in circulation when I was there.

The envelope theme: ‘roos in the hot sun.

In early January 1992, I sent a card to my brother Jim and mother from Perth.

“Plenty of strange plants & birds to see,” I wrote, becoming the nth person in history to notice that about Australia, a very high number. Still, that’s a marvel of the place. All you have to do is look around. The flora gets weirder the longer you look at it, and helps you appreciate just how far you’ve come to see their oddities. Damn, I’m at the other end of the Earth, you think.

Vast, empty spaces were indeed ahead on the road from Perth to Adelaide to Sydney. My only regret on that bus epic across the continent was that it was dark when we crossed the Nullarbor Plain.

Then again, aside from the species that make up the scrub brush, a ride across Nullarbor doesn’t look that different from a ride across West Texas, and I’ve done that in the daylight.

Not Yet, I Haven’t

Posted on by

Not long ago I came across the blog of a fellow – Everywhereman.me — who aspired to visit everywhere mentioned in the U.S. version of the song “I’ve Been Everywhere.” He then did just that, mostly by motorcycle. I don’t think I’ll do that exactly, but that’s the kind of meshuga I like, since I’m a bit touched myself.

Though others have recorded it, including Johnny Cash no less, I associate the U.S. version with Hank Snow. As well I should.

The original version was Australian, written by Geoff Mack and a hit for Lucky Starr. I have to give it its due. Australia is full of lots of weird and gorgeous place names, after all.

You need a written list to keep up with Lucky, as posted in Wiki. Or a very detailed knowledge of Australia.

Other versions for other places exist. None other than Stompin’ Tom Connors starts off in the United States, but naturally gravitates to Canada, with an entire verse about the Maritimes.

Canada’s fine, but Texas place names are just as good.

By one Brian Burns, who managed to work in some of my favorites, ever since my days of poring over Texas road maps: Pflugerville, Dime Box, and Cut and Shoot.

Thursday’s Theme: A Lot of Good Things Get Lost or Kicked Around

Posted on by

March came in like – an emu? Golden retriever? – came in pleasantly, with temps nearly 60 F. That didn’t last, of course, and chilly air is back today, with snow forecast for Friday, which will melt over the weekend.

The other day, I found a Sears bag tucked away in a semi-storage corner of the house under various things. This made me want to look up how many Sears locations survive. As of November, anyway, when Sears Holdings Corp. emerged from Chapter 11, there were 22.

That’s not even a shadow of its former self. That’s dryer lint of its former self.

I don’t know when we got the bag, or what we bought at Sears that needed such a bag. It’s fairly large, though. About as tall as a kitchen trash bag, so I decided to take its picture and then use the bag for trash. Interesting trademarked slogan. One the company maybe didn’t think through. Where else?™

There’s a lot of possibilities, Sears.

Last week, as mentioned before, there seemed to be overnight microbursts in the area, to judge by the tree branches on the ground afterward. This was the only tree knocked down that I noticed, a few days later, after it had been chopped up somewhat before being cleared away. Note the crust of soil it took with it.

I suspect it wasn’t just the wind, but also the fact that the tree stood in a low-lying area that usually fills up during a rain and takes days to empty, weakening the soil. Besides, it might have been a sick old tree whose roots didn’t have the grip they used to, so bam! Down it came.

But even healthier trees can take a beating if the wind is aggressive enough.

Speaking of fallen things, I learned today that the Hotel Pennsylvania is being demolished. That isn’t news, just that I don’t keep up with everything happening in Manhattan. I stayed there a couple of times in the early 2000s, where the company I worked for at the time put me up. I thought it more solid than grand, but I’m still sorry to see it go.

What else to say but, Pennsylvania Six Five Oh Oh Oh

One more thing about time passage, destruction and decay. Something I found unexpectedly. An algorithm suggested it. Might as well be by chance, then.

A poignant song from the point of view of an abandoned house, included on an album called The Rat Plague of ’66. The kind of thing that happens in Australia. Don Morrison seems to be a singer-songwriter from Adelaide, South Australia.

Pirates Ahoy, Sydney

Posted on by

Another postcard from a time when that was a more common way to send a short message from afar. In this case, pretty far. I picked up this card in Sydney on Dec. 22, 1991, and mailed it from Canberra the next day.

I’d wandered into a department store in Sydney that day, which I spent walking around the city: Circular Quay, the Opera House, Sydney Tower, the Australian Museum, the Royal Botanic Garden and more, such as the (to my ears) amusing Woolloomoolo district, which I’ve read has gentrified since I was there.

I don’t remember going into a Sydney department store, or seeing the Lego exhibit. Yet the card documents the visit. Lego called it “Pirates Ahoy.”

Jim has a longstanding fascination with pirates — mostly the lore, though I’m certain he’s read some genuine histories. Apparently Lego was setting up pirate-theme displays at the time to promote its Lego Pirates set, which was fairly new at the time, launching in 1989.

The genius of Wikipedia is that there are entries like Lego Pirates. It’s an astonishingly long article, documenting in incredible detail the byzantine history of a children’s playset.

RIP, Your Majesty

Posted on by

On occasions like this, it’s fitting even for citizens of a republic to say, Long Live the King!

Here’s the image of Elizabeth II that I like best.

That’s for strictly personal reasons: I picked the coin up in change in Australia over 30 years ago.

I was glad to see 50-cent pieces in circulation somewhere.

Tuross Head Tangent

Posted on by

While looking into Australia-related matters today, since it’s Australia Day, I looked up Tuross Head. It’s a small village on the coast of New South Wales.

I already knew that, since just after Christmas 1991, I spent a few days nearby, guests of the hospitable Clark family, one of whom I knew in Japan. I spent a good while one day wandering around the fine coastline at Tuross, rocky shores enlivened by distinctly unfamiliar flora, though that doesn’t really show in my snapshots.Tuross Head 1991 Tuross Head 1991 Tuross Head 1991

More recently, as in today, Wiki informed me that one Eva Mylott (1875-1920) was born in Tuross Head. She was a popular opera singer from Australia, and also so happens to be Mel Gibson’s paternal grandmother, though she was never to know him, since she died when her own children were very young.

That’s her, in a photo from the collection of the State Library of New South Wales.

Then I started reading about her son, Mel’s father, Hutton Gibson (1918-2020). While he didn’t have the platform of celebrity, the elder Gibson had quite a career as a crackpot, back when that meant pamphlets and physical-medium videos or appearing on local radio or talking to people in person about your ideas. Just as the Internet has become a vast conduit of more or less factual information, so too vast eddies of crackpot nonsense now flow through it; but that’s a rant for another time.

Crackpot dad, eh Mel? There’s a Japanese proverb for this situation: kaeru no ko wa kaeru (蛙の子は蛙). Literally, a tadpole is a frog. The less poetic English — though it has some resonance, both as sound and emotionally as meaning — would be, like father, like son.

Armistice Day 2021

Posted on by

One of many.

Laurice John Inglis was born in South Australia on the 2 March 1898, the only son of Henry W. and Lucy Inglis. He enlisted on 1 November 1916 and took part in the assault on the Polygon Wood and the capture of Black Watch Corner. Private Inglis, aged 19 years, was killed in action at Broodseinde Ridge, Belgium, on 5 October 1917.

Source.

Also, I’m happy to report — literally — that the National World War I Memorial in Washington, DC, is mostly complete.

Bundaberg Ginger Beer

Posted on by

Last day of August, spent some time on the deck. A workday, so not a lot of time out there, but I did take the opportunity to finish the last of a six-pack curiosity we acquired from somewhere or other early in the summer.Bundaberg ginger beer

Ginger beer. Bundaberg brand non-alcoholic diet ginger beer, whose bottle says twice — front and back — that it’s brewed in Australia. That fits. The only place I remember having ginger beer before was in that country, where I found it interesting, though not especially tasty. For its part, Bundaberg isn’t bad, but I’m not going to be a regular consumer.

Or be a drinker of the company’s rum, which it is better known for, at least in Australia. Rum production began there in Queensland in the late 19th century to take advantage of the local sugar industry to produce something Australians really wanted.

Odd thing about the bottle: though the ginger beer is brewed in Australia, and presumably in Bundaberg itself, another bit of text says: Bottled in the UK.

What’s that about? Vats of ginger beer go by container ship from Australia to the UK because… bottles are cheaper in the UK? Most of the export market is there, with a trifle making its way here? Something about EU regs, pre-Brexit? The ways of international logistics, now so tied in knots, are strange even in normal times.

Wednesday Debris

Posted on by

Warm days and cicadas at dusk. Back to posting around August 1.

I saw this in my back yard yesterday.

Imagine my surprise. A lawn circle! The suburban version of crop circles. (In the UK, they’re called garden circles.) Clear evidence that space aliens visited.

Spotted in a northwest suburban parking lot the other day.
Color Me Green
I ought to look that up, but I don’t want to.

Dear streaming service that I subscribe to: When you send me an email with links in it, the links should not take me to this.

This statue was just east of the commuter rail station in New Buffalo.
"Gakémadzëwen," which is Potawatomi for "Enduring Spirit,"

“Gakémadzëwen,” which is Potawatomi for “Enduring Spirit,” by Fritz Olsen, dedicated only in 2018. The plaque says it was erected by the city of New Buffalo “in recognition of the generous contributions to the city by the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi.”

“The 1833 Treaty of Chicago established the conditions for the removal of the Potawatomi from the Great Lakes area,” says the band’s web site. “When Michigan became a state in 1837, more pressure was put on the Potawatomi to move west. The hazardous trip killed one out of every ten people of the approximately 500 Potawatomi involved.

“As news of the terrible trip spread, some bands, consisting of small groups of families, fled to northern Michigan and Canada. Some also tried to hide in the forests and swamps of southwestern Michigan. The U.S. government sent soldiers to round up the Potawatomi they could find and move them at gunpoint to reservations in the west. This forced removal is now called the Potawatomi Trail of Death, similar to the more familiar Cherokee Trail of Tears.

“However, a small group of Neshnabék, with Leopold Pokagon as one of their leaders, earned the right to remain in their homeland, in part because they had demonstrated a strong attachment to Catholicism. It is the descendants of this small group who constitute the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians.”

Even so, it wasn’t until 1994 that Congress reaffirmed the federally recognized status of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi. The band now owns some Michigan casinos, including Four Winds New Buffalo, which features 3,000 slot machines, 70 table games, four restaurants, bars, retail venues, and a 415-room hotel.

Got a boring email from Amazon the other day. It said:

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to cancel the items you requested and these items will soon be shipped. We apologize for the inconvenience.

You can track your package at any time. If you no longer want these items, you may refuse delivery or return them after they arrive. You can visit Your Orders to start a return.

There’s no style to that. How about:

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to cancel the items you requested and these items will soon be shipped. No force in the universe can stop an Amazon order once it is past the FailSafe Point.®

Not even the mighty Jeff Bezos can stay your package from its appointed delivery, even from his perch in space. You may refuse delivery or return them after they arrive. You can visit Your Orders to start a return.

Also from Amazon: One of our updates involves how disputes are resolved between you and Amazon. Previously, our Conditions of Use set out an arbitration process for those disputes. Our updated Conditions of Use provides for dispute resolution by the courts.

Well, well, well. The Wall Street Journal reported in June: “Companies have spent more than a decade forcing employees and customers to resolve disputes outside the traditional court system, using secretive arbitration proceedings that typically don’t allow plaintiffs to team up and extract big-money payments akin to a class action.

“With no announcement, the company recently changed its terms of service to allow customers to file lawsuits… The retail giant made the change after plaintiffs’ lawyers flooded Amazon with more than 75,000 individual arbitration demands on behalf of Echo users.”

This is the flag of Greater London. The officially approved flag of that political entity, I’ve read. It looks like it was drawn by a ten-year-old.

One more thing: National Geographic now asserts there is a “Southern Ocean,” hugging Antarctica below 60 degrees South. That’s a term that I know Australians have long used — I heard it from Australians in the ’90s, and saw the term on a sign at Cape Leeuwin — though I believe they mean the “waters south of us.”

Speaking of ten-year-olds, I understand that part of Nat’l Geo’s mission is educational, but a headline asking whether I can name all the oceans, as if I were that age?

Australia Day, Bush Fire Edition

Posted on by

Australia Day has come around again, but it doesn’t seem fitting to post pictures of me standing near wallabies in New South Wales or recalling how they call Rice Krispies Rice Bubbles in Oz or my Christmas Day walk around in Canberra in a T-shirt.

Seems like one damn thing after another for the Lucky Country this year. Some choice recent headlines:

“Australia’s Wild Weather: First Fires, Now Baseball-Size Hail” — New York Times, Jan. 20

“Australia Rains Bring Relief From Fires — and a Surge in Deadly Spiders” — Smithsonian, Jan. 24

“Coronavirus: first Australian case confirmed in Victoria as five people tested in NSW” — The Guardian, Jan. 24

“Record 81 days of bad air quality in Sydney” — Sydney Morning Herald, Jan. 24.

Curious, I took a look at the web site of NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System, which (as it says) “distributes Near Real-Time (NRT) active fire data within 3 hours of satellite observation from both the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS).”

Took a screenshot of the Fire Map of Australia on the site as it appeared on Friday. Fires in the previous 24 hours, it says.

I can see why the air is bad in Sydney and why parts of Canberra — which is a small city practically plopped down in the bush — have been evacuated.

Still, I’m not sure the map helps me grasp the magnitude of the bush fires. Maybe that’s not really possible. I wondered about that even more when I looked at Africa at the same time.
Looks like central Africa is burning to a crisp. But do the many points of fire denote blazes regardless of size? That way a lot of small fires — which could be entirely normal for central Africa right now — wouldn’t be a catastrophe on the order of a smaller number of much larger fires in Australia.

Another NASA page hints at an answer. First, it says, “The colors are based on a count of the number (not size) of fires observed within a 1,000-square-kilometer area.” Also: “Across Africa, a band of widespread agricultural burning sweeps north to south over the continent as the dry season progresses each year.”

I’ve changed my mind. I think I will post a picture of wallabies. In hopes that better times are ahead for Australia.

Pebbly Beach NSW Dec 1991

December 1991: We’re feeding wallabies at Pebbly Beach on the NSW coast, which was damaged by fire recently, according to local reports. The other fellow is Peter, a friend I stayed with for a while in Canberra. Lost touch with him long ago; hope he’s well.