onetrack

Having said the above, I have little time for the Israelis, either. The current day Israelis shoved their way into the "Holy Land", using terrorism tactics (the bombing of the King David Hotel being the worst episode), on the basis they are the Jews, described as the Chosen People in the Bible. But the Israelis of today have very little in common with the original Tribe of Israel as mentioned constantly in the Bible, they have merely imposed their "mission" of rebuilding Jerusalem onto the multitude of Arab nations who now live in the region. These people (todays Israelis) are the descendants of the Pharisees, the people that Jesus Christ didn't have a lot of time for, because of their greed for monetary wealth, and their incessant religious rule making - none of which rules are found in Biblical teachings, or the teachings of Jesus Christ. They are a dysfunctional group, gathered from many races, from all corners of the world, simply on the basis that they have some faint Jewish ancestry, and are worshippers of the Talmud. The ultra-orthodox Jews make claims to a special position in the world, which will not withstand scrutiny when the final Judgement Day arrives. But the part that worries me, and a lot of other people, is how slavishly American Christian Fundamentalists follow the erroneous religious belief that the Jews are the Chosen People and must be protected at all costs. If America stopped supporting Israel slavishly, and with a blank chequebook for armaments, then the Israelis would pose a far lesser problem to world peace, than they do today.

I don't have any problem with Israel taking out many screamingly mad Islamic terrorists. These people live to just murder, their religion tells them constantly to murder anyone who doesn't follow it, and Hezbollah and all the mad Iranians are responsible for a multitude of acts of terrorism, starting with the taking of the American (civilian) hostages in 1979. The way they treated those hostages was animalistic, and that's probably insulting to animals. These people have a constant record of taking innocent hostages for military and political gain, and I for one, would be quite happy to see Lebanon and Iran reduced to rubble. These are the descendants of the Canaanites, they have incessant murder in their DNA. The part that worries me, is we have already allowed too many of these people into Australia, and they will soon infect many others with their murderous teachings.

The Ghan doesn't travel through the Kimberley region, so someone has misled your brother. The region it does travel through is the more heavily timbered, semi-tropical region between Darwin and Katherine, but that area has nothing on the Kimberley region, which is in the far North of W.A. The Kimberley region possesses some of the most stunning and most remote areas of Australia, including the Mitchell Plateau, the Horizontal Falls, the Ord River and the Ord River Dam, Parrys Lagoon, the Gibb River Road, and Purnululu (the Bungle Bungle Ranges).

I see a power saw. Be very careful with power tools, and your already-displayed, lack of care towards body parts. We don't want to have to rename you "Lefty".

The 'Ghan is far from cheap unfortunately, and I can't really see why they charge so much. They could add a few more cars and reduce the cost to a better level. At around $2500PP for the cheapest seats, it's definitely not good value, IMO. You also MUST book a long way ahead, if you want a seat, and want the best price. Some say, "Oh, but, it's 3 days and 2 nights and 7 meals in a luxury moving hotel, and you're paying for the views!". However the views can get pretty boring over a lengthy distance, and 2 nights in a luxury hotel gives you more room to move, and a better bed - for probably less than $500PP. 7 meals, even at $100 a meal? - and I think the value of the Ghan still falls short. The Ghan is not a high speed service, either, as it could be. The locos are speed limited to 115kmh, and they often only cruise around 100-105kmh - on the more open sections. The average speed for the whole trip is 85kmh. From Greece (Athens), we went to Turkey (by air - Sabiha Gokcen, Instanbul), then to Cairo, then 1st class (air - Qatar Airways) to Doha, then business class on a B777, Doha to Perth. That flight from Doha to Perth was a special, it was only $1900 - and it remains the best flight I've ever been on. 34 seats in business and only 9 occupied! Meals cooked to order (no set menu) and the best lay-flat seats (complete with inbuilt massage!) that I've ever laid in! 10 hrs of pure bliss!

Did everyone pay homage to the Aboriginal football players that started the game, 40,000 years ago?

When we travelled around Spain, France, Italy, and Greece during the period from 2010 to 2014, we were impressed with the level of public transport in all those places. We travelled by hire car as well, but the trains and coaches were very good, and surprisingly new, in most cases. Unfortunately, vast distances and the relatively small population of Australia means we will never be able to match the public transport of Europe and the U.K. However, the Labour State Govt here has just invested mega-billions into extending and upgrading the rail network, and we are possibly reaching a level of superiority to the other States as regards the city train network. But the country rail services are non-existent. However, we do have large 3 axle road coaches that are Govt-owned, and they provide a reasonable level of road bus service. The private coach operators here have virtually all vanished. Greyhound used to run road coaches all around Australia, but cheap airfares wiped them out. They have recovered a little, but are only a shadow of what they once were, and they no longer service the Left Coast, apart from a service to Kununurra and Broome, from Darwin.

We used to waterski on Lake Dumbleyung when I lived in the W.A. wheatbelt. Lake Dumbleyung is a salt lake, but when it fills every few years, it gets quite deep, about 4.6M (15 feet). It's 13kms long and 6.5kms wide, so it's a big lake. We'd get out there early on a Sunday morning and the wind would not yet be up, and the lake would be a complete millpond. So you'd be skiing along on this stunningly dead-flat sheet of water, like skating on an ice rink - it was absolutely magic.

I can recall reading a "Boys Own" story in either Pix or People magazine, around the late 1960's about a young Chinese pilot named Ho Fun, in WW2 Burma, during the advance of the Japanese into the country. The expats were fleeing any way they could, and the men were trying to get their women and children out. The Japs had already bombed the local airstrip and written off nearly all the aircraft - but one civvy DC-3 managed to survive partly intact. It had holes blown in it everywhere, but the locals, assisted by some Allied troops, patched the holes in the wings with sheets! They then roughly filled in as many bomb craters as they could in the short time available, to make a barely useable, but much shortened runway. Then they dragged the Dakota backwards to a large tree, and secured the tail to the tree with a big hemp rope! - after which they loaded around 40+ women and children into the aircraft! Capt Ho cranked up the engines, opened the throttles, and waved to the troops at the rear of the aircraft - whereby they promptly cut the rope with an axe! The Dak took off in the shortened area available, and they made it to Singapore, with sheets flapping terrifyingly. After unloading his precious cargo, Capt Ho badgered the Allies to refuel the Dak so he could go back and pick up more expats! The aviation people in Singapore were appalled at the condition of the Dak, but Capt Ho must have been a persuasive talker. He managed to get fully refuelled, but upon takeoff, just as he reached near V2, a main gear tyre blew, the aircraft slewed badly, cartwheeled, burst into flames, and Capt Ho was incinerated. The story was worthy of a movie, but no doubt, so were many more instances of great bravery in WW2, that were never recorded. The best "warry" book I've read is "Ring of Fire", the story of the small band of Australian commandoes from the 2/2 Australian Independent Company - Sparrow Force - who kept the Japanese tied up on Timor for over 7 months with hardly any logistics support. Only a couple of hundred Australian diggers kept something like 10,000 Japanese troops on edge with constant ambushes, and they slaughtered over 1,000 Japs with only a small number of casualties themselves. A second book about these blokes is titled, "The Men Who Came Out of the Ground" - a term they picked up from the frightened Japanese, who reckoned the Aussies popped up out of the ground like phantoms, and then promptly disappeared again! The secret to their success was the Timor terrain - a narrow coastal plain running into deep ravines and high terrain, heading inland. The Japs would always march along the beach in a large group - the Aussies would hide in the ravines, ambush the Japs, and give them curry - and as soon as the Japs went to ground and started to try and ouflank them, the Aussies would do an orderly retreat up the ravines, into the mountains, and disappear into the jungle! The Japs would always give up trying to find them. The blokes of 2/2 had a good laugh over an episode where they heard over the airwaves that a famous and indefatigable Japanese senior commanding officer, called the "Singapore Tiger" was coming down to head the group, and wipe out the Australians, once and for all! The Aussies kept careful watch on the beach, and before long, they spotted this gloriously-outfitted Jap senior officer goose-stepping along the beach, leading his large group of troops! It only took the first shots of the next ambush to dispatch the goose-stepping senior officer (and then dispatch a few dozen more of his men), before the Aussies retreated again into the mountains - and they never heard any more Japanese bragging about a "Singapore Tiger"! 🙂

Bruce - Yes, you're correct there, W.A. was the last State to join the Federation. But the State was overwhelmed by the number of Victorians digging for W.A. gold, and they swung the vote in favour! W.A. was going to be left out of the Federation, the Eastern States had already decided that! We could've been an independent nation today, imagine that! You'd need a passport to visit us!! 🙂 https://exhibitions.slwa.wa.gov.au/s/federation/page/reluctant#:~:text=On 31 July 1900%2C Western,union with the eastern colonies. Re the railways, I was referring to the West Australian Govt Railways, when I mentioned railways. The Trans-Line is, and always has been, owned by the Commonwealth Railways, and there was only one private railway operator in W.A. - the Midland Railway, which was a British company that built a narrow-gauge rail line between Midland and Walkaway, about halfway between Dongara and Geraldton. The Midland Railway ran up substantial losses over many decades, and was eventually sold to the W.A.G.R. in December 1963. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midland_Railway_of_Western_Australia

Turn all your lights and heaters on!!

The buyer of the Gorilla brand bow shackle may be located in a remote location where acquiring hardware items is costly, due to local high prices and long drives to get anything. When I sold a fair bit of NOS industrial items (parts and tools) on eBay, the largest proportion of my buyers were based in remote rural locations and it must have seemed magical to them to be able to buy items at half the cost of local purchases and have them delivered right to their mailbox in the price! But yes, there's always the suckers who just buy items without checking - usually as part of a "package deal". I recently acquired a couple of pallets of NOS, 500ml Hills Garden Trigger Spray bottles at auction. They were surplus from Chevron, and unused in their original cartons. These are top quality spray bottles and Woolies charge $5 each for them and Mitre 10 charge $4 each for them. So I'm selling them for $2 each (because I'm not greedy, I'm only making about 800% markup - :D ) So a bloke contacts me from FB and wants to buy a pile of them. It turns out he has a hydroponics shop - and he sells everything you need to "grow your own"! But get this - he sells the Hills Sprayers as part of his hydroponic package - for $15 EACH!! I don't understand how he can get away with this, when a simple search turns them up for $4 or $5 each - but I guess it's all about "buying the complete package, without having to run around"!

Willie Nelsons tax debt was a long, long time ago (1990), and he settled it for only a bit over half what the IRS originally demanded. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/flashback-willie-nelson-settles-irs-tax-debt-196254/ I think a lot of these performers keep performing because they haven't put enough aside for retirement, and they've established a high-cost luxury lifestyle, that must be funded with continual performing. Every "retirement tour" of old rock stars I've gone along to, has been a total disappointment, as they try to emulate what they were like 40 or 50 years ago, with a poor level of success. We're going along to see The Wailers in early November - Bunny Wailer died in March 2021, and Aston "Familyman" Barrett died in Feb this year, marking the passing of the last of Bob Marleys original band members. But the new generation of Wailers is continuing the reggae music!

When we had a big local manufacturing base, it was well-protected with major levels of tariffs. It was Whitlam who dismantled all the tariff protection for Australian industries and thus left them exposed to the "global manufacturing order". Car manufacturing is a horribly expensive business to be in, and you compete with huge nations and huge manufacturers who all have the advantage of large population bases and large markets that are easily accessible. In the 1930's to 1980's, Australia did alright out of manufacturing vehicles - because shipping in imports was costly (due to smaller ship sizes), and tariffs made imports expensive. Our local vehicle manufacturing was protected and subsidised, and we even managed to export quite a few vehicles to nearby countries. But the value of the Australian dollar was always a problem, it also fluctuated widely, meaning it was difficult for manufacturers to plan very far ahead. Add in the ever-increasing industry restrictions, compulsory safety features that were legislated for, vastly increased levels of manufacturing sophistication - and a small local market, with export-potential countries always a long way away, and often with limited purchasing capacity as well - and Australia was always behind the 8-ball. A lot more could've been done to assist local manufacturing, but easy money and big profits, in the form of property development, financial industry investments - and retailing, most of all - have all resulted in the money gravitating to these areas, rather than the high-risk areas of product development, marketing and production. A few Australian industries have taken advantage of overseas manufacturing for components for their locally-produced products, but they still always battle with trying to acquire funding for manufacturing - and also face the constantly-depressing fact, that no matter what you produce, China can produce it in volumes 10,000 times higher than you can, and at a fraction of the cost.

I know that middle property above, it's on Wattleup Road, in Hammond Park, in the Southern suburbs of Perth. The family have recently caved in and now have the 2.34Ha (6 acre) property on the market. https://www.domain.com.au/news/they-refused-to-sell-as-a-whole-perth-suburb-was-built-around-them-until-now-1317152/ I recently saw a similar property in East Cannington, a South Eastern suburb. It wasn't as big, maybe an acre, but it really stood out in a surrounding sea of new housing redevelopment. https://www.google.com/maps/place/94+Gerard+St,+East+Cannington+WA+6107/@-32.0077337,115.9550643,229m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x2a32be9b1f7eac69:0xf7c72f38e5ad6f58!8m2!3d-32.0074481!4d115.9554611!16s%2Fg%2F11c4nrsf_g?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI0MDkyNC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D

Our fortnight of stunning Spring weather returned to a good dose of Winter this morning, with wind and rain and black skies. We've had 12mm between 5:00AM and 2:00PM today, and the possibility of a few more mm before it all departs on Sunday. I had a dentists appointment at 11:45AM and zipping down Cambridge St, Wembley in my Hilux, approaching St John of God Hospital, I encountered a "Sydney driver"! There was a 3 tonne van body truck in front of me in the LH lane, and he braked to turn left into McCourt St. I couldn't see anything much past him at McCourt St - but as he slowed and turned, and I passed him - a dentist or a doctor in a big flash silver Mercedes, pulled straight out of McCourt street, into Cambridge St., without even a glance in my direction! What was worse - there was line of parked cars, and he promptly pulled into my lane without any indication - and I was 15 metres away, and still doing 60kmh!! It gets even worse at that point! It was raining lightly and the road was wet! I hit the brakes hard, the ABS started kicking in, and I could do nothing else, but swerve to my right, and mount the median strip!! There was traffic coming the other way, and I just managed to avoid a car coming the other way! I hung on the horn too late, as I was giving my avoidance skills 100% attention ! But then - he dawdled up Cambridge Street for 300M, then stopped, and turned right into a medical centre!! Sheesh!! Naturally, I pulled up on his left, and got a bit animated with my signalled message, about LOOKING before you pull out!!! Of course, he chose to ignore me, and turned into the driveway, obviously embarrassed, and maybe concentrating on his upcoming medical procedure. I just hope he pays more attention to his medical procedures this afternoon!! The last thing I need, is to write my Hilux off because another driver was totally switched off!

Frankie Valli - looking every bit of his advanced age. It's pretty sad seeing these old entertainers unable to bow out gracefully, when age decline sets in.

Jerry - Peter wrote $840M, not $840B. The problem with Govts spending big on large projects, is that it's rare that the cost/benefit returns in the long-term, ever match up with the initially-projected figures. Then the project becomes a millstone around the taxpayers collective necks for decades to come - and long after the politicians who incurred the scheme and the costs, are gone. I can recall that the loans taken out to finance the construction of the railways in W.A. in the 1880's to the 1920's, were still being paid down in the 1990's. Many of the initial loans were interest-only loans. The only reason these loans were able to be serviced was because of the amount of gold the State produced. When gold mining slumped, wool and grains and other agricultural exports usually rose to compensate. Victoria has long been dependent on a large manufacturing base to produce its wealth. I don't think that manufacturing base is anything like the size it used to be, and I can't see any high-tech manufacturing providing the level of State income that's needed to service large debts on public transport infrastructure, because public transport is always a loss-making exercise. Add in a loss of Govt revenue from declining fuel excise, as a result of a major increase in EV's, and the State Govt in Victoria will be looking for a whole new raft of taxes.

SWMBO and I are making a point now of paying in cash, whenever there's a CC fee. It means quite a few dollars in savings annually, and it's money I prefer to keep in my pocket, rather than lining banks already-bulging pockets with it. And I find many businesses are very happy to accept cash rather than cards. Most of the food trucks/vans at markets, often have signs advertising that they prefer cash.

Well, at least you've got no worries about damaging expensive props or propshafts on underwater obstructions! The nephews bought a Skicraft ski boat about 1985, it was a gorgeous beast, red metalflake and 350 Chev. I was tooling up the Swan River in it one sunny day, at a low speed (8kts is the River speed limit), about 600 or 800 metres upstream from the Maylands Yacht Club. Not far off the centre of the River, I hit something in the River with an almighty BANG and thump. Straightaway, I had a driveshaft vibration. I returned to the boat ramp and inspection found a damaged prop and a bent driveshaft! To this day, I still have no idea what I hit. Possibly a large submerged tree stump? There were no markers in the area, but it was just outside the navigation channel. The Swan River isn't very deep in many places. We did get a lot of pleasure out of that boat, but I gave up waterskiing around age 41, after incurring too many torn lower back tendons from mostly deepwater starts. That 350 Chev had some grunt. I think the most fun I had with it, we had a circular flat disc of 10mm Marine ply, and we'd use that as skiboard. You couldn't get over about 12-14 kts with it, the friction on the water surface was too high, and the boat would pull you off it. But you could do lots of low-speed trickery with it. One of the tricks was carrying a wooden kitchen chair with you, you'd get up on the piece of ply, then swing the chair under you, and sit on it! - skiing neatly along, sitting like a monarch on their throne! 🙂

Yes, they're still made, but the newer ones are much lighter gauge steel than the older ones.

I can understand a rough bush camp, but even in the roughest bush or site camps I was in, it was always a priority to have hot water for showers. One time I set up a cut-open 60 litre drum with a firebox under it. Filled the drum with water and when it got hot, a hose from a 12V pump was dropped into the drum, and the water pumped through a conveniently-strung shower rose. The pump was battery-powered. The Glind exhaust system/heat exchanger showers for vehicles are good, too.

If you want a pro saw, you buy a Stihl. All others are cheap imitations. Husvarna would've had the alloy casting provided by the cheapest tenderer, from anywhere in the world. Despite saying that, I've got a 2000psi Husqvarna 240V pressure washer which I bought during COVID and it's not too bad. But it's made in Italy, where all the good pressure washers are made. I've a got a Stihl 028 chainsaw I bought new in 1988. It's made in West Germany. It's done a heap of work, and it still runs like a top. It's gone through about 3 bars and 5 chains. All I've done to it is give an occasional clean, replaced the spark plug several times, and I had to replace the anti-vibration rubbers between handle and body when they buggered up a few years ago. They don't make 'em like they used to! But the Stihl cost me $799 in 1988, and that was serious money, back then.

A Statutory write off is only applied to a vehicle where the SWO Damage Assessment Criteria are met. There's a booklet put out by Austroads, that advises what those criteria are. If the SWO criteria are not met, the vehicle is a Repairable Write Off and can be repaired. Many "insurance salvage" vehicles are sold as RWO's, and then repaired and put back on the road, legally. You cannot ever repair a vehicle that is declared an SWO, the 17 digit VIN number stamped in the body is physically destroyed, so it can never be repaired or re-registered. Smashed headlights do not meet the SWO critieria, so the vehicle must be classed as an RWO. The link to the Austroads booklet is below. Good quality aftermarket headlights for the Subaru XV are available ex-Taiwan, off eBay, and from aftermarket parts suppliers, and they run to about $500 for a pair. http://carsafe.com.au/assets/AR_NMV_LV_Tech_Guide_Dec_2019.pdf

You need to practice your rain dance and rain chants. Or perhaps the rain gods have deemed you a worthless entity, because you failed to worship them in the past.