Photography.

[willedoo]

34 minutes ago, pmccarthy said:

Griselda also wrote a book - Dune is a four letter word.

Thanks for the heads up, I didn't know about that one.

[willedoo]

9 hours ago, onetrack said:

  Classic Red Centre photos there, Willie.

onetrack, there's something in this photo that was posted previously that's from your neck of the woods. The accomodation dongas were Elross vans from WA. The reason being the company we used to work for had been bought out by a WA company and we were gradually converted over to their type of gear. The Elross sleeping dongas were a form of torture. Two to a room with 0.6 of a square metre of floor space for two people. In the morning one bloke had to stay in bed so the other had enough floor space to get dressed. The only practical way two people could be in the room was if at least one was lying on their bunk. The other problem was they fitted the rooms with very noisy truck air conditioners which woke you up all through the night.

 

Before the WA mob bought us out we had South Australian steel railway fettlers train wagons to live in. They cut the train wheels off, weld a truck bogie on the rear and a skid plate and pin on the front to slip a prime mover directly on to them. We used to road train them as doubles and they were virtually indestructible and very roomy. There was no work required to the interiors as they were purpose built for fettlers to live in. The only issue was they were over width and way over length. By the time I left the WA company had only retained the W series Kenworths out of all our original gear.

 

[facthunter]

Been in one of those double bed and "no room" things.  In blazing sun and no shade whatever. Nev

[onetrack]

Yeah, I remember those Elross work vans, dreadful cramped things they were. For mobile accommodation, we had several big Viscount Supreme vans, 27 footers and triaxle, they were quite comfortable.

On the gold mine we owned, 60kms N of Norseman, we had 4 fettlers cabins we'd bought from a disused narrow-gauge siding, made redundant when the standard gauge was put through in 1971-72.

 

These were solidly built, timber-framed, 3 room buildings, about 14' x 40' (4.2M x 12M). We got the whole lot for about $200 from memory, jacked them up, and loaded them onto a house transporting trailer owned by Noel Little from Kalgoorlie, and transported them about 20km N to the mine, and positioned them in a square layout.

They were great buildings, very comfortable and roomy. Two were built in 1907 when the narrow-gauge line was first installed - but they were still in good condition in 1972 - and the other two were built later, possibly in the 1940's. They provided us with lots of accommodation on the mine, and when we were doing mining/exploration contracting in the area.

 

Unfortunately, we installed a kero fridge in one of the newer buildings and it caught fire, and burnt that building to the ground. Luckily, the brother was nearby when it happened, mid-morning, and he managed to contain the fire to that one building. Bloody kero fridges were responsible for a lot of house fires.

Quite a devastating loss, unfortunately - and we lost a beaut, vintage classic, "Icy Ball" ammonia, wooden-chest refrigerator from the 1920's, in the fire. I think it was a Crossley. Quite rare, I've never seen one anywhere else.

[willedoo]

I'd have some photos of the steel fettler's carriages we had but I think they're on an old portable hard drive that I can't access as I've lost the power adaptor. Lucky they were air conditioned and well insulated inside as the steel surface on the outside would get very hot.

[pmccarthy]

Dongas of the other extreme in PNG.

[willedoo]

They look like hothouses for growing plants.

[onetrack]

No chance of dragging any prefab dongas in there, I'll wager! I bet it was all built from local materials, and what could be flown in by chopper! And I'm guessing it rained 350 days of the year, too?

[pmccarthy]

All of that. Frames from local materials, and walls from rolls of plastic carried in by chopper. You could certainly hear the bloke in the next room snoring.

[spacesailor]

Those donga's are now very ' upmarket ' , 

Two halves on a truck & trailer .

A crane to offload & position on your land and you can move in that night .

Made in 'western Sydney ' .

[willedoo]

I've never been to PNG. I got offered a job there once but it was through a mate I was working with. He was trying to broker the deal by quoting a daily rate that gave him the same amount as me. In effect, he was asking the company in PNG for twice the going daily rate so he could skim half for doing nothing. The bloke from the company wouldn't pay that double rate so got someone else. I missed out on a lot of work there, It was meant to be a five week job but being PNG ended up being around five months of work. It was up around the Fly River if my memory is correct.

 

A mate of mine worked up in the Mt. Hagen area in the 90's. He showed me photos of the camp complex where they stayed. It was quite a big show. The way I understood, it was a large permanent combined camp where different companies all stayed in a reasonably secure compound.

[pmccarthy]

I suspect it was all  much safer in the 90s than it is now. We joked about the rascals but now I would take it seriously.

[willedoo]

I found this one today, one of those random photos hoovered off the web that float around distant corners of the hard drive. I'm fairly sure it's a Kazakhstan Air Force Su-30SM.

 

[facthunter]

Lots of Hard drives in PNG. That's why aircraft are popular. I never saw any Rascals in  LAE. Moresby was another matter.. We overnighted on the 727 at the Davara down the beach to the east till we withdrew from PNG entirely. UN mandate ceased.   Nev

[facthunter]

Sorry, To the West. A fitness seeing Flight engineer , Doing a run along the beach was told. "Run white Man Run."  Nev