willedoo

The only older Norton I've ever ridden was a 650 SS. With the featherbed frame, it was noticeably better handling than the Commando but at around 60mph had a very uncomfortable vibration that you felt in the seat of the pants. Once you went faster it would go away but the problem was the vibration was right at the speed limit you wanted to cruise at. To avoid it you had to ride slower or go faster and risk a speeding ticket.

I remember when my original one had about 10,000 miles on the clock I was pulling into the yard from the street and the whole bike went pear shaped. The small bracket connecting the frame top tube to the engine had cracked through and the whole integrity of the isolastic suspension system was gone. Without that bracket, the engine/gearbox,swing arm and rear wheel were one unit and the frame, tank and front end another. Only the bottom mounts held the bike together. Just lucky it didn't break speeding into a corner. The Commandos of that era had a few issues straight out of the box. Some bad design, sometimes bad manufacture and/or assembly. The common joke of the time was that if you got one built on a Wednesday it was ok. Get one built early or late in the week and you could have problems.

This is partially the same bike a year later. I bought it back from the insurance company and rebuilt it into this. It has the original tank, side panels, engine and gearbox, but everything else was replaced.

It hit the curb at around 110mph and went end over end a few times before tumbling and sliding the rest of the way. You can see where the top rear section of the frame is flattened onto the rear wheel. That's where it was airborne at some stage and came straight down on that section, wiping out the seat and rear fibreglass tail section. Both rims are heart shaped from the initial hit on the concrete curb. All I have left of it these days is the number plate.

Another scan, my poor old Fastback outside the police station, 1973.

A short 15 minute documentary on the history of Chamberlain tractors.

Another scan; this photo was taken north of Lake Callabonna, South Australia, in 1984. It's not a natural lake but a clay pan between sand dunes fed by a never ending flowing bore. At the time I estimated it was easy big enough for three ski boats to use at the same time, as a size comparison. It was one of those South Australian government bores that flowed unrestricted for many, many years before they finally started to close them down. I don't think there's any left flowing like that now. The bore was sunk on the side of a sand dune and the flow had cut a deep ravine in the dune that was deep enough to die from the fall. If that didn't kill you, the boiling water would. You had to go 500 metres downstream before the water was cool enough to have a hot spa bath; I'd estimate it flowed about a kilometre all up from the bore to the lake. Judging by irrigation bores I've seen, I guessed the flow at between 20,000 to 30,000 gallons per hour, flowing year after year. Evaporation over the large lake area would have accounted for a fair portion of the water loss.

I looked up Kulin on Google maps; I've got a cousin who farms north of there, between Kellerberrin and Tammin. I didn't realise there where so many salt lakes in the wheatbelt if that's what those white areas are that I'm seeing on the satellite view.

This 1982 photo shows the Simpson Desert the driest I've ever seen it. The only vegetation visible from the air was the shrubs and trees, no grass to be seen. The drought broke the following year with a lot of flooding. The photo is taken from a Cherokee Six just entering the Simpson from the east en route from Windorah to Alice Springs. Everything went ok until halfway across when the alternator died and the battery went flat, so no radio or instruments, just the compass. We landed on the strip at Ringwood Station on the western edge of the desert, and luckily the station owner was home to see us come in. He drove over and picked up the pilot so he could use the station radio to call Alice Springs airport to clear a space for us to fly into there, being pre satellite days when the stations relied on HF radio for communications. We got to stay overnight in Alice waiting on the new alternator to be fitted, then on to Bililuna in W.A. the next day. Another surprise there on landing - the client (Shell if my memory is correct) had given the crew three days off as the Halls Creek annual races were on. We took off again to Halls Creek which took us straight past the Wolfe Creek crater, so that was a good sight from the air. It was a memorable trip for different reasons. When the battery went dead over the Simpson, it really got us thinking how little preparation we had in regard to survival gear if we had to put down in a dune corridor. We didn't even have near enough water required to stay on the ground any length of time. As a comparison of seasons, I took these photos with a digital compact camera in the Simpson in 2010 after an extended wet period. Most of the green you can see is grass and herbage that burns off with hot, dry conditions. It was very different to the other deserts I've been in which have more permanent vegetation in the dune corridors, and much more spinifex. Edit: Just as a post script, it wasn't far from where these three photos were taken that I came across an old survey marker peg that was the site of Geosurveys Base Camp #1 from Reg Spriggs' first motorised crossing of the desert in 1962.

How all this scanning started was that an old close mate I'd known since 1971 passed away recently and I've been looking for photos of him from the old days to scan and forward on to his daughters. Scanning old photos is a bit like letting the genie out of the bottle, then down the rabbit hole you go.

I use Paint a lot to resize photos down in size; I find it really easy to do in Paint.

This one is Macumba Station in 1984. That was a big year for work. I did a lot of 10 week on/ 2 week off hitches that year and one bloke I knew spent six months straight in the field without a break. Not that he did much work anyway, but it's still a long time away. We started the year working at Lake Frome, then up around Lake Callabonna, over to Lake Eyre South, then at Macumba up the west side of Lake Eyre, then finished the year off around the top of Lake Eyre and north of there towards Kalamurina.

Once lightened, I had to have a good look to make sure I wasn't asleep in there.

Great photos onetrack. Flash gear in it's time but we're probably talking about collector's items now. I can remember hauling out sugar cane with one of those Massey 35 tractors with the little Perkins, but if you told someone in the game nowdays they'd think you'd gone loopy. Those D7Gs we had look old in the photos now, but back then they were the latest and greatest. All good old tractors. Here's another old beast we had back in 1982, a D8H 22A. I've got an idea they were built or assembled in Scotland, but I could be wrong.

Getting bogged can be connected to stupidity or sometimes to necessity and at other times, just bad luck. I'll own up to this one, just not sure which category it belongs in - necessity I think as a crossing had to be found one way or another. This is crossing the Macumba River in 1984 and it was like wakling through a minefield as you couldn't visibly pick the soft areas from the hard. I found the soft bit. The scary bit was looking at the flood debris in the tree tops on the opposite bank. Taking into account a 10' bank, that would put this machine about 30' under water in a flood like that. Edit: the rippers are upside down as it had previously been ploughing explosive cord into the ground with one central ripper, similar to the way they lay cable.

There's something about getting bogged that attracts cameras. This one wasn't my doing. What possessed the driver to think driving on to a salt lake was a good idea, I'll never know. Even in those days it was a serious environmental breach for starters. I got woken up at midnight after they'd been trying to dig it out for hours and given up on the shovel, so had to walk a machine for about eight hours, pull him out and then turn around and walk it back again.

Here's that dreaded B model Mack again, stuck on a sand hill with a load of fuel drums near Lake Callabonna, 1984.

That's east for you, onetrack.

More scans of old photos. It's great we have access to good, cheap digital photography these days. A lot of these old instamatic and compact cameras were woeful when you look back at it. This is the fastest donkey in the west. The photo was taken out the driver's side window of the woopie doing 40 kph.. The donkey kept that speed up for a kilometre beside us before he tired of the game and veered off, which he is doing in this photo. Until that day I had no idea how much stamina and speed feral donkeys had. The location is near Lake Eyre South.

Another scan. William Creek Hotel, 1984. It's probably changed a bit and that pet donkey would be long gone. He used to wander around in the bar; I think he belonged to the pub owners.

I've enjoyed having my 10 year old Canon EOS 700D working again. Sometimes the phone camera just isn't enough. I misplaced the Canon battery charger and had been looking for it on and off for about 18 months, so that's how long the camera has sat idle. I was about to buy one on eBay when I finally found the charger (in the most obvious place). Here's a couple of pics of the birdy friends hanging out at the verandah bird bath. First one is three Butcher Bird fledglings. It's a family of five this year; mum and dad Butcher Birds are very proud. Second one is a Blue-faced Honeyeater. Lens is a Canon EFS 55-250mm.. I'm not much of a photographer, just point and click, but I do like to keep it on the manual focus setting instead of full auto.

Have been going through the process of scanning some old photos into digital form. I don't know what film format these are; Red would know. It's whatever type of compact camera one would have had in 1988. A couple of photos for onetrack as it's sort of over his way in a roundabout fashion. Unloading at Legune Station, 1988. Legune is in the Territory up near the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf but is accessed via Kununarra and then up through the Ord scheme farmland. I remember well that horrible trip. I flew to Alice Springs and picked up the truck and machine and drove it from there all the way to Legune in hot weather with 55mph diffs and no lining inside the cab roof, just bare metal. For anyone who hasn't driven a B model, there's not much room between your head and the roof so it was certainly cooking the melon. To get anywhere soon, I had to push the foot down and with a very heavy throttle spring, the right foot was numb most of the way. One saving grace is that it didn't have 48mph diffs. That would have been too cruel. The plan was to go back to Alice springs and bring the second machine up, but fortunately they found someone else to drop it off at Katherine, so the second trip was only from Legune to Katherine and return. The tractors were stick shift D7Gs with manual angle blade, rippers and scrub canopy, about 27 tonne in weight. The float was a side load float that swivelled sideways and you could pin it solid but nobody ever did. It didn't sway much out on the road unless you really cranked it around a tight bend. Not the sort of thing you do in a B model anyway. To end load it you needed a big bank or ramp as it had full size 20" wheels on the back, and was only done if loading graders. I learned to side load with this same truck and float four years earlier when the leader of our pack led us across a Quinyambie Station track on a trip from Toowoomba to Frome Downs. He wasn't the world's best navigator. The track was passable for single trailers but had too many sandy dune crossings for doubles. Not high dunes, but just raw sand with no clay on the dune crossings. We had a 375 V8 R model Mack with a dozer on a float, and a second hay hauling trailer carrying a grader hooked on behind, and it got stuck on almost every dune for about 140 klm of the trip. He would drive until he got stuck, then I'd pull up behind him in the old B model with the single float and dozer, unload the dozer, then tow him over the dune, reload the dozer, then follow on to the next dune and do it all again. From memory it took about three days and I side loaded and unloaded that machine about a million times. I'd never side loaded before that trip. The old B model with the quad box was good in the sand dune country. You never get stuck for a gear in one of those. Just rattle the sticks round and round and it will always drop into a gear somewhere. At Legune The camera catching the blade as it's about to topple over. This is the second machine (with new tracks) Retirement is good; there are some things I miss but I don't miss the flies and getting up at 4am..

Thanks Peter. Will try to drop in from time to time to make sure you're all behaving yourselves. I've tried to cut down on screen time but it's easier said than done. Have been co-administering an inyourfacebook group so that's taken a bit of effort and tended to drag oneself back online. So all good, still breathing in and breathing out and wearing my trousers the right way round.

Brass cases, so I'd say solids. They're a 2.5" case so they'd hold a fair bit of powder to push the slug a reasonable distance. I haven't seen all the footage so I don't know if they had a 12G as well, but the bolt action gun the young bloke was firing was a .410 ejecting brass cases

I heard on the news the government is going to look at gun laws and one of the things mentioned was restricting firearm licenses to citizens. I can remember after the Monash University shooting in 2002 being surprised that foreign citizens were allowed to hold a firearm license in Australia, with that perpetrator being a foreign national on a student visa. 23 years later we still have a visa holding foreign national with an Australian firearm licence shooting people.