willedoo

Grading after rain works in some areas where they get rain, but you'd be waiting a long time between grades in a lot of this country Nev. A lot of the country has a six to eight inch annual rainfall if you're lucky. That's where water trucks come into the equation.

It wouldn't be a bad job grading those roads if you liked a bit of solitude. I've seen quite a few setups where they have two graders and a joint camp. I ran into one bloke once who worked on his own. He had a donga with everything in it, sleeping quarters, kitchen and bathroom. The 40' trailer also had the spare space for a fuel tank and genset. He had a satellite dish as well. He would estimate the distance of a day's work and tow the donga trailer and Toyota behind the grader to where he was going to make camp for the night, then set up camp and do a grade down to the start point and back. You'd need a compact, self contained camp like that if you were moving camp daily otherwise it would drive you mad. He worked equal time job sharing with another bloke. I can't remember what hitch they'd do, it might have been two weeks on/two weeks off.

A big problem with them is they reappear fairly quickly. The grader only knocks the tops off them. I can remember grader drivers telling me how deep the corrugations go below the surface as they found out at times when they've had to cut the surface right back. They can extend a foot or two below the surface like hard ants nest.

I once bought a pair of Mack branded lace ups. I don't know if they still make them, but at the time Mack and Cat branded boots were getting about. They had the gel implant in the heel for cushioning like a lot of modern workboots have. At the time we had a yard at Moomba and we left our gear there to go home for the Christmas break. I thought I'd be clever and leave some personal gear in one of the dongas to save carting it back and forth on the plane. When I got back early in January, the heels on the boots had exploded and blown the guts out of the heels where the gel bags would have been. Too much heat I figured; it would have been up in the 60's most likely inside the donga without the aircon on. They were expensive boots and nearly new but you couldn't wear them; it was like trying to drive with flat tyres.

Hopefully they'll have the money to fix it. Our council is flat broke to the tune of one billion dollars in the red. They've been spending money like drunken sailors trying to imitate the Gold Coast and now the shite has hit the fan. I'm a bit cynical I suppose, but my guess is higher rates and more potholes before any of the more than 1,000 bludgers sitting behind desks lose their jobs. They have way more sitting on their arse in the offices than they do out in the world doing some work. More than half the rates income goes to paying council staff.

It must be this one here:

Thinking in hindsight about the leaking fuel tanker in the above post. They tried everything they had on hand to try and stop the leak which at pressure was a big spray of fuel. After giving it some thought, if we'd had some rubber matting or belting as a bandage and decent sized ratchet straps on hand to hold it, we could have possibly slowed it to a dribble at least. A bit like how Captain Cook and Co. saved the Endeavour off Cooktown.

It would be nice to have heaps of spare cash to throw around as there's some bargains out there. This Massey came up today on marketplace for $5,000. There's way more than that in scrap price - heaps of steel, shafts, pulleys, hydraulic rams and pumps, gears etc.. On top of that it's got a V8 Perkins diesel with 3,000 hours on the clock. Naturally the catch is the transport cost to move it anywhere.

They're awful things; two things I don't miss about out there are corrugations and flies. The worst corrugations I've ever encountered were on the Kintore road after you turn off the Tanami road. From the turnoff it's about 375 klm to Kintore and about 200 klm of that was really bad corrugations with no let up hour after hour. It was the sheer distance of the corrugated section that made it so bad. We had a couple of casualties - one of the towed dongas had some suspension come apart so we had to take the wheel off and chain the axle up. The worst bit was late in the afternoon when a fuel tanker on the back of a body truck split a seam. We off loaded as much fuel as we could into trucks, machines and Toyotas but had to leave the tanker truck there overnight. Moving it would have ruptured it more and been a major fuel spill. With the level lowered, the pressure behind the leak wasn't as bad but it still lost a lot onto the road which the local council wasn't happy about. We borrowed a heap of 44's from a local station and a couple of the blokes came back with the float and a hand pump and offloaded fuel into the drums. They were going all night and into the next day to get all the fuel, about three trips they did. We found the best trucks to handle that rough country were the W series Kenworths. The cabs held up much better than Macks and other makes. You could buy some really good second hand road train rated W series trucks at fairly cheap prices. For the people selling them, they were no longer viable or economical for highway work, but they were still good for many years of desert bashing.

This article gives a variety of figures from four polls released this week, Redbridge, YouGov, Fox & Hedgehog and Morgan. The Fox & Hedgehog poll found if a Teal-style party ran it would have 6% support coming mostly at Labor's expense and having no effect on the combined Coalition and One Nation figures. https://theconversation.com/one-nation-surges-to-first-on-primary-votes-in-two-new-polls-284165

It is, but it's a very tight and strict alliance normally. Stray from the party line and you get the boot is how a lot of them operate.

Yes, I think they are far better off on their own. As a party they could end up being neither here nor there. Some of them of a similar persuasion could be loosely alligned but I doubt a party would work.

Nev, that would have been a license to print money when you think of the relative value of a pound (currency) back then.

I nearly died when I was 16 working on building concrete wheat silos. I'd put my age up, you were supposed to be 18 minimum to get a job there. They were four silos joined together and the working platform raised up as the concrete walls grew in height, a bit like a big extrusion machine. Concrete trucks would dump into a hopper which went up an elevator to the top where labourers with wheelbarrows would wheel it to the formwork rim. There wasn't much in the way of concrete pumps back then. It gives me the shivers when I think of the workplace safety standard back then. The only thing to stop you falling off the scaffold was a handrail made of tomato stakes cobb and co.'d together with tie wire. Pure luck it held up when I fell against it; it was about an 80 foot drop to the bottom at that stage. On the thread topic of positives, I made a lot of money for a 16 year old, had a big adventure and got to keep the hard hat at the end of the job.

Back on topic. Regarding recent talk of a possible Teal party forming, I was wondering what views are on that. Personally I don't think it will go far. At this point there's not enough interest among independents; a lot of them are very mindful they were elected as independents and probably also thinking they could lose their seat to a true independant if they joined a party. There's talk among journalists about the possibility of them filling a centre right void.

The coldest official temperatures we get in Qld. are always at Stanthorpe on the border and Oakey on the Darling Downs. They record winter lows of -4 to -6 on average. A big difference between official recordings and private recordings though. A mate who had a small crop farm at Stanthorpe has recorded up to -15 at rare times. I get why Stanthorpe is cold; it's a thousand feet higher than the Toowoomba range but Oakey has always baffled me. I think it must be the shape of the land around it trapping the cold air or something like that.

40c below is the coldest I've experienced, at Grand Prairie in Alberta. 30 below was quite ok with the right gear but 40 was a point where it was like being in an industrial freezer. 20 below at Calgary was quite pleasant if the wind wasn't blowing and was about equivalent in coldness to two or three above in western Qld. A different cold over there in Canada, as long as you could block the outside air you'd be quite warm. Australian cold is more insidious and can creep into your bones no matter how much clothing you have on. A bit like the difference between dry and humid heat.

Our place had a mix of self mulching black soil and areas of red soil. It was probably about 80% black, 20% red. You could always get a strike on the red soil with limited rain, but it was a gamble as it needed follow up rain to keep going. The black soil needed more rain to get a seed strike but usually held the moisture well. It's changed a lot these days with zero/minimal till and tramtracking. Seems to a lot wider row spacing as well.

Those were the days when we still rode on the sheep's back as the saying goes. My main memories of that town were the steam trains and the yellow Western Transport B-model Mack semis hauling wool bales in from the west. That and being able to consume as many free lemonade spiders as I could handle as my mates parents owned the local cafe.

Thanks octave, that brings back a lot of childhood memories. As a kid I had mates who lived in the local small town and I sometimes stayed with them on weekends and got to do town kid stuff. A few of our activities involved the steam trains that were the common train back then. The rail bridge had a small nook in the concrete abutment directly below the train line, so two or three of us could squeeze in there and watch the trains go over our heads only inches way. It was exciting stuff, a lot of anticipation when we heard the noise and vibration of the train coming, and then totally cacking ourselves as it passed overhead. Sometimes we got burnt a bit but that was ok, it was all good fun until we eventually got busted. When the train drivers were shunting wagons on the spur line they would let us ride up with them in the loco and work the brake lever and stuff like that.

I was listening to a talkback segment on the ABC radio tonight and the publican from Eulo rang in. He was on his way back home from Roma and mentioned that when he bought the car in Roma, the dealers offered a free 1,000 kilometre checkup. That's about 60 k's short of the distance to drive it home from Roma to Eulo and turn around and drive straight back to Roma.

onetrack, I'm assuming W.A. Day marks the date of formation of the colony if I'm right. Qld. Day which marks the date of independence is next Saturday but we don't as yet have a public holiday for it. It's a big mega sport and event day. The Premier has floated the idea of making it a public holiday so we might have it marked as a holiday next year.

I know where they've all gone. I can just about see them from my place.

There you go Nev, there's a post for you that's not generalised. Very specific I woud say.

Yes, correct. I'm giving generalised opinions and not expecting them to be taken as anything more. I prefer making general observations rather than picking sides and pushing one particular political wheelbarrow.