willedoo

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.

One of the videos on X zooms in for a close-up on the younger shooter as he was firing the .410. The way he was holding it and cycling the bolt action, plus the cycling rate looked like he'd done a lot of previous training. He was no amateur shooter.

onetrack, please read my post and don't take it out of context. I didn't say it was a low toll full stop. I said it was a low toll considering they were shooting for about 15 minutes, compared to what it would have been with rifles.

Which explains why the death toll was so low considering they were shooting for about 15 minutes, compared to what it would have been with rifles. The inaccuracy of the .410 shotgun solid slugs is also a factor in why so many were wounded and not killed.

They weren't using rifles; in all the footage there's not one rifle crack. They were using bolt action .410 shotguns, most likely with solid slugs.

My father had shingles and he was lucky to survive it. He had it on the torso but mainly in the head region where they referred to it as Ramsay Hunt Syndrome. It was in his right ear and caused quite a lot of permanent hearing loss. In the three months he was hospitalised, they did a couple of brain scans as it can travel up through the ear and cause swelling of the brain. Luckily that didn't happen. The main reason he spent the three months in hospital was because it got down his throat and he couldn't swallow, so they inserted a peg in his stomach and he lived on tube fed brown liquid for all that time. He was six foot tall and weighed about 56 kg when he finally was discharged, just skin and bone. I took time off work to look after him and they left the peg in for a period of time after he got out of hospital in case he had a relapse and needed liquid feeding again. Fortunately it didn't get into his eye and blind him although the lesions were very close to it. He was 77 at the time and still actively working the farm but after that he never really fully recovered and had to retire. While in hospital he also had the facial palsy and couldn't close his right eye for a long time. They used to tape it closed when he slept to protect the eye. I thought I'd post this because shingles can turn nasty causing blindness, deafness, brain damage and possibly even death in extreme cases. It can be a lot more than just a painful rash and as in my father's case, can be life altering. The vaccine is a no-brainer in my opinion after that experience. I'll never forget visiting my dad in hospital one day when I thought he'd died. He was not much more than a skeleton at that stage and was asleep and breathing very shallowly. As I walked into his room I could only see his open staring right eye that was that way due to the palsy, so that's why I thought he'd gone. When I saw his chest moving up and down I realised he was just asleep and they hadn't taped the eye shut.

Latest BoM update only mentions marine wind warning, no land warnings apart from the flood warnings. Most of the future rain is expected later today and through tomorrow with some going through to mid week. Latest prediction for my area is possibly 200mm so a lot better than the 500mm possible forecast for some areas. This morning when they downgraded it to a low, the wind warning was down to 55kph steady and about 80kph gusts, but that's gone now. There was a lot of cyclones down here in the 1880's/1890's. My local town recorded 90" for the month of January in one of those years and ongoing rain cut the road to the coast for five months. Bearing in mind the old road would have been lower than the present one, just corderoy paper bark trees on the swamp with a gravel topcoat. The most rain I've had here was 33" in 24 hours in the 1992 flood.

Maybe building a storm bunker will have to be added to the jobs list. First cyclone down this way in 50 years but dodged a bullet where I am; not enough rain to wet the rain gauge and very little wind. The attached radar map was 1 to 2am this morning. Moreton and Stradbroke Islands acted as a buffer and knocked the pace off it. It's now a low off Bribie Island slowly headed this way. There's still up to 500mm of rain predicted but that will mostly be on the the more southern side of the low. Even though we didn't cop the wind here, it's still good to have made the preps. Everything is charged, water containers filled, food stocked, concrete block baffle barriers across the driveway and I bought a generator and a phone charger that plugs into the car. Gravity fed water and a gas stove helps. It started as a Cat 2 cyclone and one of the lady presenters on ABC radio made the joke that in NQ they don't even bother to take the washing off the clothesline for a Cat 2. 150kph gusts can still do some damage though. My little old shack is built to 43 metres/sec. wind rating, about 155kph, but I've built in extra bracing and tie down on top of that. One advantage I have is a 38 degree cathedral exposed beam ceiling with a plywood ceiling. The ply sheets are 3 metres long so completely cover the internal area without joins. To cut a long story short, I could lose the tin roof but the ply screwed to the rafters with battens over that would hold and would still repel water for a sustained period. My brother has a tile roof so if they blow off and the blue paper rips, the gyprock ceiling turns to porridge. The 38 degree roof pitch requires more wall bracing and less tie down than a lower pitch roof, but I doubled most of the triple-grip tie down anyway. Stump to bearer tie down is double requirements and there's a ton of cyclone rods and bracing ply panels. The biggest blow I've had here was probably about 60 knots and the shack didn't budge, so hopefully it would stand a cat 2 cyclone it's rated for. The last cyclone I experienced here was 1974 where it crossed just north of us. I was renting an old cane cutter's barracks right on the riverbank and it was shaking and rattling so much that I slept with the full face motorbike helmet on. It goes without saying I had that same helmet parked beside the bed last night just in case, or maybe just for good luck. In the '74 cyclone I woke up to knee deep water in the kitchen, waist deep at it's peak. Having breakfast, the water was just lapping the bottom of the table but didn't go too much higher. In a previous cyclone, that place had only six inches of the roof peak sticking out of the water.

Their commentary is good. I don't really like cricket but enjoy listening to the ABC commentary if that makes any sense.

No good asking me, I averaged 20% for maths. Maybe I did geometry but don't remember it. I did tech drawing in grade 10, would that incorporate geometry?

ABC radio is a fairly broad church. It's mostly the local ABC radio but on some holidays they tap into radio from other states while the local staff have a break. It's good to listen to as background while working. No ads, a lot of talkback and interaction with listeners, news breaks and a minimum of music. On weekends when those previously mentioned people I don't like listening to come on, I switch to ABC news radio. Parts of it are ok. When they run BBC segments some are good and others can get a bit too arty-farty for my liking. A few twits on there but mostly good. When I used to operate machinery I found the ABC radio relaxing to listen to while working. Commercial radio wasn't compatible in a machine.

That's possible. The small round stains on the timber floor that I've put down to gecko excretions, possibly urine, is whitish in colour.

The ABC radio has a lot of good points. For one, it's the only reliable source of emergency information on the air waves. A lot of the shows are good as well. The Country Hour just had it's 79th. birthday a couple of days ago. It's only downside is Macca and Roy and HG, but there's always ABC news radio to switch to while those clowns are on. Bad choice of words, clowns are a lot funnier. Macca has a huge cult following and the consequent ratings giving him a permanent spot. His show is not too bad when he goes on annual holidays and someone else takes over. That Trevor Chappell bloke (not the cricket player) did a good job filling in but watching drying paint is less boring than Macca. Another plus for sports lovers is Grandstand on the weekend. Not all NRL games are televised but they are covered on ABC radio. Plenty of cricket if that's your thing as well.