WHY ARE CAR MANUFACTURERS SUCH DIPSTICKS?

I think that when you are going to criticize something it is best to start by saying something positive about your subject first.  The subject I have in mind is modern car design.

OK here's the positive remark.  I really love reversing cameras in cars.  The car I drive for work has one and it lets me know how close I can back up before hitting something behind me.  It has a red line on the screen and I must be sure not to let this touch an object on the screen or the car will too.  This allows me to get nice and close without causing damage.

Right, now onto criticism.

Why do I have to get into a car that has become an oven closed up in the sun?  Even once the air-conditioner is turned on, it takes up to twenty minutes for the upholstery, glass and internal plastic to stop pulsing with heat.

I have long tried to devise a system for fixing this that would sell.  The trouble is that no car needs add-ons attached to its exterior or interior, at least the number it would take to shade the car.  Roof racks are the exception to this but they are designed to look modular and hug the roof.

The attachments for shading a whole car would have to be big, light and able to be rolled into place and later back into their holders.  There would also need to be hooks attached around the car to hold the screens when they are rolled over the windows.  Not only this, they would look bad, be easily damaged and pulling them over all the windows when you leave the car would be incredibly time consuming.

The answer therefore lies within.  I thought of a roll screen that started on the dashboard and could be pulled over the front seat and hooked behind the rear seats.  This would only protect the steering wheel and upholstery and they may still overheat.  Internal roll up screens on each window and front and rear windscreens would, unless they were automated, also need time to put up and need attachments to hold them.

The answer lies with the car manufacturers.

I have asked myself why they don't come up with internal black or heat proof screens that slide up inside the power windows and front and back windscreens.  These would be automatic, totally integrated within the car and not an eyesore.

Cost, I hear you scream, that's why.  Well how about a vent or something?

It's a lot like cup holders and wheels on suitcases.  These were such darned obvious inventions that no one bothered to make them.  Obviously wheels on suitcases have nothing to do with cars, I'm just making the point that the obvious tends to get overlooked.

The manufacturers are too busy putting in hands-free phones, key-less entry, GPS and the Internet into cars to think about simple and effective improvements.

For example, windscreens; once these were more vertical and had a sun visor to protect passengers from the sun.  There were quadrant windows that you could adjust to get a breeze directed straight at you.

Now you can roast like meat in the front of a car under the sloping windscreen.  And isn't everyone concerned about skin cancer?  Don't children at school have to put on hats before they go outside?  But you can get a fabulous tan in the front seat of your car without even going to the beach.  A car must look aerodynamic even if it kills you by allowing you to get malignant skin cancers.

Doors are another pain.  If you park on a sideways slope or a hill, you have to hold them open or they'll slam on some part of your anatomy as you try to clamber out.  Hasn't anyone thought of hydraulic doors that can stay open?

It's hard to believe how much money is spent on new designs when nothing innovative or sensible is added to new models.

It wouldn't matter if I bought a Mini or a Maserati, they are both just cars and don't have any of the features I would like to have added.

I like rear windscreen wipers that many cars do have and some clever cars have two sun visors so that one goes down in front of you and one at the side window so that, as the car turns, your eyes are shielded from the sun.

One amazingly stupid thing about cars that have power assisted brakes and steering is that, when they stall, the brakes drop to one third of their efficiency and steering becomes like driving a tank.  This strikes me as being an enormous safety risk.

One last problem with modern cars is that the elderly and people with knee problems have trouble lifting their legs over the sill of the chassis as they get in.  I don't know why it has to be higher than the floor.

It would be great, if possible, for the front passenger seat to be able to swivel so that the elderly and those with problem legs, could plonk their butts down first and then deal with their legs.  It may not be possible but it's a nifty idea.

And how the about the boot/trunk?  Although some people have managed to stuff bodies in these, getting heavy suitcases into them is always difficult.  A handy little winch system would be well received.  All right, that's probably pushing things a bit but it's a little dream of mine.

All this may be wishful thinking but, just as cup holders took a century to make their way into modern cars, so maybe some of my ideas will eventually be taken on.  In the meantime, I don't care what I drive as long as it has four wheels, power windows, air-conditioning, goes forward at a reasonable speed and brakes as required.  I do like an automatic these days as I've become lazy.

But what I want, what I really, really want is a heat proof car.

I'm amazed that a new car can cost over fifty thousand dollars and after a few years, be valued at less than five thousand.  If it still works what is the difference?  If you bought replacement parts for such a car and fully rebuilt it, it would cost more than a brand new Porche.

Imagine if your house devalued with age the way a car does?  It provides the same shelter and the car does the same job.  Life is nuts.

A 1959 Road Trip Around Australia - Part 1.

 

My Mother's Opinion of Our 1959 Road Trip Around Australia
Don't Worry It's Not Loaded

There are days that have a special aura about them, that carry you along in a kind of magic plasma.  Colours appear to be more vibrant and the light is different.

Decades can have the same golden hue.  In 1959 on the cusp of two decades, one of post-war optimism and recovery, and the dawn of the fabulous and amazing 60's, I was seven years old.  I was also at the cusp, passing from the age of magic thinking to that of full comprehension.  It would mark the end of my spectacularly happy childhood as I moved on to the greater complexities entailed in just growing up, but my childhood went out on a high.

Dad took my mother and I on a road trip; a very long road trip.  His family had just sold their national news magazine, The Bulletin, to Frank Packer of Australian Consolidated Press.  At forty Dad found himself unemployed after years of being a journalist and caricaturist under his editor father.  Prior to this he had served in New Guinea as a lieutenant in World War 2.

He needed thinking time, not that I was aware of it at the time.  I did know that the family had lost its crown jewel and even I felt sad about it.  What my mother felt she never said but it must have been a huge disappointment for her.

It was June when we set off in a 1959 FC Holden Station Wagon.  It was a big, comfy car with a sun shade over the windscreen, quadrant windows that gave a fantastic breeze and bench seats front and back.  It was a cream colour with tan contrast.  There was no silly luggage guard separating the rear seat from the back.

The rear seat could be folded down to make a large area able to sleep two people.  The car had no air-conditioning and basically we didn't need it except in one hellishly hot outback town when the temperature reached well over 42' C (105'F) in early winter.  Nonetheless we survived nicely without it.  I don't think cars had air-conditioning then anyway.

I was in the glorious mindset of total parental trust at that age and I must also have been born a nomad.  I didn't question where we were going, I was just happy to go.  What a lovely thing it is to have no expectations.

Dad and Mum shared the driving while I sat in the back seat, mostly, and looked at everything we passed.  I am the perfect tourist.  I just love watching the landscape change around me.  Years later when I drove my son anywhere he wouldn't even look out the window.  I don't think he would have enjoyed this six week tour.

We went clockwise from Sydney and so headed south.  I don't remember too much of this part of the trip as I'd been this route before.  I also have an anathema to heading south or anywhere that is colder.  Mother dressed me remarkably well during the trip and she could have been a Vogue model on a travel shoot. as the photo below shows.

 

Mum, Myself and a local in the Outback









I have a thing for rocks.  I took two little suitcases with me.  They were no more than 30cm, or 1 foot, wide.  I saved rocks that I found in one and shells in the other.  Somewhere near Canberra, I think, was a hill covered with Mica.  Its flaky, mirror like pieces fascinated me so I took a couple of pieces for my collection.  The journey mustn't have impressed me much at his stage.  I remember we drove through some snow in the Australian Alps and had to put chains on the tyres but nothing really impressed me until we reached Adelaide.

I have no photos of the Twelve Apostles rock formations of the coast of Victoria from this journey although I saw them on a number of other occasions.  Another family, the Browns, travelled along with us in their matching, but different coloured, Holden Station Wagon.  They were made up of Gordon, a man the size of a mountain, his wife Molly, who was a severe diabetic, Prue their daughter, who was twelve, and Penny their Corgi dog.

Molly's illness meant the family sometimes had to go ahead of us to get to a pharmacy in a township for Insulin but she seemed to be fine throughout the trip.

Somewhere in the Snowy district Prue and I plunged into a cold stream.  That much I remember.



Not Platypuses but Water Nymphs in the Snowy 

 

We may have been smiling but, boy, was it cold.  I know we reached Adelaide but only one thing there rings a bell.  My parents stopped at the Penfold's winery.  Had I been eighteen you couldn't have stopped me going inside with them for a tour given my love of wine.  Instead I stayed outside on a lovely patch of grass that was covered with buttercups.  I haven't seen those pretty yellow flowers for decades now.  I wonder what has happened to them.  Perhaps they are a victim of progress.

 

I also wonder if I woke fully from my early childhood on the journey and that it was the catalyst.  After Adelaide I seemed to become totally immersed.  My memories really start from this time.  I also swear from the photos that I grew taller in those six weeks.  From Adelaide the fun began and the terrain really caught my attention.  I think it did for Dad too, for the earlier photos are sporadic, while the later ones were many.

 

The car was put on the Ghan, the famous train that runs between Adelaide and Alice Springs and, these days, to Darwin, but not then.  I think we spent three days on board.  I awoke one morning to find Dad already in the salon car.  Above us on a slight hill a spectacular sunrise was unfolding.  The hill was black against the sky and on it a lone windmill was silhouetted against a pink and orange sky.  The sight took my breath away.  Dad and I watched it together.  That vision has never left my mind.

 

My parents made friends with an Italian film producer and his wife on the train.  I seem to recall he looked like the film star of the fifties, Louis Jourdan.  He was on board to make an advertisement about the Ghan.  It was to be shown at cinemas leading up to movies.

 

This was real excitement.  I helped him as we spent an entire morning sticky-taping yellow cellophane on the dining car windows to get the right light.  I was even given a small role in the advertisement where, when eating with my parents, I had to say a line.  I can't  have been very good as the line kept getting shorter with every take.  Finally I got to say "Chicken" just before I took a bite.

 

Later I was hoping to find out I made it into the advertisement.  I never did know.  Back in Sydney my parents and I would occasionally go to the Italians' place for dinner.  Their dining table was amazing.  It was glass and was suspended from the ceiling with piano wires that went through it to the floor.  I've never again seen anything like it and this was 1959.

 

We disembarked at Alice Springs and had plenty to take in there.  We walked through the Katherine Gorge and saw the town.  Then we boarded a small plane that I think now must have been a twin engine Cessna.  I know that on the hour and a half flight to Ayers Rock I had one terrific ear ache.  I forgot about it on landing at the sight of that incredible monolith.  We pretty much had the place to ourselves apart from the other passengers and the Rock's caretaker.

I don't believe you can walk on the Rock these days.  Dad and I made some progress up along a handrail that guided us.  There were a couple of people already there who had made it to the top.  We were driven around the whole Rock and it is quite a distance.  The day was dull but the colours were amazing.

Uluru, once called Ayers Rock 

No wonder we call the Outback "the Red Centre".  I've never been to Ayers Rock again but I am so glad I've been once.  Years later I flew over the centre of Australia going from Perth to Cairns.  We flew directly over the Rock and my son, then eleven years old, had the chance to see it from the air.  I find it amazing that in the centre of this huge continent is this extraordinary monolith.  I feel it can't be a coincidence.  No wonder it is sacred to the Aboriginals and now, rightly, bears the name "Uluru".

 

Imagine, though, if you were Ayers, the explorer, coming upon this amazing sight over a century ago.  I would say he and his party would have been gobsmacked to say the least.

 

From Alice Springs Dad drove us to a station quite a way west of the city.  There lived one of my mother's bridesmaids who had married a station owner called Jim Macdonnel and they had three children.  We stayed with them a couple of days.  I had the dubious pleasure of using the "School of the Air" with them.  I had escaped school for longer than the three-week holiday and I had to spend the entire class time with them.

 

Another time all the kids and I hitched a ride on top my parent's station wagon hanging onto the luggage rack as they drove out on the property.  This was enormous fun.  The family had aboriginal help in the house but we drove across a dry river bed where the local aboriginals lived in bark shanties.  It was hard to believe my eyes as our car went past their encampment.

 

The School of the Air

 

Leaving the Macdonnels behind we headed North towards Darwin.  First we stopped at Mataranka Homestead.  Hot springs at Mataranka bubble from the ground and in those days there was no caravan park and no embellishments.  Nearby is the grave of the author Jeannie Gunn who wrote "We of the Never Never" as the area is known.

 

It is the story of a young city woman who married Aeneus Gunn who lived and worked in this outpost of the Outback in the 1890's.

 

                                            Dad and I in the hot springs at Mataranka

 

The homestead was a two storey affair and very basic.  I remember getting no sleep as the owner snored so loudly the tin roof reverberated all night.  Outside in the aboriginal camp meat was drying in the open and I have never seen so many flies in my life.  The backs of the aboriginals would be covered with flies but that didn't seem to bother them one iota.



 

Mataranka Homestead - not exactly the Hilton

 

I loved swimming in the hot springs but felt sure there must be crocodiles in the water.  My father assured me there were none but I was a difficult child to convince.  On Mission Beach I wouldn't climb down from Gordon Browns shoulders to get in the water because I was sure there were Sea Wasp stingers at that time of year.  There weren't but I'm nothing if no careful.

 

From Mataranka it was on to Katherine, a place where we camped beside a river.  I particularly liked Katherine.  Dad carried a 22 calibre rifle on the trip, mostly for safety as the Outback is a big place and he had two women to protect.  I loved shooting tin cans with it when I was allowed.  Dad decided for the first and last time in his life to try hunting.  He took aim at hawk high above the river in Katherine.  I think he thought he would miss.  He didn't.  He never forgave himself.  When Gordon went hunting for boar later, Dad only went with a camera.

 

Campsite at Katherine

 My father was simply the nicest and kindest man I ever knew.  That opinion hasn't changed to this day.  If he could have breathed life back into the hawk, he would have.  He was a devout Catholic and I'm sure he said penance for what he did.  But actions spoke louder than words for him and he spent his life living by the doctrine: treat others as you would have them treat you.  You can see the smile in the photo below is a sad one.  He just did it for the camera.

                                                                                    My father William Norman Prior

END OF PART ONE.

 

 

 





THE GENTEEL ART OF CAB DRIVING.

Too Busy Looking for a House Number to Notice the Customer





It is said that when life hands you lemons you should make lemonade.  Life has handed me so many it's a wonder that I don't look like a Pucker Fish.

But it all balances out.  My life started out very nicely thank you.  I was born into a well-to-do family in a beautiful setting on Pittwater north of Sydney.  From the moment I was able to perceive, I fell in love with my surroundings.  Unfortunately you need to physically own something in order to keep it.  My parents owned the place and sold it to retire when I was thirty, married and had moved elsewhere.

I think it's rather a shame that an adult child doesn't get part ownership of parental property, the way spouses do. That would sure keep the population down, wouldn't it?  But I had no say in the matter and all my protestations moved my parents not at all.  I should have learned from experience.  My parents had ignored every protestation I ever made so why change then?

Had I been able to keep the property I would now be worth a fortune.  Well, that's not entirely true.  I would have been sitting on a fortune and working to try and earn enough to eat.  My mistake was not marrying for money.  The trouble is I still couldn't bring myself to do such a thing unless the man was all I dreamed of and, rather importantly, he felt the same about me so that he proposed.

It is also a bit hard to get well-to-do men to take you seriously when you drive a cab for a living no matter how good you look.  They seem to think I'm good for a date and an easy lay. I have dated a couple of men I've met through my job but they soon discover that I'm not easy. I am also amazed that men of a certain age think that you will date them even though they look like the rear end of a fat bull.

Men are attracted to good looking women, any women in fact, but they don't have the slightest inclination to lose weight or wear shoes instead of joggers to dinner and make themselves attractive to us.  Some men must think that women go blind after forty just like men go deaf.

I find it extremely irksome and convenient for them that most men start to go deaf in middle age.  I'm sure it's a deliberate genetic ploy by nature.  It's bad enough that men don't listen until you say something three times, by which time they decide that the annoying noise they won't tune into is nagging.  Then, just to add insult to injury, they go deaf. 

I've also discovered that if men think you have no money, they want nothing to do with you. Most are divorced and have already suffered from STD (Sexually Transmitted Debt) and don't want to again. Perversely, however, there are men who go on the Internet and seek Russian or Asian brides with the whole idea of having the woman financially dependent on them.

They choose such women for two reasons.  They are misguided enough to think that women from certain cultures are more pliant and willing to please a man and also it will be hard for them to survive or leave if they want a divorce.  Women who are older, single and local are overlooked in favour of foreign, younger brides but I'd want nothing to do with such a man any more than he'd want anything to do with me.

So how did I end up driving a cab when I started off so well and thought such a job was somewhere at the bottom of the food chain?  I keep wondering that myself when I'd made all the right moves.  My mother, with whom I finally got on beautifully in the last seven years of her life said to me: "You're unlucky."

I have to say it is one thing we agreed on.  It makes no sense, but then luck doesn't make sense.  We had been discussing how my life had turned out in spite of all the effort I had put in.  How I'm a clever and decent person who didn't cause bad things to happen out of ignorance or unkindness and how things not only didn't go well, they went awry.

When I left school I spent two and a half years at University studying Science and then suddenly dropped my bundle and dropped out.  There was good reason.  I had survived boarding school suffering severe Obsessive Compulsive and Panic Disorder.  I am very clever but could not concentrate on my studies.  I winged through and matriculated simply because I could swat in a matter of weeks and was terrified that if I failed a year, that would mean I'd stay longer in school.  The teachers advised my mother to take me out.  She didn't listen.

After leaving University I had to do something for a living as my parents couldn't understand the need for me to stop and repair by sitting around the house watching midday matinees on television, so I was bundled off to do a short Computer course.  I became a Programmer for one year and decided that if this was living, I didn't much care for it.  The fact is I needed a break.

My boyfriend of four years, whom I had met at University, finally convinced me to marry him and it was in the next five years, when we moved around the country for his work, that I was able to repair.  It wasn't easy for him at all or on our marriage, but it gave me healing space.  I owe him greatly for this time.  After we had our son when we lived in Perth, the final cathartic step to gain my sanity was moving to Hong Kong for three years for my husband's job.  I loved the place so much it simply took over my mind and my spirit and I became strong.

Unfortunately Hong Kong didn't have the same effect on my husband.  Also, in finally flying free of my past, I let my hair down a tad too much and hurt him.  Wounded but wiser we moved back to Australia where I tried to make it up.  Sadly he never forgave me and we remained in Perth, a place I detested, for seven years.  In the end I was beginning to fall apart.  If there is one thing you don't do to someone who has suffered panic disorder and got over it, as well as been trapped in a boarding school they hate, it is to tie them down where they don't want to be.

Panic disorder means it is hard to go out anywhere without being overwhelmed and beginning to panic. I had tied myself down and had then broken free.  Now I was being tied down and I believe it was punishment.  I decided to undertake a degree at this stage because I felt I would soon need to support myself.  I had been doing odd jobs wherever we had traveled and I was able to find work, but I wanted a career.

Our son was still in primary school and I didn't want to take on too stressful a degree so that he would suffer or that would cause me to drop out again.  I had a habit of taking on a course and dropping out since my first time at University.  I could see what my brain was up to.  I was re-dropping my bundle by habit.  I wasn't going to let it get away with that just as I had beaten OCD and panic.  This time I would go the distance.

I chose to do an Arts degree majoring in Communications and Media.  This was a practical degree that would give me employment opportunities.  I completed it at the same time my husband decided to take a job in Brisbane.  What could be better?  I was out of Perth at last and qualified although without experience.

Over the preceding years I had picked up enough secretarial and computer skills to make me proficient. It was just as well.  For the next four years I applied for roles allied to my degree.  I had three interviews in all that time.  It wasn't as easy then either.  Email was just in it's infancy.  Every letter was typed and sent and then you had to wait for the reply by phone or mail.

My marriage broke up and I had to look for secretarial positions.  Even the word had gone out of favour and was now an Administration Assistant, a Personal Assistant or an Executive Assistant.  They were all the same duties but depended on the seniority of the person for whom you worked.

Firstly it was hard to get the work.  On one occasion when I did land a role I worked beside a girl who had also just started.  She was twenty and had arrived in Brisbane the day before. She said she could always get a temporary job the moment she applied anywhere.  I smelt a rat.  I was now forty but looked very young for my age.  Could it be possible there was age discrimination out there?

This is where it gets weird.  My roles were sporadic to say the least.  I had to go to Centrelink to obtain unemployment benefits when I was out of work.  My husband still helped but it wasn't enough.  Apart from the jobs being few and far between I appeared to be jinxed as, without exaggeration, I was figuratively knifed in the back in every office job I did.

I was amenable, hard working and enthusiastic but there is a lemon in every office and something about me cheeses them off.  Some of them were covert while others were outright poisonous.  I was always the new person in the role and would be turfed out at the end of three months.  No one seemed to care that I relied on my job for financial support.  No, humanity doesn't come into it with these types.  All they cared about was the invisible threat I somehow posed.

My partner, whom I met after my husband and I split up, had driven taxis and wanted me to lease one so he could help support us.  My husband and parents had helped me buy a house after the divorce and when I decided to move, I sold it with a view to buying elsewhere. It was far from paid off so I only had so much capital.  Meantime we bought a car and leased the taxi plate with all associated costs that included yearly registration, insurance and maintenance.  Let it be understood that taxi registration is ten times the amount of car registration as is the insurance.

I never did get another house.  The lease went into debt and I had to get a cab licence so I could drive and help reduce it.  Meantime I lived on what capital I had left until there wasn't any.  I also spent a lot flying to Sydney to visit my mother where she lived in a nursing home.

I was at first humiliated to be driving a cab but gradually I felt a lot safer than I did working with vipers in an office.  My garrulous nature also had an outlet at last.  My first customers were groups of school children whose taxi fares were subsidized by the Government as they suffered conditions such as Asperger's Syndrome, Autism and in some cases severe depression.

The group of older primary school boys I drove regularly helped me in their own way to deal with my new job.  They were terrific and we got on wonderfully as a group.  After a year of driving them as well as other customers, I tried office work again.  You know what happened of course so I went back to driving cabs.  Our cab lease was finished and I took my courage in hand and went to a depot and signed on.

I started with two days a week, all that was available, and worked up to five and being a regular.  I'm no longer feeling ashamed.  Now I love this job.  I also feel like I have a workplace and belong to the group at the depot.  It's a great feeling to be accepted in a workplace at last.  Of course I'm a bit of an oddity.  Female drivers are about as scarce as Dodo's but that makes us feel unique, and appreciated.

One thing I've discovered is that people treat you the way you feel about yourself.  I'm respected for what I do and I find women passengers to be the best, the opposite of how it works in an office.  Women appreciate having a woman driver.  Young women want to hire me to drive them at night, but I only drive in the day.  I'm not brave enough to deal with drunks and the other types who come out at night.

At least twice a day I'm asked what a woman like me is doing driving a cab.  I feel like an endless, repeating tape recording, so now I'm writing it down.  I did try office work again a couple of years ago and hated being cooped up indoors.  I also worked with possibly the worst of the backstabbers I had endured.  She was a witch from hell.  She set me up, she lied to the manager, she half filled me in on what to do and loathed the fact that I enjoyed what I did.

It took every ounce of my self control to not let all the tyres on her car down when I left.  I still wish I hadn't shown such restraint.  At any rate I decided I was too old to put up with people like her.  I also decided she was her own worst karma and would make her own life miserable.  As such, revenge was irrelevant.

 

I am safer in the taxi than in an office even with the occasional real knife wielding lunatic.  If you treat people well, they treat you well, even when they have a knife.  It doesn't work in an office but I believe petty jealousy is the reason for a lot of bad behaviour in the work place.

I also believe that whatever you do, you should take pride in it and do it well.  The same applies to cab driving.  A ride in a cab should be a pleasure and if you are foreign to a place, you should be able to trust the driver to know exactly how to get you to your destination the shortest way possible.

Lately this isn't usually the case given the number of overseas students driving cabs for some extra money.  Many don't care about customer service, often don't know how to get to a place and some just plain cheat.  It makes it harder for me to take pride in something that I found hard to accept doing in the first place.

I won't finance my old age doing this job, given my finances, but at least I'm independent and not relying on social security.  Who knows what the future holds anyway?  It's one ride where you don't know exactly where you're heading.  I really wouldn't want to know anyway.

END.

A VOYAGE INTO MY COUNTRY'S PAST.

Captain James Cook had two missions when he set out on the Endeavour from Plymouth in Great Britain in 1769.  One was to take a group of scientists to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti.  He was then to explore and chart the South Pacific and search for the land mass known until then as Terra Australis.

Ships had been bumping into it for a couple of centuries but, like the blind men and the elephant, each had come upon it from a different direction, formed an opinion and left while those who actively sought it missed it completely.

Cook bumped into it on purpose having sussed out its whereabouts from observations made by Abel Tasman on an earlier voyage.  Cook went west after charting New Zealand, which Tasman had discovered, and made land fall at a sandy bay which he named Botany Bay in honour of Joseph Banks, a botanist on board, who merrily tripped about collecting Banksia plants and thus ensured himself a lifetime of honours as well as membership of the prestigious Royal Society.

Cook on his way northwards planted a flag at Possession Island in the Torres Strait after he had actually left the mainland to lay claim to Australia.  It seems a bit odd to stick a flag on a tiny island to lay claim to a very large continent but he probably planted a few more here and there for good measure.  Explorers must have had a sense of honour in those days because anyone could have come and ripped a flag out and replaced it with another.  Ships' logs must have been inarguable for they surely would be the only record of who got where first.  At any rate Cook had laid claim to a continent only second in distance to his home in Britain as the planet Venus.

The British Government thought Australia would be a good base from which protect their interests in the East Indies where they vied for goods and territories with the Dutch, French and Portuguese.  For years, however, nobody really knew what to do with this new acquisition.  It was too far from anywhere to be of much use.  That is, unless you wanted to send something, or somebody as far away as possible.

For years various people in or around the government had suggested that Australia would be a good place to send convicts but it wasn't until the 1780's that Britain's gaols had become so full that many convicts were housed in ships moored in ports.  The conditions were horrendous and the prisoners never saw daylight.

Even those destined for the bright sunlight of Australia could wait on board these floating cesspools for up to a year.

On January 26, 1988 twelve years after Cook had left Australia, Captain Arthur Phillip, a pretty decent guy compared to some later Governors, arrived with three ships at Sydney Harbour.  One was carrying solely women convicts.

There was nowhere to the prisoners could run to escape so they were let ashore and a ration of rum given to each person.  After Arthur Phillip and his officers finished their evening meal aboard, the officers also went ashore.  It should be noted that officers and prisoners, male and female, found niches, nooks and crannies and settled into an all night drunken orgy.

This is how the British put their first mark on Australian soil.  The next morning Captain Phillip admonished one and all saying something along these lines: "Tut, tut, there'll be no more of that sort of thing."

Rum would become the currency of the fledgling nation and whale and seal killing the backbone of its economy until sheep took over.  But in the first five years the colony almost starved.  The first ship with supplies was slow coming from Britain and Phillip finally took a chance and sent one of his ships to Africa to replenish supplies.  Fortunately it came back.

The British weren't fond of fresh fish and preferred the preserved, pickled beef that floated in brine in barrels.  Well you had to be slightly mad venture so far from home and, if that stuff didn't kill you, you must have been hardy.  The first crops only succeeded enough in supplying seed for the next crops.  Eventually the settlers moved inland and hit pay dirt in a place where their crops took hold and yielded plentiful harvests and gradually the colony became self-sufficient.

By the next century freed prisoners, who were called 'ticket of leave' men or women, were writing and telling their relatives to come to the land of opportunity.  Some were even allocated land to start life afresh. So popular did Australia become that the British government chose increasingly sadistic Governors to run the penal settlements to put terror into the hearts of convicts so they would stop waxing enthusiastic about the place.  Transportation was not to be seen as a bonus and reprieve, and the parade of these sadistic governors who ran our prisons in Tasmania, Norfolk Island and Moreton Bay should have put people off, but didn't.

Captain Patrick Logan was head of the penal settlement at Moreton Bay in Queensland.  Suburbs and highways now bear his name but on the night he was murdered when out exploring, the prisoners, on hearing the news, roared with glee and applauded all night.

To read Robert Hughes' "The Fatal Shore" is the biggest eye opener I have ever experienced in regard to Australia.  I am also filled with admiration for those who not only chose to stay after being freed but to those who came voluntarily.  Hughes provides an insight into the anti-class system that arose, not from throwing off the old British class system as I had thought, but from the snobbery that arose between the free settlers, or exclusives, as they were called, and ticket of leave men and women.

Those who came voluntarily did not want to be tarred with the convict brush, however, the crimes of the majority of people who were transported arose from poverty and desperation.  There were definitely re-offenders and hard criminal types who kept breaking laws once freed, or stood up to authority in prison.  These were sent to the dreaded prisons on Norfolk Island and Tasmania.  Such dreadful and inhumane things happened in these places it will forever be a blot on our history.

The bushrangers were mostly escaped convicts and so many became legends and anti-authority figures.  The mind set of Australia arose from those who had been raised under the tyranny of poverty and an unequal class system.  The horizon here was as far reaching in its actual and social possibilities as Britain's was not.

The light of Australia was not only from the sun but from enlightenment, from possibilities and new frontiers.  I am truly proud to be an Australian.  It is a country that just keeps broadening its horizons mentally to fit its extraordinary size.  It has no wars.  It accepts all people and cultures.  I only hope some of these do not bring the mindsets of the wars they have left behind.  This country can be physically cruel and it is not a place for man to set against man.  We have to live in harmony so the land doesn't swallow us whole.  There is no room for aggression or petty antagonisms.

This is the lesson we can learn from the very first settlers, the aboriginals.  They did not abuse the land but lived in harmony with it.  Australia is both a terrible and fragile country.  It is terrible if you take it for granted and go unprepared into its vast interior spaces.  But its green rim is fragile and must be protected and the greatest danger to it is us.

END

IF.....AUSTRALIA HAD BEEN COLONISED 4,000 YEARS AGO BY THE EGYPTIANS.

Throwing a Prawn on the Barbie!

LIFE RECIPE.

Boarding School Fare - a snail in the spinach

   

Cooking seems to be a very popular subject on television right now.  Women's magazines have always included recipe sections and now there are shows like Masterchef, My Kitchen Rules and numerous others.

I've been cooking since my mother decided I should help out in the kitchen.  She didn't know how to cook when she married but she soon learned how to with a vengeance.  In my years at home I never saw a sausage or mashed potato grace our dinner table.  She bought meat weekly from the butcher and ordered exactly the cuts she wanted.

Our steaks always came from scotch fillets and she would roast whole ones as well.  Chicken could  be roasts or so many different casseroles it would make a hen's breast puff with pride.  I grew up in Sydney and my mother made things that I later discovered hadn't been heard of in some other states until thirty years later.  Brisbane was particularly backward cuisine wise and had not heard of cheesecake until the 1970's I believe.  When I arrived there in 1991 I couldn't find brown bread anywhere.  It was like landing in a time warp.

Part of the reason for my mother's success was that my father grew up next door to a French family.  One of the daughters of the household, who was my father's age, became my Godmother.  Her mother, who was always referred to as Madame, shared her French recipes with the younger generation.  My mother's recipe book is full of typed pages in a ring binder.  She gives credit for every recipe in it.  'Madame' is listed under many of the desserts.

No matter how hard I try I can never compete with my mother's cooking.  Some people have 'the gift' and she did.  My ex-husband, blast his hide, also has 'the gift'.  His second wife was double-blessed with it.  When we were still married my husband was an absolute boon when we gave a dinner party.  He would also get all the credit even though I did all the preparation.  For some reason I have always been commended on my salads and, oddly, sandwiches.  I mean any idiot can make these.  Perhaps it is my gift.

There was one little problem, however, with my husband's technique.  While my mother washed every pan after she used it, my husband used every pan in the kitchen and let them pile up in the sink to skyscraper level.  In the open plan kitchen-dining rooms of today guests can see the gargantuan mess so I had to clean the lot up before they arrived.  I would end up a mass of perspiration and just have time to put on my make-up which slid immediately off my face.

I remember a Christmas we spent at my parents' place.  My husband insisted on glazing a ham.  My mother did not like anyone in her kitchen at all.  The trouble with kitchens is that everyone loves to congregate in them.  In the home in which I grew up, the kitchen had a door to the outside and one to our hallway.  It was small to say the least and a thoroughfare into the bargain.

These days kitchens are open plan and attached to a family room.  That solves this age old problem but no kitchen on earth would have been big enough for my mother.  My parents had moved to another state and a house with a much bigger kitchen by the time we celebrated the Christmas in question.

Even so I watched as my mother succumbed to one of her mini nervous breakdowns as my husband entered the kitchen every twenty minutes to glaze the ham.  Mother had these breakdowns on a regular basis.  I'm sure the reason I was turfed off to boarding school at the age of ten was because my mother couldn't cope with her only child, who did everything to please her, taking up space in the house.

Perhaps I should be grateful but at boarding school I suffered through eight years of the most appalling food imaginable.  At school it was possible to leave a fork in the bowl in which the sausages had arrived at a refectory table, pick it up when the fat had set and the bowl come with it.  The delights of afternoon tea were enjoyed all over again when their leftovers from the four previous days turned up in green jelly and opaque pink custard as a trifle for dessert.

At a previous school there was also the mashed pumpkin that was watery mush and had pieces of pumpkin skin left in it.  We named these bits Sister Katherine's fingernails after the woman who prepared it.  It made us gag.  Another treat was the added protein of tiny snails that remained in the spinach and had clung stubbornly on during the washing of the leaves.

I came home from school on Friday nights.  I would have looked forward to this but instead dreaded the meal.  This was because my dear father was a devout Catholic.  My mother was Church of England in name only and not religious in any sense, but she would cook Friday meals according to the Catholic directive of the time.

She would rub this in as she picked me up on Friday afternoon.

"We're having your favourite tonight," she would say.  This was either delusion or downright mean.  "Smoked fish mornay."

I hated that dish.  I repeatedly told her so and I don't know if she kept forgetting or it was dad's favourite and she got us mixed up.  I hate fish period, but smoked, orange skinned fish in a cheese sauce was almost enough to make me jump out of the car and go back to school.

The real treat was her Sour Cherry Pie.  She refused to write the recipe down and when I asked for it years later she had forgotten how she did it.  I said I'd try to make it and she gave me a vague guide.  I never tried to follow her instructions.  I just wasn't going to ruin perfection.

Mum was an innovative cook as well.  She would prepare well ahead and freeze meals so she could always cater for visitors.  On weekends our house was often full of friends and family.  On one of these occasions I must have been out with my future husband and came home to a house full of people.  Everyone was in our very large living room eating fork food from a plate.  It turned out it was a Spinach Pie.

Given my memory of spinach from school I point blank refused to try it even though everyone exhorted me to do so.  It was delicious they said.  After ten minutes I gave in and said I'd try a bite.

I never looked back and the recipe has become one of my favourites.  It is called French Onion Tart of all things.  The French Onion part comes from the addition of a packet of dry French Onion soup to the ingredients.  The actual pie is packed to the gunnels with chopped spinach, three eggs, ham, cheddar and some cream, to which I'm usually allergic, but it's cooked to the point that it doesn't upset me.

Once I would buy spinach leaves, wash and finely chop these in a blender then drain the liquid.  Now it's available, I just buy the finely chopped frozen kind making the dish so much easier.  It's placed in a shortcrust pie crust, which I also used to make, but now just buy, then sprinkled with more cheese and baked in a Pyrex pie dish.

On one occasion I spent a good part of the day making this dish for a couple who were coming to dinner.  All went fine and it was cooked to perfection.  I don't know what I had previously cooked on a hot plate but I forgot it was still hot.  I took the pie out of the oven and gently placed it on the hotplate that I thought was cool.  A few seconds later came the sound of an explosion.  Pie and Pyrex went everywhere.

We bought Kentucky Fried and cleaned up the kitchen.  I have never put anything on a hotplate since before checking the temperature.  It also isn't wise to put a hot Pyrex dish in the sink and run water over it.  I tend to think Pyrex can handle anything but it doesn't tolerate fools.

One of my mother's other great recipes is Madame's Chocolate Mousse.  Real French Chocolate Mousse has no cream in it.  The cream is added, whipped, as a side dish.  Only cheats put cream in a true Chocolate Mousse.  I should admit that I am lactose intolerant and the only cream I can tolerate has been cooked to a temperature where it has broken down such as in the Spinach Pie.

My mother also made beautiful lamb stews but pork was never her favourite.  Pork was once the most expensive meat to buy in Australia but she also found it too dry to casserole although we did occasionally have pork roasts.

My mother kept her appetite for food for her lifetime and was still enjoying food when she lived in a nursing home.  I am sadly losing my appetite.  I am still young but can eat only a little.  I must have a very slow metabolism.  In fact it is probably very efficient but dulls my interest in food.  It simply isn't worth going to a restaurant now.  The most I can consume is an entrée and that's it.

This year I went to my son's place for Christmas.  I was invited for an early dinner.  In the late afternoon the table was spread with dips and snacks.  Everyone ate with gay abandon except me.  I didn't eat, saving for dinner which came three hours later.  I told my son to only invite me for one meal at any time.

I remember a delightful, birdlike, old lady at my mother's nursing home looking at her Christmas lunch.  She said: "I don't even want to eat anymore."  It is tragic to run out of appetite before you die.  In old age, if there is nothing left to you, no sex, no travel, no independence, at least there is food.  It is the final affront not to be able to enjoy what is so life giving.

There are people in the world without enough to eat and sadly there are people who, with food available to them, simply can't eat anymore.  Food is one of life's great pleasures as well as vital to sustain life.  It is wonderful to think that something so necessary can also give such pleasure.

I am also impressed by the fact that humans have turned food into an art form.  It began with subsistence and, when we found a way to store food and have plenty, it became a source of creativity.  We humans are an interesting lot in that we apply art to what is necessary and basic.

Imagine if we had to thresh the wheat, milk a cow to make butter, grow sugar cane and reduce it to sugar grains, raise hens for eggs, just to make a cake.  Cooking shows how far we have come in the sense of how we gather and store foodstuffs.  It is not trivial.  It is a tribute to human ingenuity.

You know how it feels when the electricity goes off and we are plunged into darkness?  We are lost for anything to do.   There are no woodstoves to cook on.  People used to read by candlelight or go to bed.  Life revolved around the sun and fire.  Growing and gathering the ingredients to cook a meal is no mean feat.  A simple recipe requires ingredients from an extraordinary number of sources.

When man was in his infancy he hunted for meat, killed it and ate it raw.  He may have supplemented this with the fruit and berries.  Wheat was a long time coming.  So was sugar; thousands of years in fact.

Next time you make a recipe, consider where the ingredients come from and wonder at how far the human being has come in gathering food for survival.  For something this vital to be raised to an art form is tribute to how well humans have not only adapted to survival but stated in no uncertain terms: we can go one better.  We have enough to make food flavoursome and interesting.

Wouldn't it be a shame if recipes became a sign of the lack of foresight of the human condition?  If, when the world's population reached the level where there is mass starvation, the idea of a recipe may become tribute to the lack of thought about sustaining the future?  As if it was the equivalent of: "Let them eat cake".

I like to see the human race as having the common sense to ensure its survival.  This is going to require a recipe with a whole different set of ingredients but I'm sure we're up to it.  We just need to harvest a few more of our brain cells and add them to the mix and then survival will be assured.

END

THE CATCH-22 OF TRAVEL.

"Calvin and Hobbes Go Exploring"- Cartoon by Bill Watterson

We get stale in the same place for years no matter how much we find to do or how busy our lives become.  I live in a lovely city but I need a break from it from time to time.  Travel blows a fresh breeze through my mind.  It almost literally feels like it and I feel invigorated and refreshed.

I guess brain cells need to take in something different from time to time to exercise them or they go onto automatic.  Just imagine all those tiny cells yawning as they channel the same information when you go through the same routine day after day.  No wonder they start to make you edgy for change.  They decide to revolt and give you a hard time: "Let's go on a holiday, we're bored," they nag me.

They don't seem to let up even when they know I haven't the money.  They just work on making me testier and testier until I have to have a word with them or threaten them with sedation.   So in order to shut them up while I'm attempting to save enough to go away I've taken up this blog to challenge them a little.  It's quieted them down a bit, or rather it's giving them something new to do, but I can still hear them whinging in the background even as I write this.  In order to placate them a little, I'm writing about travel.

The trouble with planning a trip to a place you've never been is that you need to have been there to do it properly.  It's the Catch-22 of travel.  Yes, I know there are travel agents, brochures and friends who have done the trip and can tell you about their experiences.

There are also travel shows on television but I have come to avoid these with religious zeal.  At first I couldn't figure out what bugged me about them, apart from the obvious, which is that the presenters are paid to travel all over the world.  This is my idea of a dream job except for the size of camera they have to lug around.

Eventually I figured out why they annoy me.  It is because presenters are people from my own country, or from a similar cultural background,  whose familiar language and manner overlay and obscure the cultural impact of the place they are covering.  It's like adding too much salt to a meal.  The subtle flavours beneath are overwhelmed by something stronger and thoroughly domestic with which you're all too familiar.

The presenters, although very professional and upbeat, also deliver their reports in a patois developed for the show.  This has the effect of causing them to come across as variations of one another and, by progression, the place they are covering suffers the same fate. 

Even with these factors taken into account a television travelogue can only cater to two senses; sight and sound.  It can't convey the cultural vibe, the atmosphere or the smell.  We use all five senses when we travel and so even the best show can't do more than show and tell.

The hotels, facilities and restaurants that appear on them also usually offer free accommodation and services to the presenters.  There's nothing like free advertising is there?  So you aren't going to hear the presenter say: "God the smell around here makes me want to puke", or "The locals all have their hands out begging and look like they want to cut my throat", or "It's so hot here I can't wait to get home."  What we get, therefore is a Pollyanna version of the place.

They will also decide what to film in order to portray the aspects of the destination they are there to promote.  All the different shots or videos are then edited to form a smooth dialogue, knitting together the pertinent pieces .  A travelogue might concentrate on hotels, local shopping and places of interest to the tourist.  I doubt that you'll catch a news item or a mugging happening in the background while the crew is filming.  If it did happen I bet you wouldn't get to see it.

Even on a large screen television you are limited to a miniature view of the whole.  I mean you can't just spin your head around and see everything as the presenter can.   Film only shows bits and pieces of places not the vistas surrounding them.  For instance, over the years I've watched television series and films set in London, however, nothing on the screen prepared me for what I experienced when I was actually there or its flatness or greyness.

The best part of travel is experiencing the unknown with every one of your senses.  If we've never been somewhere before, to arrive in the midst of it is almost like being reborn.  We have no familiar points of reference.  We don't know which corner to turn next or where anything is.  We can feel lost but renewed.  We can discover things again.  Naturally we go prepared, but imagine if you were sent there in the way Scottie in the Star Trek series beams Captain Kirk to a planet.

Imagine you landed like that in the middle of Paris as a complete newcomer.  What do you do?  You've probably seen films set there, you've seen pictures of the place, you've heard about it but you don't have a map and you probably don't speak the language.  You can't just cut and edit to the next hotel.  You have to figure out where one is and physically get there.  Some people would find this to be an exciting challenge, some others might panic, but not one of them would be bored.

Travel lets us become like a child again because it allows us to take in something new, which in our everyday environment rarely happens.  I think that's why travel satisfies us.  It has the effect of making us feel something that we haven't in years and also relieves the boredom of the same old, same old.

Travel also educates us as to how different other cultures can be.  A traveller from Australia or the US might think that asking a direct question of someone in a foreign country is perfectly fine, only to discover they are considered rude.  Many a traveller has had the dubious thrill of being tossed in gaol for doing something they consider innocent.  Travellers are always prone to greater danger through ignorance but that's the risk of exploration.  In fact the explorers of old seemed to be people who were addicted to danger.  Boredom drives people to extremes and that's why it's best to let off steam regularly.

I feel sorry for business people I talk to who say things like: "Oh, I travel overseas a lot for business but I'm just there for a few days.  I only see the airport and the office".  I bet these people have very unhappy brain cells or they've scared them into submission.

I'm building up quite a head of steam at the moment and my brain cells are almost in revolt.  I think I'm hearing talk of a union being formed in their mutterings.  I can only hope someone pays me to travel somewhere soon or I win some money.  I don't really care where I travel to, I just have to shut the little guys up.

END