The Bywong Soapbox

August 18th … I was musing over the Battle of Long Tan yesterday.  A very celebrated battle in the Vietnam jungle, by a brave contingent of Australian soldiers who held their position against overwhelming VC forces.  There was a nice dedication and memorial service at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Canberra..  It was very moving..

The Long Tan Rubber Plantation

Then I recalled the L’Oreal commercial that’s been airing on Australian television….  Starring, guess who?  Hanoi Jane!

Yes folks…  Hanoi Jane (Jane Fonda) has crept back into the public eye with a skin cream commercial.. Evidentially, she thinks this new generation ( Hanoi Jane’s an old bird ),  won’t know about her traitorous episodes in Vietnam.  Yes, old Jane traveled to North Vietnam at the height of the conflict to ‘entertain’ the North Vietnamese troops and sling mud at Coalition Forces, including the Americans & Australians.  There she sat, posing on an anti-aircraft gun that would be used to shoot down American & Australian aircraft.

Hanoi Jane - A Traitor

Well, I haven’t forgotten.. and I refuse to allow any L’Oreal into this household..    Send a message to the manufacturer and the the TV stations that air the commercial..  Boycott the product and switch the channel.

I wonder if anyone in the Bywong/Wamboin area has noticed the little yellow airplane that’s been buzzing around at low altitudes the last few weeks.

In the skies over Bywong

Well, it’s a geologic survey aircraft, VH-KPY, owned by Fugro Airborne Surveys that does magnetic geologic surveys for mining companies and whoever else has enough money to pay for their services.

VH-KPY A Geologic Survey Aircraft

“So what?”, you all say?  Well, this little gem has been sighted for the sixth time in a few weeks, flying low altitude patterns over Bywong, especially around William McEnally’s old mining area, ‘Macs Reef’.  One or two passes might be the norm for a simple survey, but they’re making these low passes a habit, so I’d assume they’ve found something interesting in their survey.

Keeping in mind that at today’s petrol prices and pilot fees, it costs a hell of a lot to spend a few weeks flying low altitude passes over Bywong. Must be something REALLY interesting in the ground around here.  Does everyone have their panning dishes handy?  In 1852 the NSW Government geological surveyor, Rev. W. B. Clarke, concluded that “gold in profitable quantities will hereafter be found in some part of the district of which Bywong Hill is the centre”.  Perhaps Fugro is about to make the same statement in 2010..  The price of gold in recent months HAS made the smaller deposits look profitable again.

“Big deal!”, you all say?  Well…  Eventually, their mining company client will apply to the NSW Department of Primary Industries for an exploration permit.  They’ll then rock up to your door and expect to drill some exploratory bores or dig a hole here and there.

How is this possible?  If you take a good look at your Land Title papers, you, like everyone else in this area, will find a little caveat that states the mineral rights belong to a mining outfit in West Australia, who just happens to hold the mineral lease on your property.

Yes folks, you only own what you can see.  What’s below the surface of your paddock, belongs to this outfit in WA, and there’s nothing you can do about it.  So, if you’ve been digging holes in your property, everything you take out, actually belongs to them.  So.. any nuggets you find…  you’ll have to turn in to the proper owners.  Right?

Go have a read of the Landholder Rights, pursuant to the the provisions of the Mining Act 1992.

http://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/minerals/titles/landholders-rights/mining_act_1992

Know what they can and cannot do. Know your rights and you can use the miners to your advantage.

How would Bywong look as a Strip Mine?

Now, I’m sure that if some large reserve of Gold, Silver or Uranium (Heh heh.. now wouldn’t THAT piss off Earth Mother Moore?), were found in Bywong, the Shire’s pillar of honour, Stainless Bascomb, would be soon filing writs of Compulsory Acquisition on everything the Shire could get it’s hands on.  And you could be sure that Bywong would become an open pit strip mine from the Lake George escarpment to Kowen Forest.

One good thing…. It would get rid of all the noxious weeds in the area..

eu-lo-gy

/?yul?d?i/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [yoo-luh-jee] Show IPA –noun, plural -gies.

There’s not a lot that one can say about Rob Apathy, that hasn’t already been said.  A short ‘eulogy’ is far from adequate. He would have tried to define the word for what it was, as I have above, in the analytical spirit he would have shown for his own eulogy.  I can only hope I’ve done him justice, for as he said to me in a posthumous letter… “Of all that I leave behind, I will miss you the most”.

He was a kind-hearted man, who would go out of his way to help you in any way he could.

He tried to see the good in everyone he met and extended kindness and council to one and all. The only person he was ever unkind to… was himself.

A brilliant man; he knew no boundaries when it came to the quest for knowledge. Not only did he amass a long list of life’s accomplishments. He kept on learning …researching … looking for the answers.

Here was a man who took it upon himself to learn conversational Italian while in his 70’s. He not only learned to speak the language, but was able to read and write it as well.

But, what was Rob to me? Rob was my friend & brother. We shared happiness and sorrow. Used each other as sounding boards for our philosophies, our problems and ideas.

Whether it was to do with photographic or artists technique; Or whether it concerned building a radio telescope or erecting an Amateur radio antenna, we worked out the problems together.

Rob Apathy - A Friend

Before his physical abilities were hampered by weight, hip joints and bad knees, Rob was a familiar face at our property. He’d often ride his motorcycle or just drive over to our place and test our palates with various Hungarian delights, which he would conjure up in our kitchen for dinner.

A good evening would quickly slip by with good wine and conversation and turn into an overnighter for Rob, as we would never let him travel the roads late at night. We were always glad to have his happy, smiling face greet us the next morning. He knew he was a welcomed guest in our house.

In the last few years he was confounded by the various disciplines of religion. He turned to analysing religions for what they were, looking for some sort of truth, or perhaps, looking to expose the untruths. He was never clear on just what he searched for. But in Robs’ fashion, he once again became a recognised authority on the subject.

As I said to his son Rodney, “I hope he finds his god… whichever one that happens to be today.

My wife Liz and I will miss him terribly and to cover all the bases, I made sure he had some coins to pay the ferryman.

So, the Canberra bureaucrats want to make it impossible to dine al fresco outside of most restaurants or at the very least, severely limit the number of covers you can accommodate on the sidewalks.

What’s the answer to keeping your tables AND your all important covers?  Do like they do in Chicago.

Hit the roofs for al fresco dining

Put your diners on the roof.  Many buildings in the local dining areas have suitably strong and accessible rooftops.  The city is complaining that pedestrians are being inconvenienced by having to dodge all the al fresco tables & chairs.  Put them to use on the roof and see how long it takes for the politicians to try taxing THAT cash cow.

Could you imagine rooftop dining at Canberra House?

Cinco de Mayo (Spanish for “fifth of May”) is a holiday held on May 5th that commemorates the Mexican Army’s unlikely victory over French forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, under the leadership of General  Ignacio Zaragoza Seguín.

And why did the French invade Mexico?  In 1861, Mexican President  Benito Juárez stopped making interest payments to countries that Mexico owed money to. In response, France attacked Mexico to force payment of this debt.  Fast forward to 2010… Nothing’s changed much.

Now, all well and good.  The Mexican holiday is celebrated in Mexico and the United States (due to the large population of Mexicans in the U.S.)  Here’s a news item that didn’t sit well with me….

Updated May 06, 2010
California Students Sent Home for Wearing U.S. Flags on Cinco de Mayo

Administrators at a California high school sent five students home on Wednesday after they refused to remove their American flag T-shirts and bandannas — garments the school officials deemed “incendiary” on Cinco de Mayo.
The five teens were sitting at a table outside Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, Calif., on Wednesday morning when Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez asked two of them to remove their American flag bandannas, the Morgan Hill Times reported. The boys told the newspaper they complied, but were asked to accompany Rodriguez to the principal’s office.
The five students — Daniel Galli, Austin Carvalho, Matt Dariano, Dominic Maciel and Clayton Howard — were then told they must turn their T-shirts inside-out or be sent home, though it would not be considered a suspension. Rodriguez told the students he did not want any fights to break out between Mexican-American students celebrating their heritage and those wearing American flags.

Galli told NBC Bay Area, “They said we could wear it on any other day, but today is sensitive to Mexican-Americans because it’s supposed to be their holiday so we were not allowed to wear it.”  (end)

What has happened to American Patriotism?

As children, we were all taught to honor and respect the flag & most of all, to display it proudly and fight for what it stands for to the end.  To this day, the American flags flies high over my house in the sunny highlands of New South Wales, Australia and if my neighbours don’t like it, they can go elsewhere.

Stars & Stripes

Now, here we have five lads in America, who decide to display the colors and remind everyone they all  just happen to live in the United States.  They don bandannas and tee-shirts, emblazoned with the American flag.  (Something I would probably do as my non-violent protest to support patriotism.)

Enter… Some politically correct, assassin of patriotism who tries to force the boys to remove the colors. The boys refuse and are sent home!

What CRAP!  Turn this Assistant Principal and the rest of the politically correct school administrators over to Homeland Security Office and let that branch of American Government determine if the bastards should be exiled to the Mexico they so adamantly want to support.

I can see the American war veterans turning in their graves…

The garbage tips around  Bywong, Wamboin & Sutton were implemented for the disposal of residential rubbish.  With the size of the Macs Reef Road tip in relation to the sparse population in the area, the tip should have lasted several tens of decades before they even began to ‘look’ a bit full.  The rules of the time assumed only ‘residents’ would be able to deposit their refuse at such tips.

A tiny omission  in the Council rules didn’t differentiate where the residents’ rubbish was being generated, so of course, every nefarious builder or contractor who happened to live in the local area, began using the tip as their own, private, Toxic Waste Facility. Dumping huge amounts of industrial/commercial waste & refuse.

Yes, over the years, tonnes upon tonnes of builders and commercial refuse has been dumped at the local Residential Tips and the glorious Council has turned a blind eye…. until now…  (smell the money yet?)

Now, the Palerang Council acknowledges the tips have been so overfilled with industrial waste, they, of course, must now be closed and the burden of cost put onto the local residents to replace the tips with the latest buzzword of the times….. “The Waste Transfer Station”

Rubbish! And you should take that literally.  The latest plans for the disposal of local, Shire generated rubbish include Roadside Pickup (which means hauling wheelie bins up 500metre driveways) or Expensive transfer stations, where residents will be charged a minimum of $4 a pop to toss a few black plastic garbage bags into a skip. Even more tithe if you bring a trailer.

You have to sit back and wonder which garbage collection contractor has the ear of the Council (or perhaps some councilors pocket)…  Or why turning an existing tip into a transfer station would incur an environmental study (at a paltry $60,000), to determine the existing tip site is suitable for a transfer station to transfer the same sort of refuse that’s been buried there for years.

Now comes the good part.  Whatever the outcome, the residents of the Western side of the Shire will incur additional rate charges of anywhere between $400 and $1200 dollars… Annually.  All because some local resident/builder/contractor thought he’d save a few bucks by dumping his toxic industrial waste at the local tip, rather than actually have to pay for disposal in Canberra, where the waste was generated in the first place.

Oh yes… I personally followed a string of dump trucks from a site in Canberra, all the way out to the Macs Reef Road tip.  There were 6 truckloads in all.  All dumping their loads at the local tip, all smiling at the tip attendant as they went back to Canberra for more loads.

Instead of charging the local residents or the inconvenience imposed by these contractors, perhaps the contractors themselves should be forced to front up the cash to fix the problem. After all, had they been on the Up & Up, we might not have a landfill closure problem.

Occasionally,  I find solace in taking the trash to the tip as the local tip seems to be one of those places where you’ll run into interesting neighbours.  Having deposited my recycling in the appropriate bins, I was dropping a few old monitors off in the recycle area when I happened across the lad that does the website for the neighbouring community of Wamboin.  Well, Bruce and I began extolling the benefits of the treasures you find at the tip and asked me if I’d like a Digital TV set top box that was acting up.

Well, rather than let him toss it in with the rest of the trash, I took it home with me and fired it up to see what was the problem.

But first, let me digress and explain what these things are….

Australia is turning off analog TV signals in the very near future.. Everyone will need to embrace the new Digital TV technology, by either getting a new ‘digital ready’ TV, or getting a set top box converter to use with their old analogue TV.  The advantage of the digital clarity is well worth the few ten’s of dollars to get a set top converter.

Anyway…. Having recently purchased an ‘all singing – all dancing’ Digital LCD TV for the bedroom, I was debating what to do with the aged Grundig analogue beastie in the TV room.  A pretty flash, large screen TV in it’s day, it was now getting long in the tooth and ready for a trip to the tip.

Enter Bruce, with his tired SRT 5390 Digital TV recorder/converter.  Yes, this thing even has an 80Gb hard drive for recording your favorite programs, just like a VCR, but digitally… on the hard drive… no tape… AND he had the remote with it as well!

So.. I plugged it in and made the proper connections to the TV.

Well… It would work for a few minutes, then seem to lose the signal.  When a digital TV loses the signal, the picture either goes black or turns to a mess of pixelated squares.  So, it did have a problem and I went straight to the Internet forums to see if anyone had the fix.

Sure enough, the SRT 5390 had a documented problem with the power supply and the fix was to change a couple of electrolytic capacitors for ones of a higher voltage value.  So, a quick trip to the local electronics store, about 78 cents worth of parts and 30 minutes of my time to de-solder and install new capacitors.

The results?  A Digital Set Top Box Converter/Recorder that works like a new one and the satisfaction of being able to breathe a year or so of life back into an old TV.

Thanks Bruce… If you happen wander by, I’ll crack open one of my homebrew stouts and we’ll sit on the veranda to muse about the mysteries of the rural lifestyle.

How Greasy can you get?

I just saw an interesting ad on television tonight….  It was one of those ‘Political Statement’ type adverts, by none other than ‘Kingsley’s Chicken’.

Kingsley’s is accusing the Rudd government of holding back their chicken joint expansion in the Canberra area.

How, you ask?….  They blame the government of refusing to allow 457 Visa applications to be filled.  The 457 Visa is for overseas immigrants who want to work in Australia..  Now what does that suggest to you?

It suggests to me that the greed of Kingsley’s Chicken has gotten the better of them. It also suggests to me that this chicken outfit want to hire cheap, overseas labour, so they can expand their greasy chicken empire in the Canberra area and put a few more dollars in their pockets.

Get a grip Kingsley’s.. Hire local Australians to run your chicken outlets.  Too expensive, you say?  Tough shit… Plan on building fewer chicken outlets and pay a bit more for local labour.

What’s better for your image? Greed or Civic Duty?

There’s an interesting article on the Bywong Community Association website that talks about the Macs Reef Road Tip and the vote to turn it into a Waste Transfer Station.  Here’s an excerpt:

“Last Council meeting in March narrowly voted for the waste transfer station proposed for Macs Reef Road but it could still come unstuck if money is not found to build it. Discussion by Councillors about the 2010/2010 Management Plan to fund works will be happening soon. Bywong Community Association would like to urge all Bywong, Wamboin and Sutton residents who want a local waste management facility to contact all the local Palerang Councillors to urge them to follow through on their agreement to build a new facility at Macs Reef Road. Email all Councillors via councillors@palerang.nsw.gov.au”

“If the money is not found to build it”?    WTF!

Palerang Council

All the council has to do is backcharge the local resident Building Contractors who have been filling the tip with contractors rubbish from Canberra  for the last 20 years..  You see… if you have a residents tag, you can dump all your contractors garbage from your Canberra building sites in the local tips and bypass the need to pay a fee at the Mugga Lane Tip in Canberra..  where the shit belongs in the first place.

Find the money… indeed!  Cough it up  ‘Palerang Council’, as it’s your turning of the blind eye for so many years that created the problem in the first place.

Well, Here we go with a new toy, or tool, if you want to call it that.

I’ve just made this post to my blog, on my new iPhone and a little WordPress app.

Neat, eh?