S is for the Snowy

By guest blogger Greg Young. We found some old negatives and had them developed the other day.

For a few years from 1968, when I finished at Albury High, I worked on and off as a labourer on the Snowy.

'The Snowy' was the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme, Australia's largest civil-engineering project, which dammed and diverted water from streams running directly to the sea, sending it through tunnels to inland rivers for irrigation. The diverted water was also used to turn turbines at electricity generating stations.

I worked a couple of times at Talbingo on T3, the Scheme's largest power station, where huge pipelines were being built to carry water from Talbingo Dam on the Tumut River down the mountainside to a pondage called Jounama then to Blowering Dam, on the way turning six enormous generators. In bays along the back of the power station were huge primary transformers.

Looking down on T3 from the pipelines

at the back of T3

Here I am, an offsider to a Serb linesman called Rudi Mrvos, swinging around in a cage on the end of a crane. We were meant to be working on the insulators on top of the transformers.

Rudi Mrvos and Greg

The crane-driver, whose name I can't remember, was a Croat, and on the Snowy there was a bit of strain between Serbians and Croatians. This led to a few jokes about the possibility of being deliberately dropped. He was a good bloke, though, and gave us an easy ride.

Of course nowadays the credit would go to an Ethnic Relations Co-ordinator, tasked with facilitating multi-cultural harmony.

Rudi simply told the crane-driver that he had a revolver, which he'd bought from some criminals in Kings Cross. But this almost certainly had nothing to do with the driver's concern for our safety.

X is for Excellence in Hands-Across-the-Seamanship, another tale from his misspent youth...

X is for Excellence in Hands-Across-the-Seamanship, another tale from his misspent youth...
(Contribution from a guest blogger)


Words starting with 'x' are rare in English, but lots and lots of Chinese place-names start   with 'x' in the pinyin system of romanisation so if these are allowed finding an 'x' for a blog-post title is actually a doddle.

There's Xianggang (Hong Kong), Xi'an (an ancient capital), and Xining (a province) just for starters.

But choosing one of the many Chinese Xs would be taking candy off a baby. X in this post is for Excellence Achieved in the Capital of Chinese Inner Mongolia, Hūhéhàotè.

Early morning at a Mosque, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

I was there briefly in 1983. One evening, landed in a low boozery by a cascading series of ever-more hazy decisions, I attempted to show half-a-dozen large Mongol lads how Australians could drink beer.

The stuff arrived at the table in a large shared baby-bath. You had a pannikin each and you all dipped in, and kept dipping, while your drinking mates cheered you on. This was an entertaining and efficient way of taking beer on board, and by the time we'd reached the bottom of the bath I was feeling splendid, surging with affection for Mongolia and Mongolians, who were plainly a magnificent body of men and women, with a marvellous history and culture and sense of humour and recreational facilities and beer.

International honours stood, I thought, at Mongolia v. Australia one all.

This was premature. It emerged that the baby-bath was just one shout, which meant that at the end of the beer round we'd each drunk a bathful.

By that stage, even though we didn't understand a word of each other's language, the boozery had reached unprecedented levels of Mongolian-Australian amity. To celebrate, we started some serious drinking. This time it was maotai, varnish-remover liquor distilled from sorghum.

Henry Kissinger is supposed to have said that all the world's problems could be solved if people would drink enough maotai. After half a dozen bottles most of our problems had indeed been washed away. A few new ones had emerged though. Someone had replaced my legs with rubber replicas and the little man inside my head responsible for the video was having continuity problems.

In the international competition, a Lay-down Sally Robbins was urgently required. Making a close but rather random inspection of the Hūhéhàotè urban landscape, particularly its drainage facilities, I traced a tired and emotional path back to the hostel where I was staying. There I found that some fool had increased the slope of the staircase to the angle of Mount Everest. I defeated this by hauling myself hand over hand up the banisters, celebrating the tactical success in a hearty bass baritone.

The next day I managed to get to the Mongolian grasslands, though with somewhat impaired efficiency. There I undertook to teach my hosts a thing or two about yurts. This also ended badly, Bogged to Buggery in a Bus with a Bunch of Bimbos, a B post, I suppose.

Two yurts (gers) in the mongolian steppe. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Related post

• U is for uplifted from Uranquinty

U is for uplifted from Uranquinty

A guest blogger describes a bit of his misspent youth ...




Imagine you're sixteen and hitch-hiking. No one will pull up and it's cold and getting dark. You've got no money. You're stuck in a one-horse town miles from home.

What would you do?

Well, these days you'd get out your mobile and start bleating for help.

Half a century ago, I walked across the paddocks to the Uranquinty railway station and asked the stationmaster if there was any chance of a ticket home to Albury. No there wasn't, but I suppose I looked small and miserable. He said he'd pull up the next goods train coming through.

Thanks to the kind SM, I went from cold and stranded on the side of the road to toasty in front of a pot-belly stove in the guard's van, with a guaranteed ride home.

There was only one small catch. The guard said I could earn my keep by looking out ahead for the signal lights. I'm colour-blind, but I didn't let on. Blue wasn't a problem, and I guessed right about the reds and greens, or we were lucky.

Anyway, we made it to Albury.

Uranquinty railway platform about 2009 from Wikimedia Commons

A railway accident where the signals were ignored.
View southward, towards Hatfield and London; ex-Great Northern East Coast Main Line. on 7 January 1957 the 19.10 express from Aberdeen to King's Cross, hauled by A2/3 Pacific No. 60520 'Owen Tudor', had passed several signals at Danger - in fog and in spite of exploding detonators - and ran into the rear of the 06.10 Baldock - King's Cross local train, which was already on its way, at a closing speed of about 25 mph. Rear coaches of the Local were wrecked, killing one passenger and severely injuring 25 others. The Pacific overturned as seen, the driver being badly injured but the fireman was almost unharmed. The coaches of the express and their passengers were also relatively unharmed.