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.

Trove Tuesday: shipwrecked

No title (1987, October 7). The Canberra Times (ACT : 1926 - 1995), p. 14. Retrieved from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article122105700

In 2013 I wrote about the launching of our little boat Titania in 1987.  She was a Sprite dinghy a  class first designed in 1934.

My mother, Greg and I launch our new dinghy.

Not long after the launching, Greg and my father, Rafe, took Titania for a sail on Lake Burley Griffin. The wind came up and they discovered what an unseaworthy little tub she was.

It was blowing a gale. Titania was reluctant to head into an 80 kph wind and, when she was forced to try, the tiller snapped. Rafe and Greg were blown downwind the length of the lake and shipwrecked on Aspen Island.

They were obliged to walk back to the car and trailer several kilometres away. In their absence a Canberra Times photographer took this dramatic picture.

When a neighbour casually mentioned the picture of a boat in the newspaper a few days later, Greg had a look at the image proofs. He remembered furling the sails carefully; in the photograph the sail is 'whipping from side to side'.

The photographer had freed the jib and main to create a more lively and interesting picture.

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.

J is for James: James Curtis (1826--1901)

J is for James: James Curtis (1826--1901), a Ballarat pioneer and one of the city's more notable citizens.

James Curtis has no entry in the 'Australian Dictionary of Biography', but in his time he was moderately important and fairly well known in Ballarat and beyond for his contributions to---well, if you are one of those people (I was) who think the Victorians were stern, serious, and straight-laced, you'd never guess.

Curtis had joined in the first Ballarat gold rushes of 1851. He didn't find much---a tiny nugget the size of a pea---and he was £30 poorer for the attempt. He quickly abandoned gold-digging and returned to his trade, type-setting.

In the early 1860s Curtis established one of Ballarat's first printing presses, and by the 1870s, as proprietor of the Caxton Steam Printing Works in Armstrong Street, the city's second-largest printing house ('letterpress, lithographic, and copperplate printer, account book manufacturer, &c') he had become a wealthy and successful businessman.

Over the next few decades Curtis joined whole-heartedly in the commercial and civic life of Ballarat. He was a director of the Prince Regent and the Sebastopol Plateau gold mines; a member of the board of the Ballarat Land Mortgage & Agency Company Limited; a member of the Old Colonists' Association; a long-standing member of the boards of the Benevolent Asylum and the Ballarat District Orphan Asylum; the Treasurer of the Harmonic Society, Ballarat's choir; a founding member of the Ballarat Debating Club; a patron of the arts; a chess enthusiast; and a well-known cyclist and tricyclist.

In short, Curtis became a successful businessman and a prominent and respectable Ballarat citizen, who 'for many years identified himself with the progress of the `Golden City''.

James Curtis, however, had a side that was less conventional. In the late 1870s he began to believe that we survive death, that 'death' was merely a change of state, a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis; discarnate spirits were, reassuringly, very much like us; and the world of the spirits was comfortably similar to the world we mortals presently inhabit. These were demonstrable facts, objectively true, backed by verifiable testimony from reliable witnesses, including Curtis himself.

And so Curtis became a Spiritualist. He joined a séance Circle, helped to convene a 'Psychological Society', whose aim was 'the proof of soul by facts', sought out the best and most powerful mediums in Melbourne, Sydney, and Hobart, sat with visiting American celebrity mediums---two of the most famous were Henry Slade and Jesse Shepard---and applied himself to spreading knowledge of what he had discovered. He had a printing works of his own; this he used to print pamphlets explaining spiritualism and opposing its detractors. He printed and published a 300-page book, called 'Rustlings in the Golden City' about his spiritual awakening. Well received in Ballarat and beyond, 'Rustlings' went through three editions.

None of this was too unusual. Spiritualism had quite a number of adherents in the second half of the nineteenth century, many of them cautious, well-educated, far from gullible, and outspoken in their advocacy of the glorious truths they had found about death and the afterlife.

Curtis's spiritualism was a little different, however, for much of it concerned his relations with a particular person, not just the broad concept of life after our translation to the next plane. When Curtis emigrated to Australia in 1849 he left his sweetheart Annie Beal behind in Southampton. He never saw her again, for she died of tuberculosis the next year. Curtis's writings are full of Annie, his joy at finding her still alive (in the world above) and his longing to be reunited with her. She loved him still, and wrote to him constantly, through mediums, to tell him so.

Curtis's love affair with his dead darling Annie was partly the product of his spiritualism, and his spiritualism was to some extent underwritten, shown to be true, by the fact of their continuing love for each other.

It's easy to sneer; let's just hope that they were indeed finally re-united forever, as they yearned to be, on his death in 1901.

A guest blog post written by my husband Greg.