The "Baggy Greens" have arrived in NZ to wipe the paddocks with "Black Caps".

We will see, hope not a blackwash as has happened to Pakis and the Windies.

Gunna watch everyday, yeeeeaaaaah.

Much as it pains me to admit this but I think the Kiwis will have a really good crack at the Australians. The poor, hapless (hopeless?) Windies are sadly outclassed at this stage and the Pakistanis have a long way to go before they recover so of their former glory. Sad to see to great cricketing nations now mere minnows to the game. I hope it does not stay that way for long. I do not want to see cricket become a three nation event with a bunch of outclassed minor teams bringing up the lower levels.

Doesn't mean I want the kiwis to win but I hope it will be a good series.

Then bring on the poms

CB

One for O.C.

AUSTRALIAN ARCHEOLOGY.

After having dug to a depth of 10 feet last year;

Melbourne Scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 100 years and came to the conclusion;

"That their ancestors already had a telephone network more than 100 years ago."

Not to be outdone by the Victorians, in the weeks that followed;

a Sydney archaeologist dug to a depth of 20 feet, and shortly after, a story in the Sydney Morning Herald that read:

"New South Wales archaeologists, finding traces of 130 year old copper wire,

have concluded that their ancestors already had an advanced high-tech communications network thirty years earlier than the Victorians".

One week later, the West Australian newspaper, reported the following:

"After digging as deep as 30 feet in his back yard at Mandurah,

Len Kingston-Kerr, a self-taught archaeologist,

reported that he found absolutely bugger - all.

Len has therefore concluded that 130 years ago,

Western Australia had already gone wireless."

Just makes you proud to be a West Australian.

The "Baggy Greens" have arrived in NZ to wipe the paddocks with "Black Caps".

We will see, hope not a blackwash as has happened to Pakis and the Windies.

Gunna watch everyday, yeeeeaaaaah.

Much as it pains me to admit this but I think the Kiwis will have a really good crack at the Australians. The poor, hapless (hopeless?) Windies are sadly outclassed at this stage and the Pakistanis have a long way to go before they recover so of their former glory. Sad to see to great cricketing nations now mere minnows to the game. I hope it does not stay that way for long. I do not want to see cricket become a three nation event with a bunch of outclassed minor teams bringing up the lower levels.

Doesn't mean I want the kiwis to win but I hope it will be a good series.

Then bring on the poms

CB

Australia flew out of the blocks as a sluggish New Zealand cricket side spluttered into gear in a one-sided trans-Tasman series opener tonight.

Before a Westpac Stadium crowd of 21,364 who flooded in late on a balmy Wellington night, the tourists cruised to a six-wicket victory with four overs to spare in the opening Twenty20 match.

The "Baggy Greens" have arrived in NZ to wipe the paddocks with "Black Caps".

We will see, hope not a blackwash as has happened to Pakis and the Windies.

Gunna watch everyday, yeeeeaaaaah.

Much as it pains me to admit this but I think the Kiwis will have a really good crack at the Australians. The poor, hapless (hopeless?) Windies are sadly outclassed at this stage and the Pakistanis have a long way to go before they recover so of their former glory. Sad to see to great cricketing nations now mere minnows to the game. I hope it does not stay that way for long. I do not want to see cricket become a three nation event with a bunch of outclassed minor teams bringing up the lower levels.

Doesn't mean I want the kiwis to win but I hope it will be a good series.

Then bring on the poms

CB

Australia flew out of the blocks as a sluggish New Zealand cricket side spluttered into gear in a one-sided trans-Tasman series opener tonight.

Before a Westpac Stadium crowd of 21,364 who flooded in late on a balmy Wellington night, the tourists cruised to a six-wicket victory with four overs to spare in the opening Twenty20 match.

bet that hurt

CB

Wotta game tonite.

Full moon must have helped Black Caps.

Beautiful game.

Kiwis were home and hosed till White came out, hit everything everywhere, great to watch.

Game came down to a super over, scores level.

OZ batted, scored 6 - 1

NZ batted scored 9 - 0 and broke Aust wonderful summer.

Mind you, OZ bowler Tait helped with 2 'no balls' tyvm.

Fabulous nite's cricket for everyone, except Micheal Clarke.

Now 5 ODIs, methinx they will be good too.

One for O.C.

AUSTRALIAN ARCHEOLOGY.

After having dug to a depth of 10 feet last year;

Melbourne Scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 100 years and came to the conclusion;

"That their ancestors already had a telephone network more than 100 years ago."

Not to be outdone by the Victorians, in the weeks that followed;

a Sydney archaeologist dug to a depth of 20 feet, and shortly after, a story in the Sydney Morning Herald that read:

"New South Wales archaeologists, finding traces of 130 year old copper wire,

have concluded that their ancestors already had an advanced high-tech communications network thirty years earlier than the Victorians".

One week later, the West Australian newspaper, reported the following:

"After digging as deep as 30 feet in his back yard at Mandurah,

Len Kingston-Kerr, a self-taught archaeologist,

reported that he found absolutely bugger - all.

Len has therefore concluded that 130 years ago,

Western Australia had already gone wireless."

Just makes you proud to be a West Australian.

Good one, Pete - here I was thinking that those poor Westralians were still on baked bean cans with pieces of waxed string - carefully assembled under the flickering light of a hurricane lamp. (Or was that New Zealanders? Whatever - all same same...)

Why not?

one more icon

Some great pics in that one soundman, think there was one of the Prison tree....awesome.

Must have been QANTAS

The jetliner abruptly stopped on the tarmac, turned around

and returned to the gate. After an hour-long wait, it

finally took off.

A concerned passenger asked the flight attendant, "What was

the problem?"

"The pilot was bothered by a noise he heard in the engine,"

explained the flight attendant, "and it took us a while to

find a new pilot."

Why not?

Love that song.

What a scandal, though, when they were sued for that simple riff in the middle that everyone thought was a cute bit that they had every right to use as "Kookaburra" was traditional.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/04/2809848.htm

cost MAW millions. 60% of the revenue seems way over the top since the riff could not have contributed that much value to the song.

I think I've just worked out who "Soundman" really is.......

Click here

Some great pics in that one soundman, think there was one of the Prison tree....awesome.

Cold Chisel has some great memories for me. I do wonder about your comment, though ND. Did you watch the clip? Perhaps there's another clip of Khe San with VN footage.....care to post it? I'd like to see this song with that imagery.

Some great pics in that one soundman, think there was one of the Prison tree....awesome.

Cold Chisel has some great memories for me. I do wonder about your comment, though ND. Did you watch the clip? Perhaps there's another clip of Khe San with VN footage.....care to post it? I'd like to see this song with that imagery.

The view of the prison boab tree at Derby, WA, was in the Men at Work clip.

I was going to post an old picture of me peering out from it, but couldn't find it.

Some great pics in that one soundman, think there was one of the Prison tree....awesome.

Cold Chisel has some great memories for me. I do wonder about your comment, though ND. Did you watch the clip? Perhaps there's another clip of Khe San with VN footage.....care to post it? I'd like to see this song with that imagery.

The view of the prison boab tree at Derby, WA, was in the Men at Work clip.

I was going to post an old picture of me peering out from it, but couldn't find it.

Yeah, ive got a couple of pics there too, as has the gf, who was nearly the first thai to be held there this century .

Harcourt, the imagery i was talking about was from the clip above that soundman posted on men at work. ace band that.

dam_n, i would really like to see some good live music again, this will have to do in the mean time.

talk about outback crusing accross Oz, these boys were doing it in style, back then

too much aussie history in this clip to let it miss this thread.....everything from the goldies beaches to bed load of bimbos.

RIP Guy McDonough - Aussie legend.

have to ND - aussie crawl - rockin

and , because it is!

The Chiko Roll.

Blotty You Tube stuff.

Seems originality and wit has been lost in The Simpson, but then I guess it is Australian fred.

The Chiko Roll.

15 or so years ago, a certain notorious underworld figure in Australia disappeared. For quite a while, many people opted to not eat a 'certain brand' of ready-wrapped roll. I kid you not.

One of my usual un-original extracts from today's Daily Telegraph (UK version)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7...-me-now....html

Kathy Lette: if my convict ancestors could see me now...

When Australian novelist Kathy Lette was awarded an honorary degree by a British university last year, she was inspired to explore her family history – and uncovered their part in the moving story of the Botany Bay settlers

By Kathy Lette

Published: 7:00AM GMT 14 Mar 2010

When I moved to London 20 years ago, my Aussie accent meant I spent my life looking up nostrils. Even the nostrils of people shorter than me. Australia was seen as a recessive gene; the Irish of the Pacific. To make matters worse, I had left school at 16, and the only examination I’ve ever passed is my smear test. I’m an autodidact (a word I taught myself).

So last year when Southampton Solent University offered me an Honorary Doctorate, including a request for my head measurement (a measurement that had been much smaller before receiving that particular request), I was thrilled. But an apparently routine question from the administrator’s office caused me to pause. Did I have any connection to Southampton? I knew I had a convict ancestor who came from the area; it’s a boast my parents often make. For most of Australia’s history, a convict ancestor was a source of shame. It was socially desirable to have arrived on the First Fleet, but only as a soldier, sailor, botanist or doctor. The convicts appeared to have made their own way to Botany Bay under assumed names. ings have changed in the past 20 years. A convict past is now a badge of honour, and, if you don’t have a convict branch in your family tree, you quickly graft one on. When we Aussies – including two prime ministers, John Howard and Kevin Rudd, Germaine Greer and the novelist Thomas Keneally – brag about our record collections, we’re talking criminal, not classical.

To mark Australia’s bicentennial in 1988 my parents, who are proud members of the First Fleet Society, gathered with all the other convict progeny under the banner of the Scarborough, the ship on which our ancestor was transported to the colonies in 1788 from Portsmouth. There were tears of joy and celebratory hugging among Australia’s crème de la crim.

So my knowledge of my convict lineage is based on extensive documentation – in the form of some stuff my relatives once told me. But the dean’s inquiry to find a personal link to the university set me off on a journey.

For weeks now I have been scouring the convict court records made available online for the first time last year. I discovered that, on March 8 1785, Joshua Peck, 30, was sent to jail at Exeter for the theft of uniforms from the house of Col John Simcoe. My great-great-great-great-grandfather obviously went to prison for something he didn’t do: run fast enough. Sentenced to transportation, he became part of a squalid and pitiless project to relieve overcrowding in British prisons by establishing a “colony of thieves”. The epic and dangerous eight-month voyage he embarked upon with 774 other convicts to Sydney Cove must have felt like the 18th-century equivalent of a mission to Mars.

Two hundred and twenty years is such a short space of time that we can almost talk across it. The symphony that Mozart was composing on the day the First Fleet landed still moves us. Tom Paine’s Rights of Man – which a few of our Republican forebears were transported for selling – remains a basic testament for civil liberties. And it was the compassion of the British juries that was instrumental in sparing the lives of so many of Australian’s founding fathers and mothers, including my own.

Britain, in the days of George III, was run by an undemocratic oligarchy. Power was in the hands of corrupt politicians and court favourites. When born into poverty, you stayed in poverty, making ends meet by meeting a Fagin and snapping up the gentry’s unconsidered trifles. As did my ancestor. To Peck, every crowd had a silver lining.

In those brutal times, justice came with strings attached – you dangled from the gallows if you stole more than 40 shillings-worth of someone else’s property. If less, your sentence was transportation beyond the seas. And it was the jury that did the valuing.

Riffling through the criminal records of these First Fleeters, it’s astonishing how many were convicted of stealing goods to the value of 39 shillings, goods that their indignant owners estimated to be worth hundreds of pounds. It was the jury’s sense of mercy that filled the prisons with people the politicians had wanted to hang, and forced the government, when the American colonies rebelled, to look for another dumping ground for the human debris of Georgian England.

A one-way ticket to Botany Bay was the means by which Britain’s idle rich could dispose of Britain’s idle poor. At first glance, the First Fleet appears to be filled with a bunch of villains out of an 18th-century version of Shameless. But the desolation and despair captured in the paintings of Hogarth and the poetry of William Blake give a sense of the hypocrisy and inhumanity of the age.

Then, as now, the poor were not members of Underachievers Anonymous with a rugged determination to lose. The School of Hard Knocks had an accelerated curriculum and you survived however you could. The term “criminal” was merely a euphemism for someone who got caught. As the First Fleeters all did.

Which is how my ancestor ended up boarding the Scarborough. A third of the prisoners were female, and the sexes were segregated. Governor Phillip, the founder of the site that is now Sydney, was also on the Scarborough, and so feared an outbreak of sodomy that he threatened the suspects with the most devastating fate that could befall anyone, then or now: a one-way ticket to New Zealand. Phillip somehow managed to get them to the other side of the world in January 1788, with the loss of only 24 lives.

Our nation began with a gross act of indecency. When the Mayflower landed in Plymouth Rock, the first act of the passengers was a prayer meeting. When the First Fleet landed at Port Jackson, their first act was an orgy. It explains a lot about the ensuing characters of our two nations. On the night the women convicts were permitted ashore, they were greeted by a terrifying electrical storm that blinded one sentry and electrocuted five of the colony’s precious sheep. (Our first impromptu barbecue.) The pyrotechnics had the soldiers cowering in their cabins – except for a Lieut Clark, who bemoaned what he saw between the lightning strikes: “Good God, what a Seen of Whordome is going on there in the women’s camp... I would call it by the name Sodom for there is more sin committed in it than in any other part of the world.”

Phillip’s punishment for this debauchery was to make the cabin boy, and a few other miscreants, parade in petticoats before a jeering mob. This was typical of Phillip’s mercy and, indeed, his intelligence. His very first law was that there could be no slavery in a free country and hence no slaves – a sentiment radical for the age.

As Stalin demonstrated, you rewrite history by eliminating those who made it. That’s what the convicts were ordered to do in Tasmania when they killed Aborigines as though they were wild animals, and Phillip’s moral vision didn’t last long after his departure in 1793. But during that time the Australian standard of decency and justice was briefly set. It was Phillip who kept the convicts alive throughout that eight-month voyage by ordering daily exercise and doling out oranges. And it was his practicality, optimism, enlightened authoritarianism and courage that kept that wretched settlement going in its first fraught years as they waited desperately, on starvation rations, for salvation with the arrival of the Second Fleet.

Cut off from the world, they had no idea how it was changing: a French Revolution, the election of George Washington as America’s first president, the discovery of photosynthesis, their own king going bonkers – it all passed them by. They also had no idea whether Whitehall had completely abandoned them. But the euphoria of seeing white sails unfurled on the horizon in 1790 was short-lived.

The Neptune, on which my great-great-great-great-grandmother was held captive, was a ship of horrors. It was built as a slaver, and the conditions on board were barbaric. Of the 1,000 convicts who were to be transported, the Neptune carried the majority – 428 males and 78 females. Deaths during the voyage from scurvy, dysentery, floggings or infectious fever were recorded as 158 males and 11 females.

My ancestor, 14-year-old Mary Frost, who had been convicted of theft in 1789, was one of the prisoners chained together on a deck that was 75ft by 35ft, with standing room of 5ft 7in. Captain Trial, who obviously did not take milk with his human kindness, decided that there would be no exercise or fresh air for the duration of the grisly voyage. The reek of decaying flesh and overturned slop buckets meant that death was, literally, a breath-taking experience. Prisoners often concealed dead bodies so as to make use of their rations – until the stench of a rotting corpse alerted their jailers.

Grey statistics become freighted with emotion when you envisage your own flesh in this hellhole. My great-great-great-great-grandmother must have wondered if death really was a fate worse than life. Reading about her tribulations made my toes curl. Anyone who survived this ordeal must have had better survival skills than a jungle commando. Mary Frost not only survived but went on to have 11 children with Joshua Peck, who was released for good behaviour and given land to farm.

Poring over genealogy research causes piles of dandruff to form around your ankles, but it’s worth noting that Mary died in Tasmania in 1847, aged about 70, in the lap of luxury. She was living with her daughter, Elizabeth, and her son-in-law, a wealthy Irish sea captain called Peter Lette.

If media pundits say that Britain in 2010 is broken and with a “toxic underclass”, what was it then? What the unique social experiment that became Australia proves is that, unshackled from the class system and with the oxygen of optimism and opportunity, reinvention can take place. Records show that, by 1795, Joshua Peck was holding “200 acres, 30 of them cleared of which four were sewn in wheat and eight ready for maize. He held five bushels of maize and the family were now self-sufficient and off stores.” In other words, they were no longer being supported by the public purse.

By the time of the 1814 muster, only one of the First Fleeters, Enoch Weavers, was still in jail. And only one was listed as a felon in the 1828 census. In a freer society, without Britain’s rigid class system and spared the starvation and vicious treatment of child labour in Britain’s factories, the industrious and law-abiding sons and daughters of the convicts did not follow in their father’s fingerprints.

Australia made what criminologists call a “fresh start” – without the burden of expectations created by long social evolution or violent revolution. Invasion, plague and rebellion have not troubled us. We have acquired no special ideological fervour or savage class divisions. We hold no view of ourselves as saints or missionaries ramming capitalism or communism or Protestantism or Catholicism down the throats of others. We have inherited the best about Britain – its institutions, literature, humour. We have been joined, over two centuries, by people from Europe, America and Asia, making us one of the most multi-cultural nations in the world.

The future generations that have sprung from the dregs of British society pioneered universal suffrage and votes for women in 1902. Australians invented the secret ballot and maternity allowances. Its miners at Broken Hill achieved the 35-hour week for workers in dangerous jobs 50 years before that idea caught on overseas. OK, it’s not the kind of list that inspires orchestra strings and a sunset, but what is distinctive about these accomplishments is the attempt to achieve fairness. To reflect a society committed to giving its people a fair go.

So what would Joshua Peck and Mary Frost make of their great-great-great-great-granddaughter receiving an honory doctorate from a university only miles from where they set sail for Botany Bay in shackles? I’m sure they’d be rattling their chains with mirth. But surely, also, with pride. And I feel pride, too, in their survival and that of their children who helped make up the first generation of colonial children who achieved so much from so little. Mary Frost produced a sizeable chunk of that first generation. As did Germaine Greer’s ancestors, Nathaniel Lucas and Olivia Gascoigne, who established a clan that now numbers at least 41,000.

But is social mobility possible for the English working class only if they are transported out of it? In Britain today, social mobility remains among the worst in Europe. My ancestors point to one enormous truth: you can be born poor and stupid but, removed from the prejudice of those around you, you can become successful and entrepreneurial.

When I was gushing with enthusiasm about my doctorate, Stephen Fry emailed me a congratulatory missive, which put things back into perspective. “Don’t forget,” he quipped, “it’s better to be an unqualified success than a qualified one.”

And that’s what they were, Peck and Frost and the other autodidacts shipped across the seas. Do any of their traits whisper in my veins? Well, I am a woman of many convictions. And if my honorary doctorate inspires any English Conan the Grammarian to make a crack about my lowly Australian origins, I will simply tell them what my grandma said when I told her I was moving to England 20 years ago. “Oh Kath, you can’t possibly move to London. That’s where all those terrible convicts come from.”

* ‘Men, A User’s Guide’ by Kathy Lette is available from Telegraph Books at £9.99 + 99p p&p. Call 0844 871 1516, or visit books.telegraph.co.uk

I'll have to read some of her stuff - never come across her before.

(Although she seems to have forgotten the Rum Rebellion and the Euraka Stockade, among other expressions of discontent in the early days of a developing nation)

Great article Humphrey,

For some reason I think of the Pogues; Rum, Sodomy and the Lash.

Great article Humphrey,

For some reason I think of the Pogues; Rum, Sodomy and the Lash.

Ahhhh - Christian Brothers education.

Takes me back to where I never want to go.

Spent 5 years a victim of Christian Brothers sadism.

Worst time of my life.

Baaaaaarstids

Years ago I worked a gig as the Lighting Tech on Ron Blair's "The Christian Brothers" for the Stage Company in Adelaide, guys were queuing up in droves to relive their school days.

Mind you many came out visibly shaken by the experience, saying things like "It was all far too real". and " It brought back how evil some of those teachers really were"......

Years ago I worked a gig as the Lighting Tech on Ron Blair's "The Christian Brothers" for the Stage Company in Adelaide, guys were queuing up in droves to relive their school days.

Mind you many came out visibly shaken by the experience, saying things like "It was all far too real". and " It brought back how evil some of those teachers really were"......

Yeah, bin there.

Reunion at St Peters College, Auckland, glad some of the brothers were not there, sadists

Poor Ockors.

What does daddy Ruddy have in store for nawtie Ockors?

Operation Titstorm - Hackers declare war on Aussie

Click on abovelink for full story

Thursday, February 11, 2010

... The system would make Australia one of the world's most rigorous internet regulators.

Critics say the filter will not prevent contentious content being shared ...

Another link.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/...jectid=10632320