amazingMoonlight Blues.
Blues
I have been a fan of Douglas Adams since 1981 when I heard his radio play on the ABC here in Australia. At that stage I had a shape sense of humour. I lost it in a bout of the blues in 1991. I have only now got it back. I find h2g2 very funny. I really appreciated the article on the Hanger Lane Gyratory.
Myself, I am into trivia,
Is it true that Douglas Adams found the meaning of life in the age at which Elvis died; forty two.
Elvis and Winston Churchill had the same chauffeur. Elvis thought that if he was good enough for Churchill he was good enough for him. He head hunted him.
There is no letter "J" in the periodical table.
The round thing at the top of a flag pole that contains the pulley is called a truck.
Donald Turnipseed was the name of the person that collided with James Dean killing him.
Bookkeeper is the only word in the English language the contains three consecutive double letters.
Now for some serious stuff.
I have a Degree in Wildlife and Park Management and I am studying Geographical Information Systems at Flinders University here in Adelaide.
I have worked as an Ambulance Officer and a Park Ranger.
I would like to hear from any one, like me, that self treats depression with humour. I am a great fan of Spike Milligan who also had down times and kidded around to lift his spirits. I find the technique quite common.
I would like to go on from here with some maturations of my earlier days.
1 Dust
Dust was a fascination for me as a child. I would spend hours gazing into beams of light that would stream through the breaks in the curtains of the caravan.
The light would light up the mired of tiny particles that would float in the air. I did not know them as dust particles but they fascinated me. Later it would come as a revolution to me that they were known as dust.
Most of them were hair like and in the caravan there was plenty of old blankets and the like to supply them. Every particle was different. No mater how hard I looked, I could not find any two the same. Their movement was directed by the air that supported them. A wave of a hand would disturb their slow and gentle movement on the course that only they understood.
I concluded that dust must be everywhere, I could not see the dust particles where the light beams did not highlight them but I could see them moving in end out of the light. Slowly drifting in from the dark across the beam and out of the light on the other side. Although in the darkened room I could not see the dust I concluded that it res still there.
Dust seemed to be every where. The telephone exchange smelt of it. The diodes. transistors, resisters and wires ran hot and as the dust would land on them. it would burn and give off a distinctive smell.
The radio at home smelt the same. Dad's car too.
We used to crawl under the beds. Here it had an interesting incarnation. It was fluffy and hung together like cotton wool. I showed some to mum and she said not to tell any one that we had it under our beds and I guessed that this had some thing to do with cleaning.
The Land Rover cab had dust. It got into all of the parts that littered the cab. This dust was from the dirt roads that surrounded Murtoa. This was not soft dust from the blankets of the caravan but hard dust of the burnt clay roads that radiated out from Murtoa.
In the olden days They did not have gravel for the roads as all of the soils of the Murtoa district were clay.
I remember travelling on the Longerenong road in my uncle's car. It was a Holden panel van and one of the first to be made. I don't think it was registered and I don't think my uncle ever had a licence. Me and my sister sat on the tail gate and dragged sticks in the burnt clay. Like with the dust I was fascinated by the paths the sticks would make in the red clay. Years later dad told me the story of how the burnt clay roads were made. The council workers would tow a furnace behind horses and shovel clay into it to fire it. Once the clay had aggregated it would be spread to make a serviceable surface. The roads were known locally as
burnt clay roads. They were still dusty.
2 The band width of barbed wire.
I can still see it now as vivid as a nose on a face. Half a yard of barbed wire suspended ten feet from the ground. I had once heard that little boys are fascinated by the details of their father's work and this was the case for me. I still have the need to know what my father got up to at work. The events are so far in the past and now that I am older I am more interested in the politics that my father faced.
I rang dad and found just what I had expected. When I was young every thing seemed straight forward and only now I am beginning to understand the complexities of my father's world.
I rang Dad because I was curious about how high off the ground the Telephone lines were suspended. The height of telephone lines in the 1960s were governed by complex standards. 18 feet across roads, 24 feet over railway lines and 10 feet for PPBs. I was sure that an engineer had worked the standards based on the heights of vehicles of the day. Dad had to know all of the specifications. The wooden poles had to be one fifth of their length in the ground and 55 yards apart. All of this was lost on me.
Dad had a bit of work on the side. He would repair the telephone lines to the houses of well to do farmers in the Shire. The PMG at the time could not afford to supply the miles of line to service the more remote of the homesteads. Those who wanted the phone on had to come to an arrangement with the Post Master General's Department and supply their own cable and posts to the end point .On top of this huge cost they had to supply a transformer to make the current suitable for transmission over the public lines. The lines that the farmers maintained themselves were known as PPBs. Part Privately Erected lines. To call their wires cables is a bit of an exaggeration as they were mostly fencing wire repaired with what ever came to hand. In the case of Joe Hancock's place. this included barbed wire. And so Joe Hancock is responsible for one of the most vivid memories of my childhood.
I never got the full story, but old man Hancock didn't check the height of his harvester when he took it into the adjacent paddock and the screw elevator snapped the wire. Joe repaired it with a piece of barbed wire. Dad was sure it was this join that made the line unserviceable.
Joe Hancock was rich and mean. He didn't like forking out the cost of running his telephone. He thought his wife spent to much time yakking on it. His wife maintains that he used to put a sheet of iron on the line to earth the service so she could not use it.
Joe Hancock died of a heart attack and this was windfall for a lot of people. His wife now had the power to maintain the line in the state that she wanted and Dad was contracted to do the work. I remember travelling along the way on that job.
Mrs Hancock lived five miles north of Marnoo which lies 20 miles from my home town Murtoa. I remember sitting in the back of the green Holden looking through a hole in the floor at the gravel road whizzing past underneath. The car had no back seats as Dad had taken them out so he could pack it with tools. Just the place for a kid to ride.
Dad had got a gas burner from the line foremen who had worked in the depot on Lake Street. Years late I quizzed Dad if this was an illegal use of government property. His reply was that Ron Edwards the senior technician sort of new. The burner was essential to the repair work. as all of the faulty joins had to be bridged with new cable and soldered. Since no power was available, Dad could not use his electric iron. The burner was a fancy piece of equipment. My Dad couldn't have afforded to buy anything like it so if he had not been able to get it of Lenny Drake he would not have been able to do the work.
Ladders were collected from the Murtoa telephone exchange. These were 24 feet long to reach the standard poles carrying lines over railway tracks. Later Dad came across a thirty foot pole at Laurel Bank on the Stawell road. He and his colleagues often wondered how the old timers got the wires up there with the standard 24 foot ladder. I concluded they must of tied two ladders together.
The politics of supplying a service to the Hancock property was complex. The Post Master at Marnoo was contracted to supply mail and telephone services to the Shire at a rate per letter and by telephone call connected. If people were not using the phones, he found it hard to make ends meet. The pressure was on Dad to raise the quality of the lines. He found a great deal of co-operation from his superiors as the Post Master from Marnoo. The more phone calls Mrs Hancock made, the more every one got paid.
Dad got paid $27 for the Hancock contract. On the way home I counted it several times. I had not seen as much cash in one lump before. They were decimal currency notes. I kept the $2 note for myself. I asked Dad if I could keep it but he didn't say anything and I got the impression that he was not happy about it. The notes were new and I guess it must have been 1966 or 1967 as they were still a novelty. Soon we had a new car.
Dad had worked as a linesman on a small island in the Pacific called Morotai. I hadn't realised he was up with the technology of the day. He applied what is known as a Kylone circuit to running telephone lines in the war with Japan. Today the embryo technology is know as data compacting. The Kylowe circuit allows two signals to be sent down the one pair of telephone lines. This saved a lot of work as stringing lines in tropical conditions is not easy. For the technobuffs, the Kylowe circuit modulates one signal onto another by taking a line off the centre point of an induction coil and returning the signal via an earth. Dad may not have known it at the time but this technique would have been the basis of modern encryption. If the line was monitored by the enemy they at first would not have known that the line was carrying two signals. The significance of the second signal would have eluded them. The disadvantage of the Kylowe circuit is that it is very noisy. The engineers tracked down some of the noise in the lines to a near by river. The gravel on the river bed, propelled by the flowing water, was enough to set a signal that could be heard over the line. Dad is aware that the band width of the earth as a conductor is virtually infinite. May be this offers the solution to today's band width problems. We may have the modems and filters to use the ground to distribute signals. I imagine it would take quite a deal of power as the return may have to be through the atmosphere.
Latest Messages
Messages left for this Researcher | Posted |
---|---|
welcome to h2g2 Amazing Moonlight... | Apr 4, 2005 |
Conversations
Conversation Title | Latest Post | Latest Reply |
---|---|---|
Atheism | Apr 3, 2005 | Jul 31, 2008 |
welcome to h2g2 Amazing Moonlight... | Apr 4, 2005 | Apr 4, 2005 |
amazingMoonlight
Researcher U1463160
Entries
Most Recent Edited Entries
- This user has not written any Edited Entries.
Entries
- This user has not written any Edited Entries.
Disclaimer
h2g2 is created by h2g2's users, who are members of the public. The views expressed are theirs and unless specifically stated are not those of Not Panicking Ltd. If you consider any Entry to be in breach of the site's House Rules, please register a complaint. For any other comments, please visit the Feedback page.
Write an Entry
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travellers and researchers."