Central Australia

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Details: Written by: Richard_McKie; Parent Category: Travel; Category: Australasia; Published: 30 June 2021; Hits: 7635

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In June 2021 Wendy and I, with our friends Craig and Sonia (see: India; Taiwan; Japan; China; and several countries in South America) flew to Ayer's Rock where we hired a car for a short tour of Central Australia: Uluru - Alice Springs - Kings Canyon - back to Uluru. Around fifteen hundred kilometres - with side trips to the West MacDonnell Ranges; and so on.

Uluru map

As expected, the car turned out to be essential. The alternative would have been a more expensive package bus trip with all the constraints that that imposes.

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Travel

South Korea & China

March 2016

South Korea

I hadn't written up our trip to South Korea (in March 2016) but Google Pictures gratuitously put an album together from my Cloud library so I was motivated to add a few words and put it up on my Website. Normally I would use selected images to illustrate observations about a place visited. This is the other way about, with a lot of images that I may not have otherwise chosen. It requires you to go to the link below if you want to see pictures. You may find some of the images interesting and want to by-pass others quickly. Your choice. In addition to the album, Google generated a short movie in an 8mm style - complete with dust flecks. You can see this by clicking the last frame, at the bottom of the album.

A few days in Seoul were followed by travels around the country, helpfully illustrated in the album by Google generated maps: a picture is worth a thousand words; ending back in Seoul before spending a few days in China on the way home to OZ.

Fiction, Recollections & News

The First Man on the Moon

At 12.56 pm on 21 July 1969 Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) Neil Armstrong became the first man to step down onto the Moon. I was at work that day but it was lunchtime. Workplaces did not generally run to television sets and I initially saw it in 'real time' in a shop window in the city.

Later that evening I would watch a full replay at my parents' home. They had a 'big' 26" TV - black and white of course. I had a new job in Sydney having just abandoned Canberra to get married later that year. My future in-laws, being of a more academic bent, did not have TV that was still regarded by many as mindless.

Given the early failures, and a few deaths, the decision to televise the event in 'real time' to the international public was taking a risk. But the whole space program was controversial in the US and sceptics needed to be persuaded.

Opinions and Philosophy

Energy woes in South Australia

South Australia has run aground on the long foreseen wind energy reef - is this a lee shore?

Those of you who have followed my energy commentaries published here over the past six years will know that this situation was the entirely predictable outcome of South Australia pressing on with an unrealistic renewable energy target dependent on wind generated electricity, subsidised by market distorting Large-scale Generation Certificates (LGCs) (previously called RECs in some places on this website - the name was changed after their publication).

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