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War!

 

At age 15 in 1939, the Second World War ‘broke out’ with very vivid implications even for those of us at home:  food rationing; petrol rationing; and later when the Japanese came into it brownouts and blackouts were also imposed. 

Coffee for one thing was practically unprocurable so people had to make do with substitutes both for that and other things.  For a coffee substitute you could stick together about a dozen pieces of wheat with burnt sugar to form a sort of a blob; if you put three or four blobs in a cup of boiling water it would taste like coffee.  I know; I used to drink it.

Everybody was issued with ration tickets which had to be used very sparingly.  Of course the few who were fortunate to have money could buy all they wanted on the black market with the possible exception of petrol, of which the Military and Essential Services had the monopoly.  But for everybody else there was nowhere near enough. 

But most problems have a solution – in this case a ‘charcoal burner’ – a big ugly monstrosity of a thing about five feet high by one foot wide mounted on the passenger side of a car on the running-board (step), belching fire, smoke, fumes and pollution everywhere.  The gas the charcoal emitted was fed into the fuel system which in some sort of way took the place of petrol but was nowhere near as potent. 

Vehicles in those days did not develop very much horsepower at all, compression ratios were very low, about 7.5:1 compared to about 12:1 today.  Also the octane rating of petrol was only about 70 compared to 91 or 95 today.  To coin a phrase ‘they wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding’.  When the car was going uphill under load in top gear the engine would start pinging (ping ping, ping ping, ping).  The only way you could stop it was to back off on the accelerator then you had to change down a gear, which would use more fuel.  It was compulsory to paint the sides of the mudguards of your vehicle white so they could be more easily seen in the brownouts. 

After Darwin was bombed and the fear of a possible bombing and invasion by the Japanese drew closer people started digging air raid shelters. 

I spent a whole week digging a huge hole in our backyard.  It was very hard digging through clay let me tell you.  It used to stick and cling to my mattock and when it was finished I was very proud of the effort I had made for my family.  I was only about 17.  One night it rained very heavily and filled the whole bloody thing with water; so much for the air-raid shelter.  Luckily as it turned out it wasn’t needed anyway.

When the Japanese bombed Darwin there was complete and utter panic and thousands of people fled south in a mass exodus to a small place called Adelaide River.  They came on horseback, cars, trucks, motorbikes and bicycles.  It was referred to as the ‘Adelaide River Stakes’.  At that time Adelaide River was the culminating point of our rail link. 

Both the casualty rate and the damage caused by the bombing were very heavily censored.  The next day I remember seeing a lone soldier with a Bren-gun mounted on a tripod standing on Manly Beach.

The Australian Government also in a state of panic had formulated a pathetic plan to abandon the whole northern part of Australia to the Japanese and to form a last ditch stand at the ‘Brisbane Line’. All I can say is ‘God bless America’ because if it hadn’t been for them the Japanese would have been all over us like a rash and what do you think would have happened then?

‘That’ I will leave to your own imagination.

 For what happened next go to A Digger's Tale

 

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Travel

The United States of America – East Coast

 

 

In the late seventies I lived and worked in New York.  My job took me all around the United States and Canada.  So I like to go back occasionally; the last time being a couple of years ago with my soon to be wife Wendy.  She had never been to New York so I worked up an itinerary to show her the highlights in just a few days.  We also decided to drive to Washington DC and Boston. 

 

Read more: The United States of America – East Coast

Fiction, Recollections & News

More on Technology and Evolution

 

 

 

 

Regular readers will know that I have an artificial heart valve.  Indeed many people have implanted prosthesis, from metal joints or tooth fillings to heart pacemakers and implanted cochlear hearing aides, or just eye glasses or dentures.   Some are kept alive by drugs.  All of these are ways in which our individual survival has become progressively more dependent on technology.  So that should it fail many would suffer.  Indeed some today feel bereft without their mobile phone that now substitutes for skills, like simple mathematics, that people once had to have themselves.  But while we may be increasingly transformed by tools and implants, the underlying genes, conferred by reproduction, remain human.

The possibility of accelerated genetic evolution through technology was brought nearer last week when, on 28 November 2018, a young scientist, He Jiankui, announced, at the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong, that he had successfully used the powerful gene-editing tool CRISPR to edit a gene in several children.

Read more: More on Technology and Evolution

Opinions and Philosophy

World Population – again and again

 

 

David Attenborough hit the headlines yet again in 15 May 2009 with an opinion piece in New Scientist. This is a quotation:

 

‘He has become a patron of the Optimum Population Trust, a think tank on population growth and environment with a scary website showing the global population as it grows. "For the past 20 years I've never had any doubt that the source of the Earth's ills is overpopulation. I can't go on saying this sort of thing and then fail to put my head above the parapet."

 

There are nearly three times as many people on the planet as when Attenborough started making television programmes in the 1950s - a fact that has convinced him that if we don't find a solution to our population problems, nature will:
"Other horrible factors will come along and fix it, like mass starvation."

 

Bob Hawke said something similar on the program Elders with Andrew Denton:

 

Read more: World Population – again and again

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