lifeasdaddy

Centrepiece for Royal Buffet, 1954

Centrepiece for Royal Buffet, originally uploaded by Old Parliament House.

To celebrate its 75th birthday, Old Parliament House called for people, from across Australia, to send in their pictures and stories of the House. The response forms a remarkable collection that tells an unofficial history of this Old Parliament House, and many are now displayed on Flickr as part of Old Parliament House's Photostream "In The Picture" .

This photo was entered by Anthony Scarth ‘The cake was a centrepiece for the Queen's Royal Tour banquet in 1954. Every one of the roses’ details were hand made and finished. Arthur Mueller was a marvellous pastry chef. It took at least 10 weeks to make and was made mostly by Arthur and I helped.’

Mr. Scarth's pride of workmanship is plain.

There's something about working on or in some of our iconic buildings.

The most recent issue (June 2008) of "About The House" magazine has a feature about the 20th anniversary of the opening of the new Parliment House building including interviews with many of the people who built it. Undoubtedly it was one of the high points of their careers.

Interesting to reflect too that 54 years after this photograph was taken Her Majesty The Queen, Elizabth II is still going strong.

So, where's Australia's chemical plant security programme?

"The Department of Homeland Security has preliminarily labeled more than 200 chemical facilities, including university laboratories, at highest risk for a potential terrorist attack.

DHS has winnowed this number from a pool of about 7,000 facilities under review in its chemical plant security program."

Read the article in Chemical & Engineering News here.

So far as I can tell, in Australia the National Counter-Terrorism Committee is responsible for this stuff.

Just to set your minds at ease, here is the National Counter-Terrorism Plan (second edition, September 2005)  Concerns regarding chemicals are addressed in section 3.7 on page 17 of the pdf.

John McCain III in Truc Bach Lake

I came across this picture of John McCain being captured during the Vietnam War on the Big Picture blog.

I've seen hundreds of photographs of McCain and Obama, but I've never  seen this one before.

I'm not endorsing McCain (as if my opinion mattered) and not not endorsing him either.  It's just an interesting moment in military history.

The photo is from the Library of Congress, and appears as part of their Veterans History Project where McCain was interviewed, mainly about his captivity where he spent more than five long years in a hell hole.

John McCain (center) being captured by Vietnamese civilians in Truc Bach Lake near Hanoi Vietnam [ Library of Congress ]

Here's his interview with the Veteran's History Project

Edward and Billy

Down at Mosman, near Balmoral Beach there is a statue of Billy the dog, who was well known as the companion to Inky the street sweeper from 1959 to 1978.

In July 2005 we took a photograph of Ed with Billy and again today, three years later.  How quickly they grow up.

The statue of Billy is by Denis Adams, according to Mosman Council, however the artist is much more likely to be Dennis Adams..

Fun @ the Powerhouse Museum

Last week Edward asked to go to the Powerhouse Museum, which if I had to categorise it, I'd say is a museum of technology, science, decorative arts and design.  So today we made the trek to Ultimo and met up with Ben and Lauren and Edward's cousins Thomas and Eloise.

We especially got Ed excited about visiting the zero gravity simulator  which is part of the Space exhibition.

The Zero-G simulator is comprised of a stationary platform upon which the astronauts (kids) stand surrounded by a cylindrical shaped mockup of the inside of a space station.  The cylinder slowly rotates to simlulate a space like experience.  To the astronauts, nothing much seems to be happening, but when you walk out onto "earth" again, it is quite disorientating.  Thankfully there is a rest area, which I suggest you use.

On the way to the Zero-G experience, then kids also had the chance to be photographed looking like space travellers as they stuck their heads through the painted backdrop.  An oldie, but a goody.

Later the boys had the chance to dress up in astronaut costumes.  There were alien costumes too, but they didn't have the same attraction.

Apart from these obvious novelties, they had some great fun in the Experimentations area which displays pratical examples of some of the fundamental physics of electricity, light, and magnetism.  In this pic, Edward is using a hand cranked generator to power a toy electric train and send it around a small track in the enclosure.

I know that when Ed said last week that he wanted to go to the Powerhouse Museum, he had in his mind seeing the steam engines on display.  The museum includes on permanent display Locomotive No. 1, which was the first steam locomotive in Australia.  Made in England by the Stephenson works, it was transported to Australia by ship and put into use in 1855.  I see from the nameplate data, that it was in fact No. 958, as far as they were concerned.

There is also an engine built in 1882, Locomotive No. 1243 on display and Edward was able to stand on the footplate and operate a few controls.  the display is interactive, and as buttons are pressed the voice of a driver or fireman explain the workings.

There's a section called Zoe's House, which is a contruction and building activity for kids aged 3 - 6.  Ed, Thomas and Eloise all loved this.

The Powerhouse Museum is well set up to light the imagination of children, and as you can see has lots of things for them to do, see, and in which to be invovolved.

But there's also rareities to interest military historians like me.

This enigma machine is part of an exhibition, and was used to create coded messages by the German Army in World War II.

Breaking the codes made by these machines was a turning point of World War II.

There are two other known specimins of these machines in Australia.  One is held by the Australian War Memorial, and one held by the government information security (cryptological) agency Defence Signals Directorate; although both are owned by DSD.

To see inside an Enigma machine, you can check this series of photographs (not from the Powerhouse Museum)

The children all enjoyed taking a break in the courtyard cafe which has some state of the art play and climbing activites, including this giant climbing frame which can be enjoyed by kids of all ages, including this 40ish man who could not resist climbing to the top. 

I managed to control the climbing impulse.

Now, it wouldn't be a visit to a museum if we didn't manage to find an error in a curatorial plaque, and here's the result from today.

There's a display about the work of violin maker William Auchterlonie (perhaps part of the famous golfing family?) and the plaque says that," This page is open to 1924, the year the violin on display was made."

But it is clearly a page from 1934. 

He had been using a day-to-a-page diary from 1930, and the day for that page, Tuesday January 28th, 1930 is crossed out.  Auchterlonie's note begins, "Started in 1934 Beginning of November ..."

SUMMARY:

Edward asked to return to the Zero-gravity simulator, and the engine Locomotive No. 1243 - so I guess they must be the best things in the museum today.

Warning. Graphic description follows:

As a teenager working at F. Fallshaw & Sons I had the privilege of meeting Bill Heard who was a close workmate of my father.  Bill, of the 2/29 Battalion, had been a Prisoner Of War during WWII,and had been put to work on the Thai-Burma Railway by his captors.

Bill was distinguished by his very thick lensed spectacles, and I recall that his poor eyesight was due to deprivations suffered in captivity.  Of course he came home with malaria.  One day he bought in a photograph of himself working on the railway, he was  piactured driving a jeep.  The jeep was just a shell, and was used for the transport of heavy rocks.  It had no engine, and was being pulled by other prisioners using ropes.  Bill joked that since he was the most intelligent POW he got the job of driving the jeep, instead of the grunt work of pulling the ropes.  He didn't tell me any of the bad things.

     "A lot of men lost their legs at that camp and one was my mate, Lloyd Ridge.  I got a message that I was on the amputation list as well as being requested to help Lloyd through his leg amputation, which was to be first thing next morning.  My job was to hold his head down and stop him banging his brains out on the table.  I did that for the seven minues it took Dr. Coates to take his leg off; he had his right leg amputated above the knee.  My other job was to keep his Burma cheroot alight; it calmed the nerves and gave him something to do.  He survived and he made it until only a couple of months ago.

     It's not very reassuring when you are holding a mate down on the amputation table and you're on the list to have your own done.  In those seven minues you watch the scalpel and the saw, knowing that they had sent to the kitchen for the saw, which had just been cutting up the ox bones for the soup.  It was a 14-tooth-per inch saw; being a tech study teacher I know something about saws.  For me, I took it for granted that I was going to be a one-legged bloke and all would be well, because when the leg was gone and the curetting and spraying or whatever you were having done at the time wasn't needed any more, you simply wouldn't have that rotten bottom part of your leg to worry about."

[ A reminisence of Kenneth Harold Darwin, p.79, The Men Of The Line - Stories of the Thai-Burma Railway Survivors by Pattie Wright,The Miegunyah Press, 2008 ]

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The funeral of the Red Baron

A bigger mystery than The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was the question of who was responsible for the downing of the Red Baron's plane on 21 April, 1918.

In a venture into new forms of disseminating history, the Australian War Memorial has put up rare footage of the funeral of Baron Manfred von Richthofen on You Tube here, and even embedded the youtube video into their website here.

The AWM notes, "Within a day of being recovered from its crash site, most of Richthofen’s plane had been souvenired, leaving little more than a frame "  Interestingly there is footage of the crashed plane at the start of the video, and various men can be seen happily examining it and probably souveniring.

Von Richthofen was accorded full military honours, and you will see in the film.