This map of the circuit shows the layout, we're now at Reid Park and you can see how there's a long looping row of sweeping left-hand bends to come...



Those dimensions are all in metric, so for the conversions:

6.213km = 3.8614 miles

1.916km = 1.1908 miles

1.111km = 0.6905 miles

862 metres = 2,828 feet

I would suggest that the Conrod Straight length includes The Chase.

 

This was my little break from the work – a drive around the circuit I used to love visiting twice a year for the races. It’s changed a lot in that time. From post and wire fences to concrete enclosures; from bumpy patched bitumen to smooth hotmix; from everyone camping out to some staying in a luxury resort; from a rudimentary pit lane separated from the circuit by a yellow line to complete pit-lane workshops behind yet another concrete wall.

As we left the circuit on the last post we’d finished the climb to Reid Park and Sulman Park, we were gathering speed quickly and the road was opening up for some fast motoring…



Levelling out. After the steep climb and tight corners, the circuit levels out for a rapid run around the top of the mountain.

…with a well-protected spectator mound on the right and a wall to the left where once it was just trees and a steep downhill slope. The cars are moving very fast as the come over the rise and continue to gather speed over the next crest and through the first of the sweeping left-hand corners:



Close to the wall. Between the sweeps the cars drift out close to the wall, the closer the better for the quickest line through the bends.

They’re heading for the famous McPhillamy Park bend, where thousands gather to see the cars hurtle through at very high speed.



Continuing to sweep. The need to drift out close to the right-hand wall here is obvious to get the best line approaching McPhillamy Park.

Remembering all the while, of course, that the road was originally built as a scenic drive, using relief labour in the Great Depression of the thirties. And a new area to appreciate the views has been added in recent times, named for the man who ran the racing here for over twenty years, Jack Hinxman:



Hinxman Vista. The gates were closed the day I was there, but a picnic area taking advantage of the sweeping views carries this name.

The next crest gives a clear view of what’s ahead on the circuit. McPhillamy Park, the scene of some huge crashes over the years, when trees adjoined the circuit and the timber safety fence was right at the edge of the track:



McPhillamy Park. The land beyond the gravel trap is a park, but for the drivers it’s crucial to use all the road through the coming corner.

And then it’s time to think about the descent from the mountain. It’s not called the ‘Skyline’ for nothing as everything drops away. Time to apply the brakes here…



To the Skyline. Once again, the wall on the left has altered the appreciation of what was once there, but the speeds of the modern race cars means that they arrive at this point with way too much speed on to go over the Skyline.

To fully appreciate how steep the Esses dropping away from the Skyline are, you have to compare the slope of the road with the flat country heading off into the distance. This one is a real test:



The view and the drop. The plains that were so eagerly sought by the first settlers on our shores are out there, but drivers don’t have time to look. Right, left, right in quick succession, it grabs their attention.

But it’s not over yet. The right hander ahead is even tighter and leads to one of the real landmarks of this circuit…



Approach to The Dipper. Lining this up is important as the road drops right away as specators look down on the cars from up on the bank.

…which is ‘The Dipper’. Here the turn of the road sees an impossible slope on the inside of the bend, though it falls in place if you’ve got the right line. Note the level line of the Coopers sign to get an appreciation of the slope out of this corner.



The famous Dipper. Another spot where many have come to grief, but mostly a place where lifting inside wheels is evident and good lines pay off.

Out of The Dipper it’s still steeply downhill, the right hander there is no problem…



Exiting of The Dipper. Again we see there’s a view unappreciated, while the thought of days gone by when there was no wall come to mind. Just a steep, lightly-treed slope to go down.

…and accelerating to the next couple of bends again sees high speeds come up. In the old days we’d walk down from The Esses to Forrest Elbow on that track between the trees on the right, but while we could see the cars going by at this point, they were out of sight at The Dipper until you were above it.

The next couple of bends…



Run to the Elbow. High speeds, I did say, with a complete trust in one’s brakes as we appreciate what comes up next.



Left and right. Simple stuff, right. But there’s more ahead…

…lead to a steep drop…



Drop to Forrest Elbow. This is where the brakes will be really tested, Forrest Elbow got its name from a motorcyclist – Jack Forrest – who was injured in a crash in the ‘elbow’.

…with the tight Forrest Elbow coming up fast. The brakes are on hard here to pull the cars up to make a good approach. And a good approach is vital as the exit needs to be a quick one as it leads onto the long Conrod Straight.



Forrest Elbow. Not a good place to come to grief, it’s tight and approached from a steep drop, demanding good brakes and a good line.

It’s not hard, once again, for me to think back to the days I first came here. This nice smooth braking area was a bit narrower, sitting between rough embankments and the surface was like a patchwork quilt where pot-holes had been repaired.



Top of Conrod Straight. It’s all acceleration now to the car’s top speed, the bend ahead presents no difficulty and then the downhill rush helps get the speed right up.

Back in 1965 I was a flag marshall just down there on the right. No walls those days, no little covered stand, just standing on the edge of the track watching as the Cortinas and Minis kept coming by – bringing a windstorm with them – and waving flags where appropriate as they ran out their 500-mile race.



Clubrooms. The Bathurst Light Car Club have their clubrooms at this point on the left, another memory I have from 1965 when I attended a post-race party and prizegiving in there.

Conrod Straight, named for an errant connecting rod of a Hudson Terraplane engine which escaped during a pass along this stretch. Originally over a mile long, downhill but with a couple of rises, it’s another thing to have been altered – as you will see.



Onto the straight. Still relatively steep, the first downhill section of Conrod and the following rise would be plenty on most circuits. But not Mount Panorama.

Rapidly passing orchards and farmhouses, the drivers approach what we used to call the ‘First Hump’:



First Hump. The rise won’t wash off much of the speed gained down that incline, but the hump would make the car feel awfully light at the speeds reached here.

The reason it’s no longer called the ‘First Hump’ is because there is no longer a ‘Second Hump’. Back in 1986 a fatal accident occurred at the Second Hump and subsequently the track was diverted to the right, with an S-bend to bring the cars back to the original line of the straight.

This new bit of road is called ‘The Chase’, a name it got because the original sponsor was Caltex and, I guess, having a name beginning with ‘C’ suited that arrangement. It was the ‘Caltex Chase’ for a number of years.



Looking for The Chase. The original path of the road is clearly seen as being straight ahead, but today The Chase is a real challenge.

The fastest cars enter The Chase, the right-hand kink from Conrod, without backing off. They soon have to wipe off the speed, however, as the bends coming up are much slower:



Left . . . The left-hander is the slower of the two bends and it’s a test of stability and brakes to get a car lined up right to go through here cleanly.

Lots of cars finish up in the gravel trap off to the right here as they attempt to enter the corner too fast, or – more likely – haven’t got their line right on the entry. Or they’ve attempted an impossible overtaking move. And there is often trouble in the next bit…



. . . and right. It should be simple, but sometimes when cars are dicing they can tangle and finish up off the road here too.

…which leads back to the original line of the straight:



Resort on the right. Built only in the past couple of decades, this resort must give a grand view of the racing.

Now we’re looking at what used to be the ‘Second Hump’. But it’s no longer the danger it used to be - cars getting airborne here was commonplace and several fatalities occurred before the 1986 one - as the speeds have come down so much due to the inclusion of The Chase in the circuit.



Down into Murrays. Bill Murray was a driver in the forties who crashed in the right-angled turn that takes the circuit to the left and back onto the starting straight.

Still the changes show up. There’s a pit entry lane going off to the left just before Murrays and no sign of the trees which used to line the circuit on the right at this point. There’s a road goes off to Bathurst at an angle, that’s an escape road for those who find they’re going too fast.

And so we complete the lap, a long lap of almost four miles. It has a bit of everything and those downhill esses and other bends still surprise overseas drivers. They arrive, they’ve seen the place on video, but they still aren’t ready for the reality.

Back to work. I had to go to Orange to pick up some more working materials from a woman who had some left over. Orange is only a short drive from Bathurst, a little over thirty miles:



But even in that short distance you can encounter things. On my way back I found there’d been a crash and the police had the road blocked:



Blocked. There’s an accident just over the crest and all traffic was being stopped for a short time.

Soon we were allowed to go past, I couldn’t make out what had happened:



Past the wreckage. I rather think there was a motorcycle involved here, but it was the usual cast of thousands to see to the aftermath.

My time in Bathurst was just about up now. Friday would be my final day and I spent it running from one area to the other picking up as many as I could of the last of the questionnaires. I achieved a fair result and so set off on a late-afternoon drive out through Sofala. I went by the same roads I’d come down on and by the time I got to Rylstone it was dark. I was, of course, being very mindful of the potential kangaroo hazard.

But the most memorable part of the trip was encountering some dazzling lights pointed at me from the side of the road. Like the unthinking driver I’d come across in Queensland, they’d parked their pickup on the wrong side of the road to give light to someone who needed help with their car.

Between the high beams, driving lights and roof-mounted light-bar I had no chance whatever of seeing anything until I got past. Nevertheless, I did get by there and drove on to Max’s place where I’d be based for the weekend work once again and spend more time helping with their sorting of books and boxes.

I still had no idea where the company were going to send me the following week…

 

Before leaving behind the Mount Panorama circuit altogether, there’s something to be said about Chrysler products racing at ‘the Mountain’.

There were a couple of open-wheeled Specials with flathead six engines in the period 1938 to 1955, but a ‘38 Dodge did compete in sedan car racing in the mid-fifties…



Don Gibson and his Dodge. Gibson was famed for his spectacular driving of this very much out of date car at New South Wales circuits in the 1950s. Here he leads Dick Shaw’s Holden.

…and made a name for himself in a car which shouldn’t have been as fast as he made it go.

In the annual production-based endurance race, the first time we saw one was a 1963 Dodge Phoenix. This was a Canadian-produced version of the Dodge 440 fitted with the Poly 318 engine and 727 (pushbutton) automatic transmission. They were pretty ordinary cars as sold here, standard 10” brakes and so on. One of these was entered in the 1967 event and can be seen (having spun to a stop!) at 17m 47s in this You Tube coverage:


The drivers of the car, Barry Sharp and Lindsay Derriman, used the 727 mercilessly to rein in the speed on the descent and at the end of the straight, it finished the race too.

Chrysler Australia introduced the Hemi 6 engine in 1970 and – in 245ci form – used 2bbl carburettors and a cam change to give a performance version in a model they called the Pacer. There was also a 4bbl version and one of these cars actually took the lead in the 1970 race.


At 12m 53s you see Doug Chivas in the 4bbl car take the lead and at 13m 55s he’s seen still retaining that lead. But because the 4bbl carby had to be mounted with the float bowl sideways (ie. not in front of the carby) for space considerations, they had to run with setups which caused greater fuel usage and put him out of the running.

By 1971 Chrysler had developed cars capable of running with any of the others. Using the Hemi 6 in its 265ci form, they built a coupe with a slightly shorter wheelbase than their sedans, but were hampered by having a 3-speed gearbox instead of a 4-speed – which came the following year.

You see quite a lot of them in this You Tube coverage, and you’ll also notice a big improvement in the circuit achieved in the intervening four years.


Those 265 Hemis in the Chargers featured triple dual-choke Weber carburettors and in their 1972 form gave over 300bhp.

 

Back in Scone I settled in to the spare bedroom for the night, but the weekend was busy as ever.

I had a regular weekend assignment to do there which took me around some of the streets near the Northern outskirts of the town. And while it’s a healthytown, bolstered by the coal mining taking place throughout that area, many of the homes are older ones, just a few new ones are mixed in with them…



Back streets of Scone. Another example of a wide country town street, though not all are like this. Older homes and renovated homes are the norm in this area.(GE)

…while flats (apartments) are a rare thing.

I spent a bit of time each day going through the boxes for Christine, putting them in some kind of order in the garden shed, with this continuing on Monday as I awaited instructions from the company. I still didn’t know where they’d be sending me but I was still guessing it would be somewhere around Sydney.

It was a bit of a rare day, too, as Marc Schagen found the time to pull up and take a break in Scone and thus spend some time with Max. Mark’s new truck…



Marc’s new truck. After waiting many months, Marc finally got his new truck on the road just a few months before this visit.

…had a long gestation period, his order going in about ten months before he took delivery.

We met Marc once before, his previous truck was yellow but the trailer was the same. I’d met up with him at Manilla as I drove the Adventurer pickup home from Sydney.

Having helped out Max and Christine for the day, on Tuesday I set out to drive to Sydney, still expecting my work to be there. I headed straight to Annangrove to visit Bob Britton – of course. But as I passed through Ravensworth I noticed this:



Burned down. This was the school residence for a school no longer in existence. Now surrounded by coal mines, it was being preserved.

The interest for me here was that my friend Norm Smith (the one with the Mobilgas oil dispenser drum and the freshly-painted Lotus Cortina suspension parts hanging from the ceiling) lived in this house when his father was schoolmaster at the old school. I phoned him to tell him but he already knew, which made me wonder why he hadn’t told me!



As can be seen, there was some rain about and that persisted all the way to Bob’s place. Just a bit of drizzle from time to time.

Bob has gum trees all over his property, and that means about three acres when you exclude the house and shed areas. So there’s always twigs falling from the trees, even branches when there’s strong winds, so he has made a habit of burning off the surplus down the backyard.

As it happened, there’d been a bit of wind and some larger branches had fallen and I was able to show off my cordless power saw – which I just happened to have in the car. We went down the back yard to burn off:



Bob’s fire. We had a fairly fierce fire going down near Bob’s wood pile. There’s plenty of native timber growing in the yard.

The ‘pet’ birds were still regular visitors…



Birds at ground level. I tried sitting the camera on the concrete apron in front of the workshop to get a close-up of the birds eating the seed Bob spreads for them.

…and continued to show Bob that he’s their slave and has a commitment to put out seed for them. Though their feathers showed that they’d been unable to avoid the wet weather:



Undisturbed feeding. They weren’t at all perturbed by me gettng close enough to get pictures like this.

Having recently become aware that Bob made a later type of wheel than I’d previously noticed, he took me into his shed where all the patterns are kept. This wheel is of the type with an alloy casting with an outer flange to which two rim sections are sealed and bolted in place.



Late wheel pattern. Bob shows both the rear and front of the pattern for the wheel centre.

Many other patterns are there. Bellhousings and steering racks and brake calipers have all been designed, patterns been made, castings acquired and machining completed by Bob.



The patterns. Accumulated over many years, there are patterns here for Bob’s BN7-type wheels (top left and top right), brake calipers (right), bellhousing and adaptors (lower left) and steering rack housing (in black).



Cooper style. An older one, similar to the Cooper wheels of the late fifties and early sixties. But wider.

Catching up with what Bob was doing with the car he was building to take the Maserati 300S type body, I got a number of pics:



Driveshafts. Bob had to shorten the driveshafts and chose to cut them in the middle and put a neat-fitting sleeve over the remaining lengths. He drilled into the sleeve and welded the shaft inside to the holes in the outer sleeve, four of such welds in each half of the shaft.



Cockpit section. The dash taking shape, the computer is mounted on top of the centre tunnel in a build which is higher than the norm for Bob’s cars. That’s because of the size and shape of the mid-fifties bodywork to be mounted.



Seats in place. Again the higher-than-normal build is seen in the bulkhead behind the seats, the exhausts from the 3.8-litre Holden (nee Buick) V6 are at each side of the car.



Up front. Unlike the other car Bob built with a Holden V6, this one has its radiator mounted conventionally up the front, electric fan and all. The pressurisation of the system is to check for leaks.

Finally I got the call from Melbourne – they needed me to work in Canberra, 300kms to the South-West of Sydney.

The options given to fill in the questionnaire for the drug survey included an online option. As Canberra is the National Capital, it’s loaded down with people who use computers all day, so most opted on the initial discussion to take the online option.

That meant that the person who dropped off the questionnaire had no reason to go back, so it gave the incentive for the respondents to put off completion, or to just forget it. They would be recorded by the person leaving the questionnaire as opting to do it online and later that day they’d receive an e.mail with a link and it was all up to them.

Hence I headed in that direction:



My purpose there, as I did four areas in some of Canberra’s Northern suburbs, was to see if I got better results (as in numbers of respondents completing the survey) than they’d seen so far. Results had been very slim and that was far removed from what I’d been experiencing.

I thought about all of this as I travelled, the Hume Highway now being a freeway all the way and so different to the road I used to drive in my youth. There are three or four crossings of the Nepean River, this one at Pheasants Nest…



Pheasants Nest bridge. The tallest of the bridges, though you wouldn’t realise it as you drove with eyes facing forwards, goes over a deep gorge in the sandstone plateau.(GE)

…is very tall as has near it a seismic sensor which reports back to someone who presumably checks on it. This country occasionally has earth tremors.



Canberra Exit. This is just South of Goulburn, where the Federal Highway heads off through Collector to the area selected about a hundred years ago to be our National Capital.(GE)

I had lived in Canberra for three years in the mid-eighties and I frequently worked there through 2000 to 2005, but the expansion of the city since then has been great. It sits in the Australian Capital Territory, which was granted self-government some time after I moved back to Sydney.

So as I drive into Canberra I expect some familiarity, but it lessens with every trip!



Trams in Dickson! There were no trams in Canberra at all previously, now they have a network of lines through many suburbs. The service roads and the houses were familiar, as were the multi-story buildings which spread offices through the suburbs.(GE)

My arrival came after it had turned dark. I well remembered that the ‘Tradies’ (Canberra Tradesman’s Union Club) had reasonably priced meals and they were in one of the first suburbs found after entering the Northern part of the city. I also had to have a look around for accommodation, but that was fruitless – there was a big football game on and nothing was available that night.

Anyway, I slipped into the ‘Tradies’ for a meal and stayed there late…



The ‘Tradies’ Club. The carpark is huge as the attendances are likewise, it’s a very popular venue adjacent to the Dickson shopping centre.

…and then moved the car into a quiet spot in the adjoining street and rugged myself up to sleep there the night. It’s nothing I haven’t done before, obviously.

I had taken the precaution of asking the motel at Lyneham to book me in for the following nights, telling them I’d probably be there about five nights, and the next morning my first call after breakfast was to see them and get that all sorted out. The company, meanwhile, were so very apologetic about me sleeping in the car. On the way down they’d phoned me and told me they were having difficulty finding a room for me and I told them I’d work it out.

Then I had to source some further materials for my work. A woman who’d been recruited to do this work a few months earlier was still working on it and I drove around to her place to pick up questionnaires. In talking to her it was plain that the reason for the lack of response was as I thought – people opting for the online method and then not doing the survey at all.

I explained to her my method as she still had areas to do too. “You offer it as if it’s only the paper version,” I said, “then as you’re leaving, show them the online option on the front of the paper version, but tell them you’ll be back unless you get a text message from them saying they’ve done it online.” Of course, were were being advised of the online responses coming in as a daily list too.

In this way, people knew we’d be back knocking on their door unless we knew it had been done online. And so I went off to work on my areas, all of which were in Gungahlin, a cluster of suburbs which didn’t exist when I lived there and were only just starting to grow during my visits in 2000 – 2005.



Nicholls houses. Nicholls is close to the older suburbs of the Belconnen cluster. As can be seen, Canberra residents don’t always rely on grass growing on their lawns, hard winters and dry summers make that difficult so many keep lawns to a minimum.(GE)

Of course, while I was working I’d take breaks to chase down something to eat etc. The trams had reached Gungahlin too:



Gungahlin shops and trams. The tram services to the city are regular, of course, and shopping facilities are well-catered for in centres like Gungahlin. There are government buildings in each of the centres too, decentralising the workforce into the suburbs.

Canberra’s history only goes back to the time of the first World War, with the ‘provisional’ Parliament House virtually built in a paddock and opened in 1927. Much of the housing development was done by government agencies to help establish the workforce needed to run government services and, in turn, to service their needs.

It seems that today, as they run out of room (Gungahlin is awfully close to the New South Wales border), there’s a need to crush ever increasing numbers of homes into given areas. Hence the development of these…



Gungahlin terraces. Like modern terrace houses, these rental properties were where I started in yet another area.(GE)

…ugly (I feel) two-storey terrace homes. Meanwhile, behind this facade facing Anthony Rolfe Avenue, there are regular individual homes in which I found some really receptive people:



Around the corner. Just turning the corner presented a nicer atmosphere. Spacious homes in which families of all sizes lived comfortable lives.(GE)

Note that the car parking is often on crushed stone or gravel areas where normally you’d find lawn. It saves mowing, but also provides for several cars per household in this busy and very mobile city.

Another area I worked was a bit newer still, though back closer to Belconnen again. The suburb’s name is Grace…



Houses of Grace? No time for large trees to have grown, houses crammed in side by side, but neat and occupied by a wide variety of people, including those of other countries.(GE)

…but it proved to be one of the hardest of the four areas in which I worked. Nevertheless, I would complete the placements in each area and I was regularly getting text messages to say people had done the job online. Not that there wouldn’t still be plenty out there to go back and pick up. I had the weekend and the following Monday morning allotted to do that.

Driving around Canberra, by the way, put me into heavier traffic than I’d seen in over six months. My trip through the outskirts of Sydney hadn’t been troubled, but Canberra turned it on:



Traffic. The provision of the tram service hasn’t stopped the Canberrans from clogging up their roads…

In reality, though, Canberra has been very thoughtfully designed so there is always another good option no matter where you’re going. Being a National Capital, it has to provide for the safe and rapid carriage of visiting dignitaries, for instance, so roads can be blocked for that purpose and the public will still have a good alternative route to follow.

The roads also have ‘supervision’ from the menacing speed camera vans:



Speed camera. This ‘service’ is let out to a private company, I have no doubt they are well-rewarded for their diligence.

With the weekend coming, I also became aware of a car show and swap meet in Queanbeyan, a large New South Wales town sitting on the border on the Eastern side of Canberra. I therefore arranged my time to be able to go there on Sunday morning.

I also managed to take a few shots showing the layout of the city. The base plan was by an American, Walter Burley Griffin, who had a vision for the layout based on its topography which has stood the test of time.

After the next post we’ll mingle the car show and the pictures of Canberra today…

 

A second post for today...

Seeing as my working travels have taken us to Canberra, it’s appropriate I devote a post to our National Capital. This is located in the Australian Capital Territory, an area severed from New South Wales to give it independence from the (sometimes squabbling…) states.



Apart from the Canberra region, because convention is that a Capital City should have a sea-port, the Jervis Bay Territories were also excised from the South Coast of NSW for that purpose and there’s a Naval base there as well as an air base.

The centrepiece of Canberra is, obviously, Parliament House. As I mentioned earlier, there was a ‘temporary’ or ‘provisional’ Parliament house built in the twenties, but as the seventies rolled around some more serious thought had gone into the need for a new and more appropriate home for our parliament.

It was always going to be built somewhere on Capital Hill (see map below), but debates about details lingered until, finally, in the late seventies a decision was made. Then an International design competition was held and, again, an American victory was seen as the Philadelphia-based architectural firm of Mitchell/Giurgola came up with the winner.



Parliament House. Capital Hill was levelled, much of it excavated, and the building took its place. It was built between 1981 and 1988 and – though it is scalloped for access and appearances – it reconstructed the profile of the original hill.(ABC)

The layout of the city provided for the Parliament house to be at the peak of a triangle with a ceremonial pathway between that building and the Australian War Memorial at the foot of Mount Ainslie, which is on the centre axis of that triangle. Walter Burley Griffin’s grand concept came together very nicely.

The ‘provisional’ Parliament House, still on the line of that ceremonial pathway, became a parliamentary museum.



Both Parliament Houses. The ceremonial pathway can be clearly seen here, with Lake Burley Griffin intersecting it at its lowest point.



Sheep paddock. The lake was, for a long time, merely a small river or creek running through sheep paddocks, but by the mid-1960s Scrivener Dam brought it up to its proper level.

Many significant buildings have been located in the ‘Parliamentary Triangle’ in between the major roads that cross the lake to converge on Capital Hill. The National Library was built in the early sixties to begin that phase of development, by the seventies things were in full swing and the National Gallery…



Naional Gallery. Built on the shores of the lake and on the Eastern side of the ‘grand avenue’ along the centre axis of the triangle, the building houses artwork purchased by or donated to the Australian people as well as hosting exhibitions of famous works from around the world.

…was built by 1982, though there have been several extensions to the structure. Opposite it is the High Court of Australia:



The High Court of Australia. A functional building as well as an architectural masterpiece, it’s on the Western side of the ‘grand avenue’ on the shores of the lake. It was completed in the early eighties.

One of my favourite sights in Canberra is to go to the top of Mount Ainslie some time in late October or early November, one a day when there’s a bit of cloud to enhance the picture. To sit up there as the sun sets, throwing its colourful rays across the city, silhouettes the ragged Brindabella Range and reflects those colours in the lake as the street lights come on. Fabulous.

And here’s a map of Canberra with most of the places I’ve mentioned or will mention visible on it:



It’s just grown out of all proportion in the 35 or so years since I lived there. The population was 250,000 then, now it’s 430,000. Time for a bit more of a look at it…

 

And so to get back to my final day in the Canberra region. It was a big wrap-up day, picking up the last of the questionnaires from the people who didn’t quite have them ready when I called, and it was time for me to take a break and go to the swap meet in Queanbeyan.

The town grew from the typical small beginnings. On the banks of the Molonglo River – the river which feeds into Lake Burley Griffin – an ex-convict named Timothy Beard established himself by squattage at the Western side of the present day town. With a farm on the river’s banks and an inn on the hill he provided the basis for the future town. That was in the 1820s.

His property was named ‘Quinbean’ as an Anglicised version of the local aboriginals used to describe the ‘clear waters’ of the Molonglo. By 1885 the railway reached Queanbeyan as it filled the needs of graziers in that district and further South to get their wool to market. When Canberra was being established a branch line was built across to the Capital’s site, while Queanbeyan boasted a large number of drinking establishments and remained an attraction to the workers.

My last night in the Lyneham Motor Inn…



Lyneham Motor Inn. After the best part of a week here I now packed to leave. It’s only a coincidence that the Google Earth Street View picture has a Forester the same model as mine in frame.(GE)

My visit would not be complete without a drive up to Mount Ainslie to look over the grand vista that is Canberra. Conveniently, this was but a small diversion on the way to Queanbeyan.



City from Mount Ainslie. The two ‘triangles’ around which Canberra was designed and built are visible here.

Mount Ainslie is the ‘lower left’ of the planning triangle of Walter Burley Griffin, Capital Hill, with the new Parliament House, is the apex and Black Mountain, with its white communications tower, is visible through the tree to the right, where it is the ‘lower right’ corner of the triangle.

The other triangle also has Parliament House as its apex, it’s known as the National Triangle or, more commonly, the Parliamentary Triangle. It is more central to this photo, the bridges over Lake Burley Griffin are on the two sides and the small hill in Civic and the Defence Headquarters in Russell form the other points.

The Mount Ainslie-Capital Hill- Red Hill axis is the centre of that triangle, down which the photo looks – just left of centre – over the top of the War Memorial building in the foreground. To the far right are the Brindabella Ranges, mentioned earlier in relation to me sitting here and watching the spectacular sunsets in late October and early November.



Looking North-West. With the leafy older suburbs in the foreground, the industrial area of Mitchell is largely white, while the Gungahlin and Belconnen suburban areas spread across the picture in the distance.

A feature of Canberra’s suburbs are that they are formed into clusters which are separated by ‘green’ areas, largely including hills, where there are some farms as well as areas where people keep their horses and have riding trails. Some of the hills are also simply natural forests and some are planned pine forests which periodically are harvested for timber.



South-East. Queanbeyan is off to the left here, the industrial centre of Fyshwick is out there too, as well as some of the older inner suburbs of Canberra’s inner North.

But time soon gets away and I had to head off to the swap meet. I had a look around for bargains but didn’t find anything to appeal. Had it been today I would have snapped up some large drills I saw with Morse tapers, we could certainly use them at the Men’s Shed, but I hadn’t yet joined that organisation.

One thing which caught my eye was a huge length of trailer wire. This had the seven differently-coloured wires within a tough outer sheath and was presumably from a semi-trailer. But it was way more than I could potentially use and a bit too pricey.

And so I moved on to look at the cars, which rolled in to be shown off:



Dart V8. Bearing ACT numberplates, this Dart was the same as our Valiants of the same period from the firewall back. The 1958 Chev Biscayne alongside was an Australian-assembled model.

Cars such as this appeal to those who want something just a little different, so they’ve been privately imported in small numbers over the years. Or they may have come here as the personal cars of Embassy staff and stayed when they left. That happens often.



1939 Buick coupe. It used to be commonplace to see this model on the roads here in sedan form, but coupes were rare. Buicks were assembled here by Holden’s in that era.

Also assembled here with locally-stamped bodywork were many of the Chrysler range…



1936 Plymouth sedan. Six-wheel equipment was not common, nor spats at the rear, but it’s likely that this car was wearing a body stamped by T J Richards or Holden’s.

…though this one definitely wasn’t:



1942 Chrysler. By 1940 all car manufacturing in Australia had ended as we were embroiled in the war from September, 1939. This Chrysler would have been imported.

Some of the ways these made it here were as staff cars for the US military, or personal cars for high-level officers of the US forces, or as later private imports. As a right-hand drive car it’s evident it’s been here for many years, but the spats point to it being owned by someone who’s cared for a long time.



1926 Dodge. Most cars in Australia in the twenties and early thirties came in this form - ‘tourers’ - with a soft top and four doors. This one had a 4-cylinder engine and 3-speed manual transmission and brakes on… the rear wheels only.

That’s one nicely-restored car and wins, in my mind, for originality and standard of presentation. While the next car…



1939 Chev hot-rod. This coupe should have plenty of ‘go’ if that intake is any indication. The paint and the wheels are, like the engine, a long way removed from original.

…shows that there are other ways to finish cars of the older eras.

And mentioning the ‘older eras’ brings to mind that the first car to ever venture into Queanbeyan was a Winton. This was on a promotional drive for that marque and reached the town in 1901. Winton had sent three vehicles to Australia for this purpose, one of them being a ‘Post Office’ vehicle as they intended tendering to supply these to the Australian postal service.

Back to the car show… even some of the modern cars were a long way from being stand-outs:



’Plain Jane’ Charger. Only the alloy wheels and driving lights stand out on this Valiant Charger, from the first of these models and a very nice example of its type.

Similarly, this 1970 Dodge Phoenix…



1970 Dodge Phoenix. From 1965 to 1972/3 Chrysler Australia assembled Plymouths and rebadged them as Dodge Phoenixes. From about 1966 they offered a pillarless 4-door like this one, all of these equipped with a 383 big block engine.

…has very little external evidence of a caring owner than its standard of presentation and the highly-polished Simmons composite wheels on which it stands.



RAM 1500. Very recently re-introduced into general sale in Australia, the RAM is here sandwiched between a 1960/61 Holden and a 1965/66 model with more Simmons wheels.

Possibly it was the Dukes of Hazzard which led to the Australian popularity of orange-painted Dodge Chargers and there was one here, too:



Dodge Charger. Naturally equipped with a 440, this Charger harks back to the popular television series.

And back to the locally-produced models…



Valiant Pacer. Sitting alongside a Mk 1 Ford Zephyr, this VG model Pacer was Chrysler Australia’s first entry into the power race that led to the Ford Falcon GT and Holden’s GTS V8 models. Striping reflected some of the US-parent company models designs.

…with the Valiant Pacer. It preceded the Charger and, in the VG with its Hemi-6 engine, was a potent road car.



Outside the fence. A pair of locally-built Valiants – the AP6 on the left and a VE on the right. The VE differs very little from the American version of the same year, the AP6 has a different grille.

Just why this pair of cars were parked where they were, with nothing else around, I had no idea. Perhaps the owner/s wanted them to stand out so somebody might want to buy one of them. Both are slant-6 models.

And speaking of the Hemi-6 which is not slanted at all…



Worked-over Hemi-6. Though naturally-aspirated, this Hemi-6 engine has a cold-air feed to its multiple carburettors.

…and lives in a 1971 Valiant Charger.



Pair of 2-doors. More private imports: A 1958 Dodge Coronet and a 1960 Dodge, both two-door models and both converted to RHD after importation.

There were other examples of privately-imported models from that era, a ‘58 Plymouth two-door and a ‘60 Plymouth sedan, while there was also a Plymouth Duster.

This was probably locally-built…



Happy Cobra driver. Australia has plenty of Cobra replicas and not many real ones, so I’d be as happy saying this is locally-made as the owner appears to be driving it in.

…and this definitely wasn’t:



A rarity. The Lil’ Red Truck wasn’t sold here, nor were any pickups Dodge made in that era, so it’s obviously an import.

Cars were still arriving, and this truck rolled in…



Speedway cars arrive. Fancy transport for some potent speedway racers, The truck is a snub-nose Chev or GMC from the late forties.

…and added its sprint car to the display of racers on show:



Speedway racers. Naturally, people who like cars are potential speedway fans and these cars wouldn’t always be available for a close-up look.

The next one, in my opinion, comes from the ‘only a mother could love’ range:



1963 Mercury. The Monterey Breezeway with its reversed back window seems like a throwback to models from the late fifties – which in turn had lost their way anyway.

As can be seen from the row of cars behind this Roadrunner, there was plenty on display on this day, even before I left quite early.



1971 Plymouth Roadrunner. These featured that unique bumper-bar based style that makes them stand out from any crowd. It was a style later copied by Chrysler Australia for their ‘Chrysler by Chrysler’ models based on the Valiants.

And still there was more…



Charger and many more. A 265 Hemi-6 powers this Charger, while behind it there’s a whole row of trucks and pickups I didn’t photograph.

My time was running out. I went for a quick walk back through the swap meet and watched as someone else bought that cable. I asked him how much of it he’d use and he said about half, so I quickly did a deal to buy the other half and so saved myself from buying the lot and got all that I wanted.

Cars were still arriving as I got to the gate…



GMC pickup. Another recent import, thus the owner’s been able to leave it left-hand drive*. My Forester is just across the street, so I’d soon be on my way.

And I was as I still needed to go out and get those final questionnaires picked up and make my way back to Sydney on my way home…



* I’m not sure when the rules changed, but it wasn’t possible for many years to register a left-hand drive car in Australia. Today anything over 25 years old can be so registered.

 

And so I headed home. Well, not straight home, I did the final pickups first and then pointed the nose of the Forester towards Sydney. It’s freeway all the way now, whereas only about 80kms of the 300kms of that stretch was freeway when I lived in Canberra in the eighties.

Thoughts of the freeway combined with thoughts of where I’d just been and the cars I’d just seen brought a few more to mind. I’d photographed a hot-rod based on a twenties Buick and utilising a supercharged Hemi 6 engine…



Hemi 6 in a Buick. Built by an intrepid Mopar enthusiast, this hot-rod was a car I’d heard a lot about on forums…

I think it attracted more attention than the old Thunderbird alongside.



Supercharged Hemi. …seeing it in the flesh was good, but I didn’t expect to see acorn nuts. It was certainly an interesting car at the show.

I think that’s a little intercooler under the intake, isn’t it? Refreshing in these days of alloy radiator-style intercoolers as fitted on Japanese diesels.

So there was plenty to reflect on as I headed back to that part of the modern Canberra suburbs…



Modern Canberra. Out to Gungahlin again with its unfamiliar (to me) construction, so unlike the Canberra areas I once knew.

…before heading up the Federal Highway. The smooth ride that it now is soon got me to the downhill run to Lake George:



Descent to Lake George. You can’t see the lake? You’re excused. Often it covers that whole flat area out there, sometimes it just disappears.(GE)

I’ve seen this lake full, with the water lapping at the embankment on which the road is built. And I’ve seen it plenty of times simply empty as it was when Google Earth’s camera car took these pics. As far as I know, nobody really understands the lake’s comings and goings, it can be empty when you go to sleep and full the next morning. Without rain.

There are fences out into the lake for graziers to use it when it’s empty. There’s a story of some US soldiers here during the second World War who camped out there one night and drowned as it rose. But this drive, for some reason makes me think of fast cars:



Pair of Vipers. Fast enough for that road, which goes straight for about six or seven miles. These Vipers didn’t attract much attention when I was at the show.

In the days when I had dreams of driving a fast car along there, the car of my choice would have been a Gullwing Mercedes-Benz 300SL. There wasn’t even one of those in the country at that time. But you can see from this view…



Along the lake’s edge. A mostly-straight run for six or seven miles, time to contemplate just why that lake appears and disappears.(GE)

…that, even as the 2-lane blacktop road it used to be, it would have been an exhilerating place to sit on speeds over 120mph – which were legal in those days.

With that steep ridge along the whole of this section, it means that the Southbound lanes (ie. the lanes on the right) were almost entirely built up with fill when the freeway went through. Also visible in this Google Earth image is a rock structure on the edge of the road – that’s a little dam which can fill as the lake fills and retain water when it goes away for stock to drink.

As I passed through the North-Western fringe of the Sydney suburban sprawl, I recalled what BobWinley had told me about this new bridge being built at Windsor…



New Windsor bridge. The old one was always one of the first bridges to go under when floods hit the Nepean River, which virtually rings Sydney’s Cumberland Basin.

…and that it wasn’t much higher than the old one and certainly wasn’t above flood level. But when all things are considered, it will do the job, the road itself goes for a couple of miles further up at a lower level than the new bridge.

I was intent on spending a couple more days with Max and Christine in Scone. Max was almost totally immobile, Christine has her problems since she had a stroke a few years earlier, and they had a lot of sorting to do after their move from Brisbane. I explained all of this to Sandra when I phoned her, explaining that I felt compelled to give them a bit more of a hand while I had this opportunity, even if it delayed me getting home by a couple of days.



Bookshelves. A set of flat-pack bookshelves needed erecting and that was certainly beyond Christine.

I put up one set one day and started filling them with some of the books I’d sorted out in the garden shed a week and more earlier. Then the next day I did the other just the same. Of course, Christine expressed her gratitude to me as it was all getting on top of her.



Max and the bookshelves. Max, who had also suffered a stroke, looks over a Ned Kelly booklet with his bookshelves in the background.

Things were coming together better for them as my input in other little ‘impossible for Chris’ projects were completed, so I was satisfied that I’d been of assistance as I headed further North.

Remember that I’d been held up by that fire at Tenterfield? Other fires had crossed that path in the intervening period, and smoke hung in the air, but there was no immediate threat of my path being cut.

As I drove through the stretch between Glen Innes and Tenterfield I passed a few old cars. Then at Bolivia Hill there was a traffic light for the roadworks where they’re building a bridge to enable the climb to be straightened out. You can see smoke in the air as there were still fires about in these pictures:

As I drove through this stretch I passed a few old cars. Then at Bolivia Hill there was a traffic light for the roadworks where they’re building a bridge to enable the climb to be straightened out. You can see smoke in the air as there were still fires about in these pictures:



T-Model trippers. It would have been some kind of a T-Model club run taking place that brought these cars out onto the roads…

The couple in that car would have spent many hours restoring, polishing and maintaining it. The other one, which pulled up just as the traffic was about to be allowed through, was a truck…



Trucking Tee. …and such runs bring out all kinds. I didn’t have time to walk back to get a closer shot of this truck.

…and it looks like it might be a father and son team in that one.

I reached home that night and started to take a break. Whether it was well-deserved or not I won’t speculate over, but I had been away all but a few days of over three months. A little time at home – our new home just before I left – enabled me to look around a bit.



Sunset at home. From the front verandah I snapped the colours of the sunset this day, while I learned on my return that the nice elderly couple next door had moved out and a busy contractor had moved in.

But it wasn’t all rest. The weekend week was to continue and I headed North through Crows Nest one weekend and saw that the caravan park just South of the town was loaded down with old cars. I couldn’t resist…



Pair of Chryslers. The front one has a numberplate that says it’s a ‘29 model, the blue one behind it is, I’d think, a few years older.

…stopping to get some snaps. Apart from the Chryslers there was a couple of Buicks:



Buicks. These were obviously classy cars in the late-’20s and the roadster would have been a rare sight on the roads here.

Not everything was as classy, but I’m sure the owner loves his Chev:



Chev cut down. So many of these cars got cut down to convert them from Tourers to workhorses, the water-cooling bag on the front bumper is a nice touch.

Yes, I was back to the weekend-whirl, North one weekend, South the next, keeping the statistics coming in for the company. One place I worked was Urbenville, you might recall I worked there before I went away and met the man who built model boats. That time I left there in the dark and so missed out on getting a glimpse of this magnificent view:



Valley view. This view is seen from the road where it clings to the edge of the high hills, it’s narrow and I took the time to stop rather than risk anything.

What’s also visible in that pic is more of the everpresent smoke. Australia was building up to a very bad fire season, one which would devastate towns and lives in places all over the country.

Meanwhile, I had my own problems. Remember I circled that little sore on my head back in Alice Springs? Well, that was spreading and Sandra wasn’t the only one wanting me to find out more about it.



Squamous Cell. It was immediately identified as a carcinoma of this type and it would need surgery. I got on the waiting list.

Because of the size of it I would require a skin graft when it was removed, it would be a day-surgery job at the local hospital. But life was normal as I awaited that time…



Tree comes down. The local Council had identified that this huge tree out front of our neighbour’s place was diseased and had to come down.

…I watched and waited as things happened. And did things, of course. The tree was huge and the machinery brought in would have been costly, but there was no alternative.

When we’d been at the other house, which also had a very small lawn, Sandra didn’t like me mowing with a petrol mower because the fumes bothered her. Aldi periodically have a mower on sale which is powered by two of the 4-amp/hr 20-volt batteries I use in my cordless tools and I thought it was just the right thing to do such small lawns. So when Aldi put them in their catalogue…



New lawnmower. I wouldn’t want to do a big lawn with it, but for our small patches of grass this 20-volt machine is good enough.

…I made sure I was at the store first thing on the Saturday morning to get one. It cost $170 without the batteries, but I had the batteries anyway.

My youngest stepson, Reilly, like me, loves taking long drives. He’d been in touch at one stage and asked if I still had the sound system his mother bought back when we lived in Brisbane. I told him I had it and he could get it whenever he passed through, so he let me know he’d be passing through and I arranged to go to The Summit to meet him at my storage shed:



Reilly arrives. His Subaru WRX was getting a lot of running on this trip, I’ll detail it in another post as it’s really quite incredible. He’s parked here outside the shed I rent for storage, a part of an old juice factory, with the entry through that large sliding door.

Not only did I give him the sound system components to lad into his neat little Subaru, I took him for a run around the block in my van. “I want one!” he exclaimed as he enjoyed his time in the Dodge.

But for the moment, life was returning to what it was before my big trip. Except for the evidence of the fires of the 2019/2020 ‘Fire Season.’ They were everywhere.



Burned out. A fire has torn through this gumtree forest on the Bruxner Highway and blackened some trees, burned out others, caused some to fall across Armco fences on one stretch. The damage being down was immense.

And it wasn’t just property and trees being damaged, these are habitat for animals both domestic and native. As I wound my way through this stretch I spotted movement on the road…



Damaged kookaburra. This is a youngster and had been hit by a car, damaging its wing. I picked it up and nursed it all the way to Casino.

…and found a young Kookaburra unable to fly. Its wing was in a bad way and I felt compelled to try and give it a chance at life.

We have an organisation here called WIRES, Wildlife Information and REscue Service, I made contact with one of their volunteers in Casino and waited as she came to me to take the poor bird off to give it whatever care they could. Of course, it’s possible that they couldn’t do anything, I never found out.

I worked in the bush that weekend, just South of Grafton where there’s people scattered about among other gumtrees. I couldn’t help but notice this bit of incorrect spelling:



Spelling in question. I don’t know how this got by the many people who would have been involved in its manufacture, transport and erection. But it did.

After a couple of days beating around among those heavily-treed areas I headed home, but I took the time to visit Bob Trevan at Lismore on the way…



Bob’s shed. Bob Trevan is a real collector of Fords, but also trades in T-models, doing restorations to keep himself busy.

…where he had a US-model mid-sixties Falcon in amongst his assorted items. The T-model was done up for sale, Bob’s always sold Fords. His father was a Ford dealer from 1910 and Bob sold off the dealership in 2008.

Well, I’m not a Ford man at all and I’d by this time made arrangements to secure a new gearbox for my ailing Dodge van. The people I bought it from forgot to pack the bellhousing in with the gearbox and sent it by airmail, so that arrived six months before the box!



Bellhousing. Having bought a 5-speed NV4500 gearbox for my van, with shipping by boat, I was surprised when the bellhousing arrived by airmail.

So while my big trip was over, the adventure was continuing, and preparations for that continuance would begin with the arrival of this bellhousing. It would, however, be a very long time before it all got fitted up.

That story will continue, even though the whole world was about to be turned on its head...

 

I foreshadowed in my last post that I’d do a post about Reilly’s adventurous trip when he called on me and had a ride in the van.

Reilly was Janet’s youngest son, he was just two when Janet and I were married, so although he has a firm relationship with his father, he’s spent a lot of time with me as well. He’s carved out a career in retail, working for the Woolworths supermarket chain so at this time he’d just taken over management of their store in Ayr, in Northern Queensland after a three year stint managing their store in Innisfail.

It was time for him to do a road trip to visit his father and he arranged two weeks off work. The first leg of the journey he decided to take the coastal highways – the Bruce Highway to Brisbane and then the Pacific Highway to Sydney, with the final stint to his father’s place at Mittagong on the Hume Highway…



There are two Bradfield Highways, each of them a little over a mile long, they are over the Storey Bridge in Brisbane and the Sydney Harbour Bridge and are thus at each end of the Pacific Highway. William Bradfield was the designer of both bridges.



Storey Bridge. These days it’s lit up at night and this pic makes it look fairly spectacular.

Reilly learned to drive long days and into long nights, it’s an effective way of covering the kind of miles you have to cover if you live in places such as Ayr. The next day he drove over a bridge which readers will recall fascinating me…



Harwood Island Bridge. Still the old bridge in use at this time, but the new one was coming along nicely.

…and I was wondering how it was progressing as I spent my three months roaming around the country’s interior. Note the inset, and contemplate the fact that these photos might have been taken with the camera in his phone!

And so the trip down the coast went, and on to his dad’s place. He was there a few days but had an appointment in Liverpool, a Southern suburb of Sydney, where a fancy new burglar alarm/immobiliser was to be fitted to the WRX. So on the appointed day he drove to Liverpool and cooled his heels for several hours while the whiz-bang system with all the bells and whistles was fitted. It included a touchpad on the windscreen and provided for remote starting of the engine.

And then he started to steer the WRX towards my part of the world:



We were in regular contact during this time as he was to drop in and pick up the sound system, but I’d also arranged for him to spend the night at Bob and Elaine Abberfield’s place near Tamworth on the way through. They enjoyed having him there, so that worked out well.

The next morning as I drove down the New England Highway to The Summit and my shed Reilly was steering his way up the New England Highway to meet up with me. He noted (photographically) that there was smoke in the distance at Glen Innes…



Smoke in the distance. Entering Glen Innes Reilly got a pic of the smoke up ahead, perhaps he was concerned about getting through, too.

…and at Deepwater, 45kms further on, the town was really engulfed in the threatening cloud of doom, but still the road was clear.



Deepwater threatened. Deepwater is a small town and threatening smoke like this would have been of concern to the residents.

And so he arrived at The Summit and we fitted the pieces of the sound system into the WRX and I demonstrated the van to him. He got a shot of the shed:



My shed at The Summit. You can just about see one of the Foresters and the van inside here, the driveway’s a bit tricky.

And he demonstrated the fancy alarm system to me, bewildering me with the science of it. But he was intent on getting back on the road and I bade him farewell. But that afternoon he found there was a flaw in the system and he decided to go back to have it corrected. After all, he’d only done 1,100kms since he’d got it in, and he had time to enjoy the drive…



As he’d travelled down the coast road and gone back the New England, he decided to make this leg of the journey on the next major inland route, the Newell Highway. It was, naturally enough, getting well into the night time when he decided to drive out to the satellite tracking array of radio-telescopes near Narrabri and camp.

This this was his view as he woke up the next morning:



CSIRO array. The array is made up of units which move about on rails, there are three visible in this dawn picture.

As the weekend had arrived, he was in no rush as the people at Liverpool wouldn’t be there until Monday. Some sightseeing was appropriate and the zoo at Dubbo was one place he wanted to visit. This used to be called the Western Plains Zoo, but in recent years it’s become a ‘branch’ of the Taronga Park Zoo on the harbour foreshores in Sydney.



Dubbo Zoo. A ride around in a safari bus revealed many different animals. The rhinoceros doesn’t look too active and the zebras in the background are quiet, while the giraffe tried to stick its head in the window of the bus and the meerkat was on alert. The place was still in drought.

The next thing to ‘inspect’ down the Newell Highway was the big radio telescope at Parkes. This was used in the successful space flights of the sixties and later, in particular receiving signals from Apollo 11 when it was ‘out of sight’ of the US observers during its moon landing.

As such it was the centre of attention in the informative and humorous movie, The Dish, which actually included a scene or two of the operators playing golf on the dish during their time off.



The Parkes Dish. This played a vital role, along with the Tidbinbilla Observatory near Canberra, when moon missions were happening.

Turning off the Newell to head across towards the Great Dividing Range, Reilly was keen to see something else:



Mount Panorama circuit. Famous for the annual 1,000km endurance race, Reilly had never driven around this circuit before.

It is a public road circuit, but strictly limited to 60kmh. When it was built, as I detailed previously, it was intended to also be a scenic drive. When he got to the top of the mountain, Reilly took a pic which showed the view…



Brock Skyline. The point where the road begins to drop has always been known as ‘The Skyline’, but with Peter Brock’s unbeaten string of wins, his sheer dominance here, it was renamed for him after his death.

Rather than going over the Blue Mountains at this stage, he headed down through Oberon to Goulburn, then back up to reach his father’s place at Mittagong again, then on the Monday returned to Liverpool and had the fault looked at. Today he says it’s still faulty, but at least he tried.

During this time he phoned me. “I drove down the coast, then I went back up the New England, and back down again via the Newell,” he began, “so which way can I go now that’s a different road?”

I suggested he cross the mountains again, head up to Mudgee, then turn North and go as far as Premer, then cross the Newell at Coonabarrabran and go on up the Warrumbungles and out to the road up through Walgett and Lightning Ridge. And so he headed that way:



He put the WRX to use covering these miles, sightseeing near Katoomba in the Blue Mountins:



Three Sisters. When I was a kid it was a big day out for people in Sydney to drive up to Katoomba (or take a train…) and take in sights like this.

There are, naturally, walking trails around them. With thousands of steps!

Out through Mudgee, he headed North again, stopping at Coolah to look back at the Northern entry to the town and snap a pic of its sign. The ‘Black Stump’ is a fabled thing in Australia, typically when something is a long way out into the back-blocks we’ll say it’s ‘beyond the black stump.’

Coolah lays claim to the ‘black stump’ – though I don’t know why they can stake that claim.



Coolah and the Black Stump. Reilly’s posed the WRX here as he’s pulled up to photograph the black stump sign.

A few miles further up the road there’s a Rest Area with a black stump as its centrepiece, he also photographed that and the explanatory signs:



The Black Stump. It’s a very good Rest Area and its centrepoint is a good conversation starter.

Heading across the road from Premer to Coonabarrabran is an easy run and then out from there to the Warrumbungles…



Warrumbungles in view. I can’t see it, but Reilly tells me that the Siding Springs Observatory is visible in line with this bit of straight road.

…which rise out of the plains just to the West of town. It’s a spectacular volcanic landform and gets lots of visitors. But many of them go there to see the observatory:



Siding Springs Observatory. Nestled on top of this outcrop of volcanic rock, this installation attracts a lot of visitors.

From there the roads are pretty ordinary. Once off the hills they are mostly straight, but there are things to see, even if they are just signs pointing to strangely-named towns and localities.



Come-By-Chance. The sign is probably more significant than the town, but it’s a catchy name.

A quick turn off the main road North from Walgett to Queensland took Reilly and his WRX into Lightning Ridge. He snapped this icon which, as readers will know, is indicative of the abundance of strange outdated vehicles and machinery in the opal-mining town:



Lightning Ridge tumbler. An old concrete mixer, used to ‘tumble’ the soil to allow the opals to be found, is typical of the machinery used in Lightning Ridge.

It wasn’t far from there, maybe 60kms, to the Queensland border. Reilly reached that point as the sunset was just starting to go away. All the same, he thought a nice pic of the ‘Welcome to Queensland’ sign with the sunset in the background (and a few stars in the sky) would be a good one to get.



Welcome to Queensland. It would seem that crossing the border was easy and lauded, but Reilly was to find his circumstances differed from most.

He pulled up to park on the edge of the road and stepped out of the car, raising his phone to get the photo. As he was doing this, the driver’s door found the angle on which the car was parked was perfect to allow the door to fall shut.

With the engine running. With the fancy alarm system functioning. With Reilly outside the car. He couldn’t do anything which would get him back into the car, so he got a lift to the town of Hebel, just a little way up the road.

There he phoned the NRMA (the Auto Club in NSW) and asked about getting someone out there to help him get back into the car. “He’d have to come from Lightning Ridge, he’ll be a while…” was the response. So Reilly settled in at the hotel and, at closing time, the publican drove him out to the car.

The NRMA took over an hour and a half to find a way to get into the car, but they did it and Reilly was able, after expressing his gratitude, to drive back into Hebel, where the publican had offered to put him up for the night.



Hebel Hotel. Not unlike many such places in ‘outback’ locations all over Australia, simple places like this become an oasis of companionship and refreshment for travellers despite their humble appearance.

The next day the journey continued:



Reilly’s path was determined by the fact that he had to go to Blackwater for a pre-arranged meeting with a young lady.

The road to Blackwater was, he found, fairly spectacular with the Blackdown National Park’s Western perimeter presenting cliffs which were to reflect the afternoon sun as he drove through there. At speed, it should be noted:



Road to Blackwater. This still from the car’s dashcam is too small to show them off, but those cliffs are quite a sight.

And so the journey drew to a close. His appointed time to go back to work wasn’t to tick around for a few days and the mileage he’d covered meant the WRX was a little bit overdue for a service, so he drove on up to Townsville so the dealer could take care of this. He had, after all, done over 7,500kms on this trip.

Of course, all good things come to some kind of an end and ultimately he had to go back to work…



Back to work. Google Earth Street View’s picture of the shopping centre which includes the store Reilly was managing when he made the trip.

…and, of course, start planning his next trip. He was also still thinking about taking a trip to the US and buying a Conversion Van like mine. But subsequent events would eventually take away that desire.

Reilly doesn’t sit still for long...

 

The fire which had stopped me at Tenterfield on the way to Bathurst and Canberra wasn’t the first of our ‘bushfire season’ in the latter months of 2019. A couple of earlier fires had foreshadowed that this would be a bad one and we would soon learn just how bad.

The ongoing drought across so much of the Eastern three states had left the countryside tinder-dry, while years of neglect of fire trails (tracks into the bush to enable firefighters to get to the seat of fires) had been adding up to an impossible situation. Added to this, people whose view of the world is only seen through green glasses had forced various authorities to block off these trails.

In short, much of Australia was ready to explode in flames. And ‘explode’ is not far from the truth with gum trees as the leaves do explode into flames as the extreme heat reaches them. As the problem grew it became news world-wide, though I would be nowhere near the bigger blazes. So my drives in November, 2019, were sometimes dominated by fires and their devastation…



Pine forest burned. One of the early fires was at Ravensworth, just North of Toowoomba, and it spread through the forest country to reach this pine plantation near Crows Nest.

…such as these examples on a trip to Kingaroy.



Gumtrees bared. Nearer to Kingaroy a small fire had swept through this bit of country.

Through all of this there was everyday life. Sandra’s car had a battery problem and in changing the battery I’d knocked a little spout off the plastic radiator tank. So If I was going to replace the radiator I would have the chance to connect that oil cooler I’d bought earlier and bolted in place in the front of the car.



Oil lines. This pic was taken with the radiator removed, so you can see how inaccessible the lines were when it was in place.

To blank off the oil cooling line in the radiator I cut off the pipe flush with the nut and filled it with solder, but once again you can see how tight things get in this area:



Tight spaces. The line over the top goes through to the oil cooler, the blanked off cooler tube in the radiator is clearly seen.

On another weekend trip I could see yet more smoke billowing in the distance…



Smoke in the distance. Heading for the NSW border again and the prospect of finding my way blocked by a bushfire.

…and it pointed out one of the problems I faced with all of this. Living in Queensland, even though we are not all that far from the border, we don’t get the news of what’s happening the other side of that imaginery line. Once closer I can tune into their local radio, but in most cases I left home with no idea of possible impediments.



Dry country and smoke. Looking out across what is normally a great view we see little other than dead grass and the threat of fire that can consume all.



Mount Lindesay on fire. The steep slopes leading up to the exposed core of Mount Lindesay show clear signs that it’s not going to miss out on some of the fires.

I was heading for Lismore and fires had already been through some parts of the area.



Smoke through the trees. That Richmond Valley road I like so much took me through many burned-out areas, while the smoke was everpresent as fires continued to burn close by.

It was like a pall of doom which hung in the air everywhere one went, with the sun often changing it to an ominous orange colour which made it even more threatening. The moon also played a part in this.



No smoking! One could almost say that the ‘No Smoking’ sign on the window of my motel was too late as conditions outside foretold gloom.

Through all of this I just kept working and thinking of my various projects. One of these is to make up a floor-change for a Peugeot gearbox for when I once again have a Peugeot 404 on the road. I did some investigatory work when I was at the shed one day…



Inside the 403 gearbox. Tiny things alongside the Chrysler boxes – principally the A833 – I’ve become accustomed to looking inside. I want to emulate a nice neat floor-change setup I owned when I was young.

…just to remind myself of the whole thing. But in many ways I was at this time simply settling into home life after the big trip.



Smoke from home. The afternoon sun shows up smoke haze to the West of Toowoomba, fires continued to spring up everywhere.

At this time I did put the van into use to help Sandra achieve a long-held goal. I took it down to Ipswich, an outer suburb of Brisbane, and we loaded all of her mother’s possessions into it so she could move in with us. Almost 92 at the time, she needed care Sandra’s brother couldn’t give her and Sandra was determined that she owed it to her mum to look after her before she went too far downhill.

One day I got this shot of Sandra in the pool…



Making use of the pool. Sandra uses the pool for exercises as well as relaxation. It’s good for her back problems.

…while her mum sat and watched…



Mum in the shade. Not a water lover, my mother in law sits and relaxes as Sandra takes her time in the pool.

…and her little dog took more interest in me:



The dog. This overfed dog was gifted to her mum by Sandra ten years earlier. Sandra soon started her on a healthier diet.

And my squamous cell carcinoma continued to bug me, but my waiting time for the little operation to take care of it came and my head finished up wrapped in a bandage:



Bandaged. Wrapped up neatly, I would be a couple of weeks in ‘head dress’ before the dressings became less intrusive.

The skin graft came from the area of my collarbone, that part of it hurt more than the obvious job on my head (where stitches and staples held things together!) but people kept asking how my head felt.



Graft site. Right where the safety belt comes over my shoulder, right? This was by far the worst of the operation.

Trips away for work didn’t stop, however, and they continued to reveal to me just how bad the drought was.



Droughts and fences. When times are tough farmers use the roadsides as extra grazing land, as I’ve mentioned before. In this shot it’s become very professional as an electric fence is there to keep the stock in.

Settling into some of the other things that living in a city had to offer, I decided to join clubs where I could learn a couple of skills. I needed to enhance my ability to weld, while setting up the gears in final drives was something I really needed to find out about.

So I joined a couple of clubs. The Vintage and Veteran Car Club was the first, with people there I hoped would help me with the gear issues…



Car Club project. At the car club they have a big project on – rebuilding a 1922 Hudson from the ground up. It’s progressing well.

…while the Men’s Shed at nearby Highfields I discovered had more focus on metal working than others, which stick mostly to projects with wood. I would soon become embroiled in lathe work there and I continue to struggle on with my welding.

As January, 2020, rolled around, I was beginning to heal:



Head healing. The doctors were very happy with the way the skin graft took and I had to be patient to await the disappearance of all the scabs.

But now another issue came up. When I’d taken the big storage shed it was always intended that I’d move the gear from the original smaller shed into that as well. The owner phoned and asked me to get that done as he had another tenant lined up for the little shed.



Moving loads. Over a few weeks I spent days at a time at the shed getting stuff moved. This trailer load holds about six Hemi 6 blocks, a few heads, several crankshafts, oxy-acetylene bottles and other assorted items.

My friend Jaime helped me with this for a few days, also my cousin Greg on one occasion. Without them it would have been a much more difficult job.

And speaking of difficult jobs, the air conditioning in Sandra’s car failed again, this time it was the compressor, which we’d replaced with a ‘good’ used one a year earlier, so I bought a new one and had a specialist who works from his van come around. He evacuated the system, I changed the compressor, then he returned to re-gas it.

While he was at it I decided to get the air conditioning in the silver Forester fixed. He re-gassed it, but it cut out after a few minutes each time I tried to run it. We established from a forum that the problem was in the drive clutch.

I still had some work to do and it involved some experimentation.

And while fires still raged in various places, one weekend I took off to head down towards Inverell and found my path blocked by a swollen creek. Yes, we now had floods!



Floods. These cattle are far from happy, I’d say, with their paddock mostly under water. Along a little further a creek crossing was running a few feet deep and I had to go another way.

These rains helped out in the areas in which they fell. The water-supply dam at Tenterfield was one which really needed some help and it got it…



Water in dams. Just what was needed at the time, though the fire threats were still present in other places.

January continued with the worst of the fires on the South Coast of NSW, on the coastal parts of the North Coast and in Victoria. Destruction on a grand scale, with loss of life among people and even more so among wildlife.



Back to Britto’s. When I had a weekend with no work I took the opportunity to become one of the number who go to bob Britton’s place of a Saturday.

Bob has a Saturday afternoon thing where people turn up and they look over his cars and talk about all sorts of things. Bob Abberfield had been wanting to go to one of these and so I took him down, he’s in the background here about to have a discussion with Pat Clarke.

Life was getting back to normal, wasn’t it?

Not really. Somewhere in the distance, in a place called Wuhan in China, there were now reports emerging of a virus going out of control. It wouldn’t affect us immediately, but it would in time reshape our lives…

 

Dwelling just a little on the visit to Bob Britton’s place, where we had such a nice afternoon and so many of his friends were present to add to the occasion. Because I normally work every weekend I miss out on opportunities to be there, but we had one weekend over the end-of-year break which enabled me to go down there.

The construction of the Maserati-bodied car was advancing well.



Maserati progress. Unlike the other car fitted with the Holden/Buick V6, this car had plenty of space within the bodywork to fit the engine. Bob works on the air cleaner while Bob Winley sits in the car and Ray Eldershaw looks on.

Still in the workshop was the BMW-engined open-wheeler…



BMW confined. The abbreviated intake manifold Bob had to make to fit it all inside his neat bodywork is seen here. Bob Abberfield and Pat Clarke discuss the installation.

…which was still awaiting the electronics man to sort out the computer complications brought on by taking the engine from a sedan to a race car.



Different approaches. Totally different rear suspensions graced these two cars. On the left is the De Dion rear end fitted to the Maserati lookalike while on the right is the double-wishbone setup more familiar to bob as a race car builder.

Also there that day was Les Puklowski, the man who crafted the fibreglass for both of these cars.



Side by side. Bob Winley on the right and Les Puklowski admire Bob Britton’s handiwork on these cars. We all do.

It was only a dash down and dash back visit from Bob’s place, about 230 miles away. The next day I had time to look over the work going on to convert the large fibreglass-clad hot-house into a decent shed and workshop:



Shed conversion. Bob and Elaine were once big cactus fanciers, hence they had a hot-house for them. But that interest waned…

In fact, they had two. Looking through the bare frame you can see another shed. This was once a glass-clad hothouse but had suffered a collapse. That was when the fibreglass one went up. Since then the original one has been straightened up again and clad with corrugated roofing material and is used for Elaine’s pottery hobby.

The next day I headed for home. Through Deepwater, the little town where Reilly had snapped that dramatic photo of the threatening smoke posted earlier, there was once again smoke in the air:



More smoke. Not so threatening this time, just smoke hanging in the air from the various fires burning across the state.

Back at home I found the opportunity to go around to the Vintage Car Club’s workshop, where Wednesday afternoons regularly sees a number of members working on the Club’s 1922 Hudson project car – and their own cars, of course.

The Hudson's wooden wheels were being restored one at a time by a professional working elsewhere:



Wooden wheels. Freshly restored, this wheel has part of the steering assembly attached.

The bodywork was absorbing a lot of time of a number of members. It’s timber-framed and the bulk of it is aluminium…



Timber-framed. Classic methods were employed in the twenties – timber frames and metal fitted around the timber.

…and it’s been testing those members’ skills for many months. Doors also have timber frames.

A trip to the Gold Coast enabled me to catch up with my nephew, Ben, and see his new workshop.



New workshop. Ben moved out of his tiny workshop near the NSW border into this larger shop much closer to home.

Of course, he had to keep on working while still setting up, so he arranged for some friends to help him with the moving of the bulk of the machinery over a short period and then kept on setting up the workshop as he continued working.



Head grinder. Nothing new about some of the machinery he uses, this grinder does a great job of surface-grinding cylinder heads, blocks and also flywheels. Beside it is the parts wash, while the ever-practical Ben has found that having some old ironing boards around enables him to set up small benches anywhere according to his needs.

Cylinder heads are his specialty, while he builds engines from diesels (not big ones, however) through to full-race V8s. He has a good clientele among the people racing HQ Holdens, which are based on the Holden inline six (made in the 202ci size from about 1970 until 1985) and use a single-choke carburettor to produce about 105hp at the rear wheels.



Finishing valves. With a range of seat-cutting stones in front of him, Ben is here finishing up on a valve on an inline six engine.

Note the ‘mezzanine floor’ he had built to give extra storage space above his office area. It was all starting to come together for him when I visited.

And while fires had been giving much of the East Coast a scorching for months, there were times when it rained enough to put water over the roads on the New South Wales North Coast…



Creek overflowing. We were certainly seeing the extremes of weather conditions. A trip to the NSW North Coast saw me having to pick my way past blocked roads.

…and created small delays for me. I was working in the Maclean area and it was as wet as anywhere.



Broad waters. The broadened Clarence River meets a local branch here at Maclean. Fortunately the major roads weren’t cut.

For the first time I was able to drive over the Harwood Island Bridge, which I’d watched with wonder while it was being built.



The old and the new. The first few times I crossed the water here it was on a cable-tethered ferry. The bridge with opening span came in 1966 and now it’s consigned to history.

Water was lying around everywhere:



Lake in a paddock. Heading up the Bruxner Highway on the way home there was plenty of evidence that the rains had been heavy as this cow-paddock lay submerged.

The shed where I had stored by furniture – and many other things – was the next thing to draw my attention. This was because the smaller shed in the same block was now wanted by someone else and I was asked to move all of my car parts etc from that one into the larger shed. This was to be another major moving job, of course.

The first thing which had to be moved was the white Forester body. It was sitting on the car trailer beside the smaller shed and I needed that car trailer to move everything.



Forester moved. Stuck in a corner to await final demolition, the white Forester was the first thing I had to move as I took up more space in the big shed.

This move began in February and I was working away at it a day or two each week, often with help from my friend, Jaime. As I did so I was listening to the radio and hearing news of the Coronavirus which was beginning to escape from China and cause trouble in other parts of the world.

We worked on, simply loading stuff onto the trailer and moving it into the big shed, using the engine crane for heavy lifting at both ends of the journey and doing our best to put things into areas where like was with like so I’d be able to find things again.

I began to wonder how I’d ever straighten out the things in the big shed. All the while, everyday jobs kept coming up, like fixing the air conditioning in the silver Forester, as mentioned earlier.

I read up on replacing the clutch and found that some people used a method where they screwed 6mm screws into the threads in the pulley and used those to pull the centre of the pulley from the shaft. I tried that on the spare compressor from the white wreck and learned why some found that their screws bent, so I made up a more sure-fire way of getting the job done:



Cool tool. This puller relies on pressure applied to a cap screw loosely fitted into the shaft, the other screws are fitted into the threads provided and so it’s easy to remove the clutch. The tool also doubles as a means of assisting the tightening of the pulley when the job’s done.

There are two small shims on the end of the shaft and the key to making it all work again is removing one of those.



Clutch and spacers. On the left is the shaft with the spacers having fallen into the space below their proper home when the clutch was removed. On the right, my choice of clutches, the original was quite worn and the one from the white car not so bad. I left out one of the spacers (or shims) in the reassembly.

Simple, though time-consuming, and I finally got cool air into the car. And then it was back to the moving job, the Falcon panel van had to go into the shed too, along with many bits and pieces related to it:



Falcon moved in too. The Falcon was flat-towed into position. Spares from another similar one were abundant.

As time went on we reached the point where Australia went into ‘lockdown’ to prevent the spread of the Coronavirus. My employer immediately stopped the work I was doing and the government provided them with funds to pay me a replacement wage while I wasn’t working. During this time I resorted to a little subterfuge (necessary, even though we had next to zero cases in the area) to continue to go to the shed to work, being ready to claim that the owner was demanding that I get on with the job.

I was, of course, reacquainting myself with many ‘goodies’ I’d taken from cars over the years. Some looked really useful for the upcoming gearbox change.



Peugeot pedals. Clutch and brake pedals from a Peugeot 504 (actually, from a couple of them) looked interesting as components for what I had to do to make the clutch work on the new installation in the Dodge.

The old-style pull-rod and Z-bar clutch mechanism was going to have to go by the wayside. The new gearbox had a hydraulic system and there was no other way to do this than to go with the hydraulics. I drew up a diagram:



Back of an envelope. I have plenty of these envelopes so it was appropriate to draw it all up on one. I had already put rod ends onto the clutch rods, now they’d be used to pull on another bell-crank which would in turn pull on another rod which would function an arm inside a box bolted up under the floor. That would then operate the master cylinder.

I was essentially confined to home and I’d retrieved parts I felt would be useful for this project during my trips to the shed. I fabricated the ‘conversion box’ and used the top part of the Peugeot clutch pedal inside it, while the bell-crank would use the top part of the brake pedal.



Conversion box. Still with a lot of work to go into it, this is how the ‘conversion box’ started out – held together with Tek screws – with the apertures in the front for the master cylinder and the pull-rod from the bell-crank.

Further brackets, cut from offcuts of steel tubing, would provide the mountings to the underside of the floor, two of the bolts for that purpose being the underside of the studs holding in the driver’s seat. They were, of course, made longer for this purpose.

Looking forward to the job of actually lifting in the gearbox, which I still didn’t have, I once again used the cradle I’d made for the same purpose on my floor jack. But now I had a bigger jack and the swivel at the tip of it was very securely screwed on, so I duplicated the detail of this on a piece of steel plate and worked from there to produce this:



Cradle on jack. The cradle was extended for the bigger gearbox and it both rotates and tilts so that the gearbox can be perfectly aligned before pushing it home.

I should add that the jack was purchased with a bonus gift card I’d been given by my employer for the good work I’d done in Central Australia. That gift card also bought me a better soldering iron and a laser printer for my computer.

The plate on which the cradle was based was machined on a lathe I was able to use earlier in the year at the ‘Men’s Shed’. I’d joined this organisation so I’d have access to such machinery as this (and other) jobs went on, but the lockdown prevented us going there for three months.

The lockdown also prevented me driving to Sydney when the gearbox arrived there. I had optimistically thought I’d drive the van to Bob Britton’s place and spend a couple of days there altering things and fitting it up. I still had no idea just how big a job it would become…