Do Not Throw Food At The Geeks, 12th November 2006

Now, at last, twelve months in the making...
After long debate and procrastination I met with four other Flight Simmers for lunch. Naturally we picked the "Roulettes Tavern", named after the RAAF Aerobatic Team, next door to Parafield Airport . Our thoughtful booking volunteer managed to get us a window seat overlooking the runways, so we could criticise the low-flying Grobs and other aircraft as they did touch-and-goes while we ate. I should perhaps say that of the group, only one is a real-world pilot...

The ambience of the Tavern is of course aeronautical. Several bar areas incorporate what are apparently genuine old airline booking counters, and the restuarant featured a Qantas sign and model aircraft made from beer cans (ah, culture!). The meals were good, and nicely priced.

After lunch we moved off down the road to ogle aeroplanes - there was even one among us who had never been there before. Truth is stranger than fiction.

The shot by Bob T. shows me and two of the other sim guys outside the Bruce Hartwig Flying School, in the humidity. No, Flight Sim is not a game for kids...

We made the most of the occasion. I grew up with Parafield being a place for families to go and look at aeroplanes, as it has been since the late 1920s. But now, thanks more to local deadbeats and vandals than to terrorist paranoia, the low fences allowing unobstructed views are being replaced with tall intrusive ones.

One of the local rescue 'copters came in and practically posed for photos - I got a heap, much closer than this, but found the little Piper PA-18 on the ground of interest. It's one of several aircraft registered to the Sidney Kidman pastoral company . I'd bet this one's somebody's pride and joy as the rest are "working" aircraft, more modern than this little classic. The late Sidney Kidman was one of Australia's pastoral pioneers and some of the Kidman properties are larger than small countries.

We wandered around a little, but not much given the hot, sticky weather. We spent more time in the Classic Jets Fighter Museum on the airport grounds.

They have just finished restoring a WW2 Lockheed Lightning and are working on a Bell Airacobra WW2 fighter (I use the term loosely).

The museum staff are a great bunch, and really friendly. One even made me feel uniquely knowledgeable by insisting the museum never ever had a two-seat Vampire jet trainer.

The silver aircraft with the orange day-glo in the photograph is only in your imagination! It's not there now, anyway, but apart from the Lightning and partly restored Airacobra, they have a Meteor jet (currently displayed outside), a Dassault Mirage III-E, a DH Sea Venom, a CA-27 Sabre (modified from the North American design with a different engine and a pair of cannon instead of a cluster of machine guns), and several other interesting displays of airframe, engines, weapons etc.

I am a little baffled that our token married guy didn't bring his wife. Sure, she lapses into uncontrollable laughter when we move smoothely and effortlessly into geek-talk, but we're a tolerant lot!

An Ornithological Discovery - 4th November 2006

On Saturday I was over at Joanne's trimming her rose arch. One offcut had a nest and I put it aside. Joanne spotted that the nest was occupied by five open beaks with fluffy, beady eyed chicks behind them.

She got in touch with Fauna Rescue. Meanwhile a couple of parent birds were circling around the yard and searching the rose arch in confusion, despite our best efforts to put the nest where they could see it.


Fauna Rescue said chicks need to be fed about every ten minutes - but that it was unsafe for us to try feeding them (unsafe for the chicks, I guess).

Fay from Fauna Rescue collected the nest fairly quickly; but unfortunately by Wednesday only one chick had survived. "You've made a discovery," she told Joanne, "they are European Finches and weren't known to be in this state".

As Joanne said, "Great. The population went from 0 to 7 to 3 in a matter of days. She said they are feral, but not destructive feral, just non-native feral."

- photos by Joanne