Monthly Archives: July 2008

Today’s real estate agents really can’t hold a candle to those of the 1840s.  Not only did they offer champagne lunches at THEIR auctions, but their literary and biblical effusions really do put modern billboards and advertisements to shame.

But they rarely mention the fact that perhaps the sunlit rolling plains and luxuriant growth might have been occupied by Aboriginal people previously.  Notwithstanding John Batman’s countermanded attempt at a treaty, the official policy promulgated by Governor Bourke at the time stated that aboriginal people could not sell or assign land, nor could an individual person acquire it, other than through distribution by the Crown.  Indeed, there was little acknowledgement that aboriginal people had even been on a particular piece of land. However, I did find this advertisement in the Port Phillip Herald of January that surprised me.  It’s for allotment 16, block 28 in Lonsdale Street (now part of the inner-city grid of Melbourne)

Who is there remembering Melbourne in her infancy…who knew Lonsdale-street as it was, so lately the quambi of the savage, would imagine that a period almost imperceptible would exhibit the same Lonsdale-street as the centre of the white-man’s comfort, as the spot to which all love to congregate, yet such is the fact, Lonsdale-street once the centre of savage orgies, with nought to break the silence of the forest, but the wild yell of the Australian Cannible, sheltered by his Mia Mia alike from the heat of summer and the chill of winter, now exhibits all the most fastidious could desire…

I have no idea what a ‘quambi’ is- wait- yes I do!  ‘My baby name’ website gives the meaning as Aboriginal for ‘shelter’ should you decide to name your baby boy Quambi, which is, after all the site’s 50584th most popular baby name.  But how appealing- the memory of ‘savage orgies’ in the location, and the ‘wild yell of the ‘Australian Cannible (sic)’. As they say, position, position, position…

In Saturday’s Age there was a full-page advertisement ‘Honoring the Life of a Great Australian: Ken Dyers 14 July 1922-25 July 2007’.  No doubt the anniversary of his death (it’s odd that there’s no word for that) has prompted this outflowing of emotion.

Apparently he was the founder of the Kenja Communication group (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenja_Communication) and he previously had links with Scientology. Kenja was named in NSW Parliament as a “sinister organisation”, and there have been suggestions of sexual abuse of children and a link between Kenja and Cornelia Rau’s mental state.  According to Wikipedia, for $130 you can undergo an Energy Conversion Session, where you sit opposite another person and stare into their eyes.  That would do it, I reckon.

Anyway, what interested me most about this advertisement was the list of the names of the people who signed, and I assume, paid for this advertisement.   During the Howard government, there seemed to be a string of letters by Eminent Australians castigating the government over treatment of refugees, climate change,  industrial relations legislation etc. etc.,  and a cynic would sniff that they were all signed by the ‘usual suspects’. I was interested to see if the ‘usual suspects’ had signed this one too. Certainly not.  There was not a single name that I recognized.

There did seem to be a preponderance of sports people and dramatists.  And how cute, people affixed their academic qualifications-  two Ph.Ds, quite a few Bachelors degrees and even  an Associate Diploma of Medical Reception Administration- there’s a qualification to conjure with!!  Several company directors, a few personal trainers, and even a “Mother of Five”.  But, thankfully, no-one I’ve ever heard of before.

I’ve been mystified by this THING that I’ve been seeing in the paper recently. What IS it???

Ah! So that’s what it is- a code for your mobile to take you to a website???? Obviously I’m not alone in my bemusement: there’s a website QRious.com.au

It really is strange seeing a new technology being ‘born’, and being puzzled by what it is at first. More often, technologies build on other pre-existing technologies and there’s not that same sense of ‘I just don’t get it’.

I can though, from my 50plus vantage spot, remember a few technologies being born.  Dad used to have a mobile telephone in his car in the late 60s/early 70s.  You had to call an operator, who would then connect you. I can even remember the phone number 0172 21522!!!  He also had one that he could take out of the car, but it was VERY heavy, and was literally the size and weight of a brick.

I remember our neighbours across the road, who were international travellers (unusual then) and early adopters (also unusual) who had the first microwave oven I had ever seen.  We all stood around it, watching as Uncle Eric boiled a cup of water.  They also had the first reel-to-reel tape recorder that I had ever seen, and we had great fun round the table listening to it and recording our voices.

And my first personal computer? A little Macintosh- a squat, oblong thing higher than it was broad. Until then, my only contact with computers had been pushing out the chads on a card with a pin in mathematics, aware that it was going off to ‘the university’ to a computer kept in a specially controlled room. To this day I don’t really know what it was all about- push out bits of cardboard with a pin? Hey, even I can do that!

I’ve always been a television child- Mum and Dad bought one for the Olympics when I was a year old. But colour television was something else again.  We lined up at the Royal Melbourne Show to shuffle in a queue into a tent to see colour television- coming soon!! And when Mum and Dad bought one, I can remember sitting just LOOKING at it- even looking at the test pattern once programs had finished for the night. I don’t know if  television even stops anymore- do they still have a test pattern??

And so to this little code-thingie.  I don’t know what it’s called. I don’t know what it’s FOR.  It might be dead in the water in a year’s time: on the other hand,  we might forget that we ever didn’t know what it was!