Thursday 23rd July 09
In the afternoon we visited the Unicorn Brewery which is across
In the afternoon we visited the Unicorn Brewery which is across
the road from the caravan park and checked out the underground storage areas. The Brewery building is currently a private residence. We then crossed the creek via the footbridge alongside the caravan park to visit the Town Hall which was just closing for the day, so we went next door to the Art gallery.
This included digital photographs as well as oil, water, pastel and acrylic paintings. The photographs had been processed to poster size and printed on canvas, creating a very effective finish. The gallery was presenting two themes, one of which was ‘looking through’ and the other ‘light’. Both themes were quite clear in the displays.Friday 24th July 09
We walked into town to pick up some groceries and found a hairdresser that was not busy and Merry had her hair cut. After lunch we began the Heritage trail, starting from the market square and proceeded out to the copper mine, passing several of the heritage items but as they are within easy walking distance will do them later.
We walked into town to pick up some groceries and found a hairdresser that was not busy and Merry had her hair cut. After lunch we began the Heritage trail, starting from the market square and proceeded out to the copper mine, passing several of the heritage items but as they are within easy walking distance will do them later. 
At the mine we checked out the lookout over the open cut pit with its constant level of water which apparently changes colour subject to time of year and therefore temperature. Last time we saw this in 2002 it was emerald green but this time the colour is not so striking.
The colour is not due to the copper, just simply the light refraction.
We looked over some of the ruins and chimney stacks and then discovered the museum in the Engine House had closed at 1,00pm and we had missed it, so left the mine via the town lookout and proceeded to the Bon Accord mine where their museum was open.
Some of the equipment used in those times is quite fascinating and achieved monumental tasks. There was a woman providing a guided tour and she was quite knowledgeable about the mine. In its day the Burra mine was known as the Monster Mine as it was the largest copper mine in the world at that time. According to the literature the Bon Accord Mine never found any copper so to recoup some of their investment the mine owners built the small town of Aberdeen.
We continued on checking out old buildings such as churches, pubs, shops, bridges and residences (some still in use privately or used for bed and breakfast).
We continued on checking out old buildings such as churches, pubs, shops, bridges and residences (some still in use privately or used for bed and breakfast). 
We were about to visit the old Redruth gaol but decided to call it a day and continue the next day.
Saturday 25th July 09
We returned to the copper mine at about 11.00am (opening time) and checked out the Enginehouse museum which gave us access to an underground adit tunnel leading to the top of the pump shaft, and surface equipment and buildings, such as boiler house, mine captain’s 
house and some rather good views of the lake in the open cut mine.
We returned to the copper mine at about 11.00am (opening time) and checked out the Enginehouse museum which gave us access to an underground adit tunnel leading to the top of the pump shaft, and surface equipment and buildings, such as boiler house, mine captain’s 
house and some rather good views of the lake in the open cut mine. 
We also took some more photographs of the town of Burra from a rather good lookout near the museum. The standout feature being the community school.
We returned to town at about 1.00pm for lunch at Polly’s café (weird open sandwich (actually it was a club sandwich) and awful coffee, burnt) and then drove out to where we had finished yesterday. 
This old gaol at Redruth which had also been a girls’ reform home for a while as well as a private residence, was used to make part of the film Breaker Morant.
This film was actually about South Africa but this part of South Australia was deemed to be a suitable place to film. From there we preceded to the remains of Hampton township, and the smelter ruins.
The smelter was built quite late in the mines history with the copper originally being shipped to Swansea in Wales for final processing. The rest of the day was looking at various old buildings around the town which in the main are still in use today. 
One other interesting spot was the dug out houses which were built into the side of the river bed. Apparently quite a lot of the miners didn’t want to live in company housing so they dug out the banks in the dry river bed and made houses in there.
This of course worked perfectly well until the river flooded which it occasionally does. Then 100s of people were suddenly homeless.
Monday 27 July 2009
Today when we turned on the computer we had a message saying that the hard drive was almost full and we needed to clean up. This meant that we needed to back up our photographs on to the 3 hard drives we are carrying and clear out some programs we aren’t using. Also clearing the temporary internet files gave us some space back. I am sure there is other rubbish in there somewhere but I don’t know how to get rid of it or what to get rid of. Because the computer was really slow with the hard drive being full this took the whole day. This didn’t matter as the weather was awful but I had meant to spend the day working for my 2 clients that I still have left.
Tuesday 28 July 2009
I spent the day working for my couple of clients, finishing end of financial year stuff. Barry basically watched me and went for a couple of walks with the dog. Most of the day was a miserable drizzly rain and very cold. We were quite happy to stay in the caravan with the fire on.
We received some papers from Timbercorp Growers Group who are a group trying to salvage the various Timbercorp investment projects and stop them from being wound up now that Timbercorp is in liquidation. This could save us a chunk of the $100,000 they owe us to date. We spent several hours this afternoon discussing the situation and trying to decide whether we should put money into the fighting fund to try to save the projects or to forget the whole thing and write it off as a bad error on our part to invest in this way in the first place. We have to make some decisions soon as we only have until Thursday to lodge a proxy form to keep the Almond Project going if we choose to do so. We are a bit scared of chucking more money down the drain, but hopefully somebody has put a plug in. One of the things that really annoys us is that we lose $150.00 a fortnight because Centrelink deems that we earn that much from these investments and we cannot get them to remove them as assets because Timbercorp won't commit to any decisions and state that it could be more than a year before anything happens.
Wednesday 29 July 2009
Today we spent the morning with the washing and emails. We decided that we would pay into the Timbercorp Growers Group fighting fund and we emailed the proxy form with our votes to keep the almond project going. We received another email today which stated that there is another group interested in rescuing the Olive groves so we might be alright with the olives and the almonds.
We drove into town to do some shopping. We both needed pills, this is another of our pet hates. We take pills every day not because we feel ill but because the doctors deem it necessary for various reasons. I suppose we could ignore them and not bother but as we are really not sure what high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels really do to the body we keep taking the pills.
After lunch we walked back across the river and visited the Town Hall which is open from 11.00 am to 3.00 pm. This is a lovely old restored building with some of the furniture from council meetings, etc, still in place. There is a photo gallery in one room with photos of then (late 1800s) and now, another has photos of prize rams and ewes of the area, with some of their history such as how many lambs the rams sired. One ram at the age of 2.5 years was claimed to have sired 267 lambs in that year. He must have had a good time.
The main hall had a mural painted on the back of the stage so it looked as if a play was about to start. When walking back stage we found the dressing rooms as original with some lovely old clothes hanging in them. The idea being that you dress up in the provided period costumes for photo shoots in front of the mural. There is also a kitchen area which was obviously used for other things originally. This building was obviously a picture theatre as well because the projection room was still in tact with the old projectors still in place and a rewinding room on the side. I forgot to take photos of this room so I can’t add a photo of this here.
From the town hall we walked into town to visit the Old Sweet Shop museum which was the last museum included in our passport to the town.
Monday 27 July 2009
Today when we turned on the computer we had a message saying that the hard drive was almost full and we needed to clean up. This meant that we needed to back up our photographs on to the 3 hard drives we are carrying and clear out some programs we aren’t using. Also clearing the temporary internet files gave us some space back. I am sure there is other rubbish in there somewhere but I don’t know how to get rid of it or what to get rid of. Because the computer was really slow with the hard drive being full this took the whole day. This didn’t matter as the weather was awful but I had meant to spend the day working for my 2 clients that I still have left.
Tuesday 28 July 2009
I spent the day working for my couple of clients, finishing end of financial year stuff. Barry basically watched me and went for a couple of walks with the dog. Most of the day was a miserable drizzly rain and very cold. We were quite happy to stay in the caravan with the fire on.
We received some papers from Timbercorp Growers Group who are a group trying to salvage the various Timbercorp investment projects and stop them from being wound up now that Timbercorp is in liquidation. This could save us a chunk of the $100,000 they owe us to date. We spent several hours this afternoon discussing the situation and trying to decide whether we should put money into the fighting fund to try to save the projects or to forget the whole thing and write it off as a bad error on our part to invest in this way in the first place. We have to make some decisions soon as we only have until Thursday to lodge a proxy form to keep the Almond Project going if we choose to do so. We are a bit scared of chucking more money down the drain, but hopefully somebody has put a plug in. One of the things that really annoys us is that we lose $150.00 a fortnight because Centrelink deems that we earn that much from these investments and we cannot get them to remove them as assets because Timbercorp won't commit to any decisions and state that it could be more than a year before anything happens.
Wednesday 29 July 2009
Today we spent the morning with the washing and emails. We decided that we would pay into the Timbercorp Growers Group fighting fund and we emailed the proxy form with our votes to keep the almond project going. We received another email today which stated that there is another group interested in rescuing the Olive groves so we might be alright with the olives and the almonds.
We drove into town to do some shopping. We both needed pills, this is another of our pet hates. We take pills every day not because we feel ill but because the doctors deem it necessary for various reasons. I suppose we could ignore them and not bother but as we are really not sure what high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels really do to the body we keep taking the pills.
After lunch we walked back across the river and visited the Town Hall which is open from 11.00 am to 3.00 pm. This is a lovely old restored building with some of the furniture from council meetings, etc, still in place. There is a photo gallery in one room with photos of then (late 1800s) and now, another has photos of prize rams and ewes of the area, with some of their history such as how many lambs the rams sired. One ram at the age of 2.5 years was claimed to have sired 267 lambs in that year. He must have had a good time.
The main hall had a mural painted on the back of the stage so it looked as if a play was about to start. When walking back stage we found the dressing rooms as original with some lovely old clothes hanging in them. The idea being that you dress up in the provided period costumes for photo shoots in front of the mural. There is also a kitchen area which was obviously used for other things originally. This building was obviously a picture theatre as well because the projection room was still in tact with the old projectors still in place and a rewinding room on the side. I forgot to take photos of this room so I can’t add a photo of this here.
From the town hall we walked into town to visit the Old Sweet Shop museum which was the last museum included in our passport to the town. 
The sweet shop had old style jars of lollies just as they were when I was a kid. The only difference was the little bags of lollies cost $2.00 instead of the ½ penny I used to pay.
The rest of the museum was the house behind the shop which has some lovely things in it including 3 wedding dresses which didn’t look anything like wedding dresses to me. It was interesting to note that the woman brought up 5 children in this little house which only appeared to have one bedroom. The original cash register is still there although it only opens/closes the till, but doesn’t state the cost because of the change to dollars and cents from pounds, shillings and pence.We weren’t sorry to head back to the caravan because it has turned really cold again.
Thursday 30 July 09
This morning I spent sending emails for my business and setting up an old file for Barry’s olive business in the hope that I can prove to Centrelink that our Timbercorp interests are businesses not investments. After a time I decided that I was wasting my time and stopped. As it was raining once again we stayed in the caravan trying to keep warm. Barry set up the satellite dish so that we could watch the 3rd test match in the evening. A wet ground made this a waste of time as there was no play at a time when we could watch.
Friday 31 July 09
This morning we spent several hours listening to a meeting of Almond Growers which was webcast from Melbourne. Some of what was said was interesting and quite positive. One company is offering to exchange your rights to crop proceeds in the future in place of shares in the company. There would be some cost involved but less than paying the next lot of fees due in October and we would have a saleable asset which could be traded on the stock exchange. Apparently you would be offered shares equivalent to the number of lots you hold and the year that you purchased your almond lots. This would be a lot better than having the project wound up whereby the best we could hope for would be what is left after the wind up costs are paid. The estimate was about $1,500.00 per lot. As I own 2 lots and am owed about $36,000 for them winding up does not seem the best option. If I get the chance I will be accepting the share offer. There may be other offers made for the almond orchards because from what the experts said once we get over the next 2 years, with the world down turn and the drought in Victoria continuing and causing severe water problems with the Murray River, there is a very bright future for the almond industry in Australia. There was a vote and the end of the meeting to vote for the project to continue and although we didn’t get a result from that vote it appeared from the proxies that were held that there would be a positive outcome. Whether the courts will uphold this is yet to be tested but we are certainly feeling a bit more positive about the almond project continuing in some form and us not losing all our money.
According to the Timbercorp Growers Group which we have paid into there are also people interested in salvaging the olive projects as well, so hopefully we will have some positive outcomes there also.
That took up all the morning and was followed by a call from Centrelink telling us that we can’t change our Timbercorp holdings from investments to businesses. He said they are valued at what we paid for them which is different to the way we valued them so we have to sort that out too. We will not be any better off and until there is something definitive from Timbercorp regarding the projects Centrelink considers that we have an income stream from these investments and there is nothing we can do about this.
Anyway enough of the doom and gloom, lets talk about something more interesting. Ann called in the afternoon and we had a bit of a chat which was nice. We also went into Burra for a bit of shopping and to pick up the mail.
Apart from a couple of walks with the dog Barry didn’t do much. We did watch the cricket highlights for an hour in the afternoon and things were quite positive, which is more than I can say about the first session of today’s play. I don’t want to watch any more. It is looking like we will have a repeat of 2005.Saturday 1 August 2009
Once again we have woken up to rain and grey skies. South Australia can definitely say that the drought is over but apparently the Riverlands are still in trouble with nowhere near enough rain to break the drought. This is a real shame as this is where the River Murray runs which appears to supply almost the whole of South Australia with water. There are pipes running all over the place including right out into the desert.
This morning we made up some sandwiches filled the flask and after some shopping we took a drive to some of the small out lying towns around the Burra area.
We had been told that there was a homestead which was the birthplace of Sir George Hubert Wilkins, who is renowned for being part of several of the expeditions to the North Pole. Once as a photographer, once as an environmentalist, and he also had a failed attempt to go under the North pole ice in a submarine but the equipment failed (must have been a Collins Class). He was also an official photographer at the front in France during the 1st World War. He received several awards including a knighthood and was going to be buried in Westminster Abbey but his wife wanted his ashes to be scattered at the North Pole. We found the homestead but it was locked up and we discovered later that we could have got a key from one of the garages in one of the small towns but as we didn’t know this at the time and we had driven about 12kms on muddy gravel roads we weren’t interested in going back with a key.We looked at the little towns of Hallet, Mt Bryan and Jamestown. None of them had anything of real interest to look at and there were no visitor centres to get any information about them. I found a café in Jamestown which had some brochures but there was nothing that called to us to drive to apart from Magnetic Hill which claimed to apparently make your car roll up hill. We decided to drive out to this hill which was about 50kms away and see what it was all about. There was nothing much to see but when you stopped where the sign told you to, turned off the engine, put the car into neutral and released the brake, sure enough the car ran up the hill to where there was a big imitation magnet sitting at the top. We went back to the bottom and tried again and the car rolled up the hill again. It must be an optical illusion but when you come over the brow of the hill where the magnet is sitting you definitely appear to look down into a gulley. We carried on past the sign back up the hill on the other side, turned around and came back down to where the sign was and once again we turned off the engine, put the car into neutral and let off the brake and the car this time appeared to be rolling forward up the hill. We met some other people who said “We have been had, it isn’t rolling up hill” but we said that is definitely down hill into that gulley but they said it was up hill so they obviously saw it differently to us. There loss as far as we were concerned because we found it quite fun. It reminded us of a time when we were in a fun house in New Zealand and we sat in a seat that ran up a hill. We took a few photographs back in Jamestown and as it was still drizzling we headed home.
Saturday 1 August 2009
Once again we have woken up to rain and grey skies. South Australia can definitely say that the drought is over but apparently the Riverlands are still in trouble with nowhere near enough rain to break the drought. This is a real shame as this is where the River Murray runs which appears to supply almost the whole of South Australia with water. There are pipes running all over the place including right out into the desert.
This morning we made up some sandwiches filled the flask and after some shopping we took a drive to some of the small out lying towns around the Burra area. We had been told that there was a homestead which was the birthplace of Sir George Hubert Wilkins, who is renowned for being part of several of the expeditions to the North Pole. Once as a photographer, once as an environmentalist, and he also had a failed attempt to go under the North pole ice in a submarine but the equipment failed (must have been a Collins Class). He was also an official photographer at the front in France during the 1st World War. He received several awards including a knighthood and was going to be buried in Westminster Abbey but his wife wanted his ashes to be scattered at the North Pole. We found the homestead but it was locked up and we discovered later that we could have got a key from one of the garages in one of the small towns but as we didn’t know this at the time and we had driven about 12kms on muddy gravel roads we weren’t interested in going back with a key.
We looked at the little towns of Hallet, Mt Bryan and Jamestown. None of them had anything of real interest to look at and there were no visitor centres to get any information about them. I found a café in Jamestown which had some brochures but there was nothing that called to us to drive to apart from Magnetic Hill which claimed to apparently make your car roll up hill. We decided to drive out to this hill which was about 50kms away and see what it was all about. There was nothing much to see but when you stopped where the sign told you to, turned off the engine, put the car into neutral and released the brake, sure enough the car ran up the hill to where there was a big imitation magnet sitting at the top. We went back to the bottom and tried again and the car rolled up the hill again. It must be an optical illusion but when you come over the brow of the hill where the magnet is sitting you definitely appear to look down into a gulley. We carried on past the sign back up the hill on the other side, turned around and came back down to where the sign was and once again we turned off the engine, put the car into neutral and let off the brake and the car this time appeared to be rolling forward up the hill. We met some other people who said “We have been had, it isn’t rolling up hill” but we said that is definitely down hill into that gulley but they said it was up hill so they obviously saw it differently to us. There loss as far as we were concerned because we found it quite fun. It reminded us of a time when we were in a fun house in New Zealand and we sat in a seat that ran up a hill. We took a few photographs back in Jamestown and as it was still drizzling we headed home.
Once again we have woken up to rain and grey skies. South Australia can definitely say that the drought is over but apparently the Riverlands are still in trouble with nowhere near enough rain to break the drought. This is a real shame as this is where the River Murray runs which appears to supply almost the whole of South Australia with water. There are pipes running all over the place including right out into the desert.
This morning we made up some sandwiches filled the flask and after some shopping we took a drive to some of the small out lying towns around the Burra area. We had been told that there was a homestead which was the birthplace of Sir George Hubert Wilkins, who is renowned for being part of several of the expeditions to the North Pole. Once as a photographer, once as an environmentalist, and he also had a failed attempt to go under the North pole ice in a submarine but the equipment failed (must have been a Collins Class). He was also an official photographer at the front in France during the 1st World War. He received several awards including a knighthood and was going to be buried in Westminster Abbey but his wife wanted his ashes to be scattered at the North Pole. We found the homestead but it was locked up and we discovered later that we could have got a key from one of the garages in one of the small towns but as we didn’t know this at the time and we had driven about 12kms on muddy gravel roads we weren’t interested in going back with a key.
We looked at the little towns of Hallet, Mt Bryan and Jamestown. None of them had anything of real interest to look at and there were no visitor centres to get any information about them. I found a café in Jamestown which had some brochures but there was nothing that called to us to drive to apart from Magnetic Hill which claimed to apparently make your car roll up hill. We decided to drive out to this hill which was about 50kms away and see what it was all about. There was nothing much to see but when you stopped where the sign told you to, turned off the engine, put the car into neutral and released the brake, sure enough the car ran up the hill to where there was a big imitation magnet sitting at the top. We went back to the bottom and tried again and the car rolled up the hill again. It must be an optical illusion but when you come over the brow of the hill where the magnet is sitting you definitely appear to look down into a gulley. We carried on past the sign back up the hill on the other side, turned around and came back down to where the sign was and once again we turned off the engine, put the car into neutral and let off the brake and the car this time appeared to be rolling forward up the hill. We met some other people who said “We have been had, it isn’t rolling up hill” but we said that is definitely down hill into that gulley but they said it was up hill so they obviously saw it differently to us. There loss as far as we were concerned because we found it quite fun. It reminded us of a time when we were in a fun house in New Zealand and we sat in a seat that ran up a hill. We took a few photographs back in Jamestown and as it was still drizzling we headed home.
No comments:
Post a Comment