Buy Australian

Good luck with that if you want a new car.  Car manufacturing is highly automated and so labour costs should not be too high, yet it seems it is not a viable business in Australia. Australian car manufacturing has completely closed down. 

Our supermarkets promote their Australian grown vegetables, fish, fruit and meat. This is mostly a good thing. We generally do it better, cleaner and greener than other countries and there is very little that can't be grown here, although we seem to import many tonnes of canned tomatoes from Italy, along with oranges grown in California whereas our orange harvests are often just dumped to rot.

To steal from Hecla, buy Australian. It's good. 

With thanks to our Aussie friend Wombat in northern Japan, buy Australian is not new.

The sign sounds racist but not really. That's not to say Australia wasn't terribly racist then. The "Australian Made Preference League Exhibition Touring Train" visited all corners of New South Wales. Buy Australian, Preference Australian made. 

The steam engine towed twenty carriages each with a letter on on them making up Buy Australian, the last two carriages being sleeper cars for staff. 

There was a very posh dining car attached to the train and local dignitaries wherever the train stopped were invited onboard for dinner before or after grand speeches. 

Onboard generators powered the internal electrics and sweeping searchlight type fittings to attract night time attention. 

Most days a lecturer left the train and visited local schools to impress upon students the importance of buying Australian. 

There were some fabulously lavish and beautiful art work advertising on the train., some of which advertised Nestle products? Yes, Australian made but not where the profits ended up. Get your Jusfrute made with fruit from Gosford, New South Wales.

Ultimately it could be judged as a propaganda train. So what happened to the Buy Australian train? The Great Depression of the late 1920s/30s killed  it. 

Almost set free

Melbourne's lock down moves to lock down light at midnight. We have to remain masked indoors and out unless you are at home, have an exemption or are eating, drinking or smoking. The five kilometre travel limit for only five reasons will be lifted. Pretty well all businesses can reopen but still with some heavy restrictions. Office buildings can have 25 percent of workers return. 

There has been about a dozen new infections in Melbourne over each of the last three days, all in isolation for their whole infectious period. 

However, we won't be able to visit people in their homes. It is over four weeks since we have seen Mother and thought we would be able to do so this coming Sunday.

Technically if she waited at the bottom of ABI Brother's driveway and we picked her up in the car, we could take her out for lunch and shopping. But that goes against the spirit of the new rules, so we won't. 

I said to R we will go for a nice long drive in our new car on Sunday, it yet to travel over the speed of 60 km/h. He replied screw that. We have nothing on the calendar for Thursday. We will go out that day.

Not so bad for my state, but what about New South Wales, specifically Sydney? What a disaster with days and days of over 100 new infections. While Sydney does lockdowns less severely, can someone with Sydney knowledge really explain to me why the infection rate is so bad there?

Monday Mural

Quite a number of people participate in Monday Mural, including Sami in Perth, WA. 

It was late summer when I caught a train to Hawthorn and saw this mural as I waited at the tram stop outside the station. I am not sure why later I was where I was in Riversdale Road when I came across this second mural. I expect there are big stories behind both.

I couldn't do much about the shadowing. 

Birds in the 'hood

I was delighted to come across these lorikeets in a South Yarra side street as I took my lockdown exercise walk. This Saturday I was there at the same time and they weren't being fed. I think it is ok to feed native animals as long as it is irregular and they don't become dependant. However, once they know you are a possible food source, they will hang around, as was evident when I walked the same street today and I could hear lorikeets squawking away. That's ok. It passes the time for them. They are very noisy but ever so pretty. At times they fly past the Highrise, but so fast you never really see them, only hear them.

The return of 2020

I hope this excellent effort by ABC Radio broadcaster Sammy J is viewable in all countries. There is a couple of references to explain. 

Our Prime Minister Morrison said I think late last year that it wasn't a race to get everyone vaccinated. Now with COVID outbreaks in four of our states, the worst in Sydney, he has apologised for saying that and pretty well admitted drug companies should have been lobbied harder for Australia to receive more doses. The Gladys (Berejiklian, Premier of New South Wales) reference is about her being too slow to lock Sydney down, which is has seen over 100 new infections on some days last week.