We’ve been away for a few days as Donna took me away to Gippsland to visit the old gold mining town of Walhalla for my birthday. We also took a trip up to Aberfeldy, which had over 1,000 people, 2 hotels and a school there at its peak, but now has about 7 houses in total left in occupation.
Photos later, when I’ve got them off the camera, but here’s a site with photos of what you can find if you *really* know what you’re looking for..
Whilst Australia is not perfect it’s really, really nice to come back to autumn here from late spring in the UK and find that the weather is warmer and sunnier than any day you’ve had in the UK for the last 3 weeks.
21C, cloudless skies, not a lot of wind or people.. Fab! 🙂
Well, we’re back from Canberra and LCA 2005 went really well, and I even survived presenting at the Clustering Mini-Conference which was worth the trip in itself.
Anyway, no time to write more at the moment, been very busy fixing up the new mailsystem on one of these (with 128MB RAM and a 40GB hard disk) running Gentoo Linux using Maia Mailguard to control Amavisd-new with SpamAssassin and Clam Anti-Virus.
Just wish I’d been able to afford the model with 256MB when I’d bought it!
You’ve heard about the film “The Terminal” where Tom Hanks character gets stranded in an airport terminal because he suddenly finds himself stateless. Well there is a real life version of this that has been going on for almost 7 years now in Australia and, unfortunately for the person, he’s not trapped in an airport lounge but in various Government detention centres with razor wire and guards.
Peter Qasim is caught in a situation where he arrived as an asylum seeker from Kashmir, was denied asylum by Australia, but India refuses to believe he is their citizen and will not accept him. He is trapped inside the system, unable to return to Kashmir and not permitted to leave the detention centers.
He has been locked up for almost 7 years now, and faces no escape and (in his dark times) believes he will die there, never being allowed to live the life of a free man. The ABC has a background report on his plight and there is more here, here and here.
In other news, Australian officials deported a man travelling on a false French passport despite being told he was a convicted criminal by the French authorities.
The French Embassy believed without his French passport the man with the fake identity could not leave the country, but they had not reckoned on what the Australian authorities might do.
Sources close to the French Embassy say they are most concerned that their warnings about the man posing as Kingue were seemingly ignored and a convicted criminal using a stolen identity and therefore a fake passport was able to travel out of this country with the help of the Australian Government.
ABC News is reporting that the new Tasmanian Tiger photos (as yet unpublished anywhere) which created such a stir recently are now believed to be fakes by the curator of the Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery.
Mr Pemberton says he thinks the photos are clearly doctored.
“The thylacine in the image was very similar to another photograph that we quickly identified,” he said.
“But secondly there were two photographs and there was a time gap between the two of… five, 10, 20 seconds… and the posture of the animal hadn’t changed, which I found very strange.”
The ABC news reports that a wheelchair-bound Australian citizen was refused treatment for throat cancer at the Royal Darwin Hospital as he wasn’t eligible for Medicare.
The reason for this death sentence? He’s lived in the Phillipines for over 5 years and thus became ineligible for Medicare and couldn’t afford treatment there.
A spokesperson for federal Health Minister Tony Abbott says the Medicare rules are clear and Mr Cooper is not eligible for treatment.
There’s a further twist to the S.A. MP story being reported by the ABC news and others..
It used to be that the ABC News RSS feeds were only available by subscription, but it looks now like they’ve groked the RSS mindset and made them publically available here for non-commercial use. The reason that I’ve said they’re the official ones is that some folks got fed up at waiting for the ABC to "get it" and made their own via screen scraping.
I’ve added their breaking news RSS feed as a block just below the BBC news feed on the left.
Saturday 19th February is the anniversary of the bombing of Darwin during WWII by aircraft launched from Japanese carriers, 10 weeks after Pearl Harbour.
The ABC has a news report on the commemoration.
It appears that a project launched in 1999 to try and clone the Thylacine, more popularly known as the Tasmanian Tiger, has been shelved due to the poor quality of the available DNA. 🙁