Before you jump to thinking this is a Defenders of the Wilderness Save The Forests chest pointy log entry well no, it's not, not directly anyway. In fact, it will at first seem counterintuitive of such matters but stay with me on this, it is going somewhere.
The Johnstone family came to Queenstown around 1975 and moved into a house on the corner of King and Selby streets. I had to walk past that house on the way to Queenstown Central primary school.
'We welcome you to Central our school in Queenstown
Where mountains of pink wear white snow for a crown
Where we learn and we strive, to enrich all our lives
At Central our school in Queenstown'
Oh, I still remember the school song. Colin and Dianne Johnstone came to town with their three children. The eldest, Scott, was quite the sporting type. Aussie rules footy and cricket mainly. Leesa was in the same class as me in school and Corey slightly younger. And why did they come to live at the end of urbanisation? Well, money of course. The promise of a generous fortnightly paycheque, accompanied by the almost cost-free but high standard of schooling and healthcare, and a suitable house with a peppercorn rental, were all reasons why most people came to the Lyell district in those days. But it's not all beer and skittles for this is at the farthest flung urban corner of Van Diemens land where periods of incessant rain, sub zero temperatures and snow choked roads heightened the profound sense of isolation. Even today, Queenstown is perceived to be the ragged edge of civilisation.
But there was easy big money. The success of the Pyritic Smelter in the 1890s necessitated the Mt Lyell ABT railway to transport the metallic bounty to Macquarie Harbour, then ship it to Melbourne for distribution. Logistic sensibilities backloaded goods for the vibrant cashed up people of Lyell meaning shiploads of Victorian beer for the 14 pubs got back-freighted in as did the latest Melbourne fashions and luxuries.
There are still undertones of Victoria here today and one thing still prominent is Australian rules football.
One has to wonder, what would possess anyone to take up residence at the Wilderness frontier of Tasmania and play this tough game made all the more tougher being played on the infamous gravel surface in what could sometimes be the harshest of conditions??... Money of course. Attractive incentives could be earned by coaches, captains and imported stars if the team won. Colin Johnstone was a football star who would be the playing coach of a footy club to really crank up the earnings. As a child I had to tag along to the games with mum when she would work the coffee and cake shop under the grandstand. The teams were Lyell, City, Smelters and Gormanston.
By the mid seventies the four key teams that had battled it out on the gravel grounds of Queenstown and Gormanston were amalgamated. Lyell and Gormanston would amalgamate into Lyell/Gormanston and not long after that Smelters and City would amalgamate into the Queenstown Football club. By this time most people had cars and the roads were developed to something we could relate to today. The now amalgamated teams and teams from nearby towns of Zeehan, Rosebery and Tullah made up the Western Tasmanian Football Association. Rosebery could even contribute two clubs, Rosebery and Toorak! The footy of Western Tasmania was as strong as ever and everybody lived where the wealth was. If you worked there, you lived there with the mining wealth fuelling a lifestyle to be envied.
The cars that people drove between towns and parked around the boundaries of the footy grounds where people would barrack and sound horns when their team put one through became important.
Some of these people only had a passing interest in the footy but it was a great place to be seen with the car and for them..... Bathurst day was their granny!
My dad drove a Valiant Safari wagon and it took me a few years to understand what the 'leaning tower of power' meant. Chrysler ingeniously designed a 225 cubic inch displacement inline 6 cylinder engine by offsetting the crank tunnel and cylinder head, casting the engine block with the cylinders off vertical. The engine looked like it was just an inline 6 mounted on a 20 degree angle to the chassis but in fact was not. It was done like this to allow much more room for the intake and exhaust to be optimally engineered and still fit into the rather tight engine bay and became known as the 'Slant Six'.
One night, after mum and dad had been away all day having driven to Burnie and back!, which was a big deal then, dad had traded the trusty wagon and that's when I saw the big new gunmetal grey 265 Hemi Valiant Ranger. I still remember the relentless acceleration and I don't recall dad ever being overtaken.
Queenstown's abundance of performance cars from the iconic Australian era of production car racing was evident, encapsulated by the single word...Bathurst.
One day in 1978 I walked down to King street and there, parked in the Johnstone family drive, was a brand new Atlantis blue
Holden HZ GTS.
I stared in wonder at this beautiful thing, overhearing an adult conversation about the power of the 5L V8, the amazing four wheel disc brakes and a comment about the power steering 'I could steer it with my dick' that I wasn't supposed to hear. Mr Johnstone went on to say 'gonna drive it over to the game today'. The game was in Zeehan and I was lucky enough to go along that day in the back of this awesome car.
The crisp sound from those stereo exhausts of 8 Australian designed and manufactured cylinders in V configuration firing in beautifully timed order delighted my 10 year old senses.
12 years later I saw a Supermint Metallic example of one of these beauties in a Hobart yard for sale and test drove it. The Australian designed 5L Holden V8 produced a healthy amount of reliable horsepower from standard but a substantial power increase can be realised with a camshaft and exhaust upgrade, both of which had already been installed in this particular car. An electric cooling fan replaced the power robbing mechanical fan and a twin point ignition distributor make sure the bangs are well initiated. As soon as I reached the Brooker highway I opened the taps, the tachometer exceeded the factory redline effortlessly and the speedometer read 160Kmh.... then I slipped it into 4th (Top) gear. Needless to say, I happily handed over the asking price.
It was our family car for a few years until I parked it in a shed one day from where it rarely moved for the next 22 years.
Until, one day, the time came.
I have always loved a nice classic V8 rear drive performance car.
Some say, given my obvious stance on environmental conservation this rings of hypocrisy.... or does it? (That's a Clarkson)
V8 Automobile engines are among the most efficient internal combustion reciprocating engine designs and although it appears that battery electric cars are the way of our future, certainly with regards to the daily commute, this post is not intended to get right into the argument of the virtues versus the hideousness of the electric promise. Let's first examine the internal combustion engine.
1826, the first combustion engine designs were fueled with Ethanol which has been used as heating fuel since the 17th century. Early appliances called spirit stoves fueled with Ethanol could heat food and people without contaminating or producing noxious fumes.
1860, Mr Otto developed the 4 cycle combustion engine and the preferred fuel was Ethanol. Henry Ford brings cars to the masses in 1908 with the model T. It was first manufactured to run on Ethanol with Gasoline as an option. *Worthy of note : A battery electric example that Ford himself drove was prototyped as well.*
A wikipedia 'timeline of ethanol fuel' perusal will undoubtedly leave one questioning as to why on earth are we not pumping this sun juice into our fuel tanks.
It's clean, it's totally renewable, it's safer, we can produce it ourselves and it has a substantial carbon offset.
I saw how Ethanol as fuel works first hand in Illinois, Indiana and Iowa where Ethanol production plants fed mainly with the surpluses and waste of the immense corn crop produced clean fuel.
Fuel that I saw being pumped into Australian manufactured Pontiac GTO's!
I thought this was simply brilliant so when I got home I strongly invested in an Australian company that promised to produce Ethanol fuel in Australia for Australians. Even though slow to evolve Australia hadn't really caught on yet I thought this a sound and ethical investment with regard to environment and Australian economics. I proudly purchased an Australian manufactured Pontiac Commodore powered with a 6 litre GM V8 that performed best when squirting 85% sun juice into its combustion chambers! (Most motorsport disciplines had already adopted E85 or straight Ethanol)
Yearrrp, that didn't go so well.... I avoid the topic of share investment but still bang on about the glory days of owning and driving those cars.
Well, I'm still yet to be convinced that Ethanol is not viable. It was working long before governments taxed it out of the game as Big Oil refined dinosaur juice to produce Kerosene for street lighting and fuel stoves. A byproduct of this process, Gasoline, which was mostly being dumped was tried in fuel stoves but having a tendency to explode it looked like Mr Rockefeller's fortunes may have peaked.
But then, it was found to work just fine in Mr Ford's automobile engines and team Rockefeller pressed that point hard whilst the Governments increased the tax on Ethanol. Meanwhile over in Germany, Mr Rudolph Diesel's oil injection engine first ran on peanut oil and it was his intent that his invention would be fuelled with vegetable oil but it was determined it would be fuelled with Rockefeller's refined Dinojuice aptly labeled Diesel fuel. Later the jet age capped things right off for Dinoco when gas turbines began burning massive amounts of good old Kerosene, as they still do today.
In reality, people who think deeply about these subjects have known since the days of Kerosene lights and stoves that refining crude oil could never be a lasting solution. For even though our planet has vast amounts of stored hydrocarbon it is a finite resource and one day we would have to do something else.
After some time, individuals who contemplate deeply started cautioning everyone about the release of stored carbon into the atmosphere through the burning of crude oil-based fuel, without any offset. These emissions coupled with the increasing destruction of carbon storing natural forest is increasing the percentage of carbon dioxide in atmosphere, making the planet surface warmer and starting to make life harder so we had better crack on with finding a different way.
We will have to generate much more electricity to charge batteries made from Copper, Tin, Zinc, Lithium, Cobalt, Nickel, Lead, Aluminium and plastic which will have to be mined and refined in increased quantity. Used batteries will quickly become a waste problem unless we can come up with a way to recycle and exchange.
Elon, I don't think this is what Mr Tesla envisaged but apparently battery electric is happening anyway.
Me, I still think Sunoco is worth pursuing.
Watch the first Cars movie with an adult perspective, all will become clear.
Anthony Coulson
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