From: Douglas Greville (dgrev@ruralnet.net.au)
Date: Fri Jun 14 2002 - 06:13:04 PDT
Ryan
> Heh. The US was social malcontents and religious fanatics, not
> Telephone Sanitizers and Documentary Producers. It took the US to
> invent those things for those jobs to appear.
Ours were free settlers and convicts.
> Now, Austrailia, what
> did they invent? Oh thats right the Crocadile guy..wot's his name?
> Steve Irwin isit?...pretty interesting useless 3rd.
He's a Johhny come lately. The original is "Crocodile Dundee" aka
Paul Hogan. Not one of this country's favourite sons.
You would be very surprised to know just how many of your daily
activities involve Australian inventions. We just have an abysmal
talent for selling off overseas the rights to anything worthwhile as
Autralian business is far too conservative for its own good. Venture
capital out here is looked upon akin to breathing vacuum - someone else
can do it.
> They were victorian and had too much starch in their nickers?
As good a reason as any.
> The US may not have nearly as much nice weather over it's entire
> area, but we do have a distinct lack of dangerous and deadly snakes,
> crocs, spiders and other nasty beasties that Austrailia seems to have
> in droves. We've got snakes, but ours generally warn you before they
> get cross and try to bite you.
Hey, Kangaroos hiss. Koala's snarl If you are a bit slow getting the
message - like one of our politicians - you then get bit, scratched
and piddled on. Now wouldn't you say that is a class act? I know quite
a few people who would like to pull off what that Koala did to that
politician.
We do have a very nasty snake called a Tiepan (sp?) the damn thing will
attack on sight, extremely venomous.
Most of what you have seen on the TV is up north in our tropical
region. Bit like worrying about getting bit by a 'gator if you are
visiting Seattle. Let them have their swamps and you stay well away.
Getting back to things empire. It wasn't till Australia benefited
from Lend Lease during WW2 that Australia even acknowledged that
there were weapons produced outside the empire.
We still had a very bad case of "British is best". Even after WW2
our military concentrated on British gear.
Really, it wasn't until a very fair and thorough testing regime was
carried out between the M113 and the FV432. The purchase of the Belgian
SLR rifle and also the exhaustive aquisition process that saw the
Mirage enter RAAF service that we started shopping around.
Then Australia finally woke up and realised that automatically buying
British didn't automatically equip us with the best for our needs, but
rather set us up to fight a war on the other side of the world.
British meant English which
meant suited to Whitehall's mission requirments, after WW2 that was
european with a nodding realisation that equatorial service would have
to be tolerated. Thus warships that didn't have air conditioning
(no fun in the tropics). APCs (Saracens) that almost cooked the
crew and passengers alive in Europe, yet we fielded them in the
tropics.
Since then, we have even bought Leopards, which caused just as much
fun trying to translate technical drawings and manuals as what the
Mirages did.
However, buying British wasn't necessarily bad. The record of the
Centurions in Vietnam surprised everyone. They could take damage
that would render an M48 or M60 fit only for the scrap heap and keep
fighting till they limped home for repairs. There is one vehicle that
took something like 72 RPG-2 hits (the inferior Chinese copy) and
survived (somehow). But were maintenance nightmares.
The ultimate success story was the combining of the F 86 Sabre
airframe with the British RR Avon engine (just like the Mustang with
the Merlin) that gave us something realistic to take on the Mig 15.
Regards
Doug
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Armoured Vehicles Collector
_______
_/_(_o_)_\_ ____
_/|___|_|___|\_ /____\
/ [___] [___] \ Douglas Greville _/[o]___\_
/\_ [o] [o] _/\ Broken Hill __/=_|____|_=\__
|w||___________||w| N.S.W. /__\__________/__\
|w|\u u/|w| Australia |w| \ / |w|
|w| \_________/ |w| |w|$ \______/ $|w|
[w] [w] [w] [w]
M8 Ferret
dgrev@ruralnet.net.au
Web Armour site at:
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