The act of walking requires arm movement, and smokers are no exception to this. Combine a lit cigarette with someone who isn’t paying attention to where they are flailing their arms around, and the end result is getting an innocent pedestrian getting their leg burnt.

Bonus rage is reserved for fat smokers who block up more of the footpath than their skinnier counterparts.

Super Bonus rages goes for smokers who light up inside the converted areas of railway stations, while still managing to throw their hands in the air.

Inconsiderate douchebags.

Footnote

In a few years of working in the Melbourne CBD I’ve managed to avoid my leg getting burnt by smokers. My sister hasn’t been so lucky. (Then again, I’m the kind of guy who loses at games of footpath chicken.)

Today seeing women working as mechanics, electricians or carpenters isn’t unheard off, but back then it probably was – hence why in 1981 Box Hill TAFE College state that over 500 female apprentices were already working in ‘traditionally male’ jobs, and invite girls to a free seminar to learn about their options in one of over 100 different trades.

Meanwhile a few pages along in the same newspaper, things start to head into 1960s Mad Men territory, with this advert aimed at parents of secondary school girls by Stotts Secretarial College. What runs the office of today? Telex, dictating machines, print-out calculators, telephone switchboards and electric typewriters? Act now and get your daughter on her way, because no matter what the state of the economy, well trained office staff are always in demand!

Today the above pieces of office equipment are obsolete and so are job titles like as secretary and typist, but Stott’s Colleges are still running training courses, in what is now a Certificate III in Business Administration.

As for gender roles in today’s workforce: I’ve seen a number of women up the front of my morning train to work, but I’m yet to find a bloke working as a receptionist. I wonder how the workplace will look in another 30 years time?

Further reading

• Digital archives of The Age, 1854-1989 at the Google News Archive
• Blog post about Australia’s Historic Newspapers Online

Located on the south-western tip of the island at Summerland Beach, the Penguin Parade is one of Australia’s most popular wildlife attractions, with almost half a million people visiting each year. To cater for these hoards of tourists, floodlights illuminate the beach in front of concrete viewing terraces, and a network of boardwalks have been constructed over the sand dunes so that the delicate environment beneath is protected.

While today’s Penguin Parade is a big budget production, this postcard from 1940 shows a very different scene at Summerland Beach. It was an age of little environmental concern, when parking cars on the delicate penguin burrows was not given a second thought, and introduced foxes and pet dogs killed dozens of penguins.

The first organised trips to see the Summerland Beach penguins occurred in 1928, when local residents Bert West, Bern Denham and Bert Watchorn started to pick up visitors at the Cowes ferry pier and take them on a tour of the island for five shillings. However it was not until the 1940 opening of a bridge to the mainland that tourism to the island really took off, and so did the environment damage caused by the hoards of visitors.

The first efforts to protect the penguin colony date to 1930, when four hectares of land on the Summerland Peninsula was given to the people of Victoria by Mr and Mrs Spencer Jackson as a penguin reserve. Additional land was added to the reserve soon after by the Phillip Island Shire Council, with further land added in 1955, and formal regulations for the reserve being gazetted in 1956. Development of tourist infrastructure commenced in 1961 when fences and concrete viewing stands were erected along the beach, with the involvement of the National Parks and Wildlife Service.

Today management of the facilities is the responsibility of the Phillip Island Nature Parks, a not-for-profit body created by the State Government to conserve and protect the flora and fauna reserves of the island. The current facilities at Summerland Beach date to 1988 when a major redevelopment was carried out, with the opening of a visitor centre and carpark a few hundred metres away from the sand dunes, enlarged viewing terraces on the beach, and a network of boardwalks to link the two.

With the park receiving no recurrent operational funding from the government, Phillip Island Nature Parks is reliant on income from tourist operations to fund their activities. In 2007/08 the total operating revenue was almost $14 million, when a total of 487,251 people visited the penguin parade, with 63% of them being international tourists. With the competing interests of wildlife conservation and increasing the number of visitors, management needs to walk a fine line to avoid destroying the very reason for the park existing.

Sources

• History of the Penguin Parade from the ABC program ‘Penguin Island’
• History of the Summerland Peninsula by Roz Jessop, Environment Manager at the Phillip Island Nature Parks
• The potential impacts of climate change on the Phillip Island Little Penguin colony, a report from 2009
• Strategic Management Plan 2012–2017, Phillip Island Nature Parks
• Annual Report 2009/2010, Phillip Island Nature Parks

Thankfully the solution to these crowds at suburban stations is a sensible one – secondary exits have been constructed on the outbound platforms at many stations, with additional Myki FPDs being installed to allow passengers to touch on or off their cards, allowing them to avoid the main entrance to the station. A much more elegant solution than the last minute ‘throw the barriers open before someone gets trampled‘ solution seen in the city.

However in the case of Myki, even good solutions manage to snatch failure from the jaws of success: the rollout of these secondary exits has been half baked, with temporary fencing blocking up many of the exits, leaving passengers still stuck in the crowds.

So why are they blocked up? The root cause is due to the work being divided into two phases: civil works to install the steps and path to access the platform, followed by the installation of the actual Myki equipment, with some halfwit having decided that the perfectly safe and complete pathways should not be used by passengers until ticketing equipment is installed.

As a result Metcard and Myki pass holders who don’t need to touch off still have to wait in line behind people who do want to touch off. I wonder how long until someone in charge realises?

Footnote

The secondary exit shown in the first photo was at Spotswood, the fenced off exits are at Ascot Vale and Bell stations. I’m sure there are plenty more of each type of exit around the Melbourne suburban network.

You could say not much, but just on a month ago they did issue a decree on the correct way to use your Myki:

15 March 2012

MYKI USERS URGED TO TOUCH, NOT SWIPE OR WAVE
As more passengers make the switch to myki, public transport users are urged to ensure they touch on and off successfully.

Transport Ticketing Authority Chief Executive Officer Bernie Carolan said it is encouraging to see so many people making the switch from Metcard to myki, but acknowledged there are reports of difficulties when passengers ‘swipe’, ‘wave’, ‘rub’ or repeatedly ‘tap’ their myki at the myki reader.

“The most important tip is for people to touch their card to the centre of the reader and hold it still to ensure a successful touch on or touch off, rather than swiping, waving, tapping repeatedly or rubbing their card across the reader.

“When passengers are more familiar with myki they will find it takes about a second to touch on or off, meaning they easily enter or exit a gated or ungated train station, tram or bus.

“The main message is: touch, don’t swipe, touch, don’t wave, touch don’t rub, touch, don’t tap.”

To assist passengers, the Transport Ticketing Authority has uploaded a brief video tutorial to the myki website demonstrating how to touch on and off successfully, but more importantly, what not to do.

The video in question is here:

The above video does illustrate how one should successfully touch your Myki to the readers, but what good does it do if the message doesn’t reach those who are actually travelling on Melbourne’s public transport network? One month on, it appears someone at Myki head office has finally decided to roll out the campaign to somewhere that matters – the City Loop railway stations.

This animation appeared on Monday morning at Southern Cross Station on the large advertising screen outside the Collins Street ticket barriers. It reinforces the “don’t swipe / don’t wave / don’t tap tap” message, as well as the sometimes incorrect “always touch off, even if the barriers are open” spiel.

The same kind of message is also being spread by these cardboard signs between the escalators at City Loop stations.

The wheels of Myki sure move slowly – my last question is: why did it take them a month to roll out all these signs?

You can experience it for yourself quite easily – present your Myki to a ‘Frankenbarrier’ * and you score the useless ‘CSC Pass’ message, leaving you confused as to whether your Myki has been touched off or not.

With all that useful information given by the ticket barrier, you probably want to check your Myki balance. Next stop, a ticket machine.

Hmm, 10 history items all titled ‘Travel’ – really useful guys!

I’m sure if these dimwits ran a supermarket your receipt would say ‘Food’ 15 times.

One hopes the Baillieu Government’s $1 million plans for a “myki customer experience panel” will get to the bottom of these problems.

Footnote

• ‘Frankenbarriers’ are Metcard ticket barriers retrofitted with Myki scanners.
• ‘CSC’ stands for ‘Contactless Smart Card’, before the Myki readers were installed, the space on the ticket barriers was taken up by the yellow reader for the older ‘Metcard Xpress‘ smartcards. That system never got very far, the cards only being issued to two groups of people: customer service staff so that they could open barriers for passengers with defective tickets, and to the wider public transport workforce who were entitled to free travel.

When you plug ‘Sydney West Airport’ into Google the results aren’t of much use. Giving advice to the non-existent travellers who visited Sydney West Airport? Reading up on and departure and arrival times for a paddock? Driving directions to the middle of nowhere?

The answer to the question comes when you zoom out of the Google Map: ‘Sydney West Airport’ is located in the suburb of Badgery’s Creek, which has long been the preferred site of the construction of a second Sydney Airport. The history of the entire saga can be found in the background paper “Second Sydney Airport – A Chronology” produced in 1998 for the Federal Parliament:

In every post-war decade, governments have studied the airport needs of Sydney and possible locations for the second airport. Priorities and locations have been identified. These plans however, have been scuttled or delayed for a variety of reasons including changes of government and funding shortfalls.

From the nineteen sites that have been considered over these years, two remained in discussion in the 90s, namely Badgery’s Creek and Holsworthy. As campaigns against each of these continued to be mounted, discussion continued on a ‘Sydney-West’ second airport.

The above paper suggests that the first usage of the ‘Sydney West Airport’ name was in 1994 during planning work for the Badgerys Creek airport, with a body named the ‘Sydney West Airport Development Corporation’ to be established to drive the project. Another official usage of the term was in the ‘Airports Act 1996′ – an act that enabled the privatisation of the previously Federal Government administered airports of Australia.

So why did an entire forest of useless links like ‘Sydney West Airport Car Rental’ and ‘Sydney West Airport Hotels’ appear? For this we can blame companies who take a list of IATA airport codes and convert it into a farm of web pages without any human intervention. The list they appear to be using IATA ‘Fuel Code Directory’, you can find the 2010 edition here in Excel format, where ‘Sydney West Airport’ has the code SWZ.

Another mystery solved!

Further reading

• ‘Second Sydney Airport’ on Wikipedia.
• Second Sydney Airport – A Chronology from the Parliamentary Library.
• Airports Act 1996 and the definition of ‘Sydney West Airport’.

[Edit] It’s now past noon so you can read the truth – this is just another photoshop job.

Located at 610 Lorimer Street, the GM Holden powerhouse once contained the briquette fired boilers that produced the steam and heat needed in the engine plant located next door. The building itself dates to the late 1950s, and the glass fronted Modernist design was in the same style as a number of other industrial buildings constructed around Melbourne during the same period, such as the APM boiler house at Alphington and the BP mixing tower at Spotswood. In this example only the northern wall along Lorimer Street was covered with glass, with more economical asbestos cladding being used for the side and rear walls.

Running along the top of the building were the coal hoppers that fed the boilers, presumably with a conveyor belt to raise the fuel from ground level. By the time I visited in 2010 the building had already been mostly stripped out, including the asbestos wall cladding and the majority of the heavy machinery, the exception being a single boiler at the west end.

Outside the four chimneys still remained: the one at the west end was taller than the rest.

Abandonment of the powerhouse presumably came in the early 1990s when GM Holden rationalised their operations at Port Melbourne, closing older parts of the factory, and selling off the empty land to developers, who established an office park on the site. With asbestos filling the building, the powerhouse was much slower to move.

It appears the first company to buy the site was developer Omni Property, who proposed the subdivision of the 2,991 m2 site into four individual 700 m2 lots, and the construction of four 900 m2 triple level office/showrooms, with a total project cost of $5 million. This proposal appeared to come nothing: possibly the developers got part way through removing the asbestos before discovering how big the job actually was, and decided to cut their losses.

The next owner of the site was investment group Storm Financial, who purchased the site for $1.825 million in 2007, intending to convert the site into their Melbourne headquarters. Unfortunately for the company and the clients who invested with them, the company went bust in January 2009 and the site went back into limbo. It fell to corporate receivers KordaMentha to dispose of the site as part of the wind up of Storm Financial, with the buyer paying only $700,000 for the empty shell of the powerhouse – a massive drop!

The new owner decided against the conversion of the building, and instead opted to raze the site and build three new warehouses: one around 1000 m2 in size, flanked by two smaller ones around 520 m2. The design and construction contract was awarded in May 2011, with demolition commencing in September the same year.

Asbestos removal occupied a number of months, with the boiler being surrounded by scaffolding and plastic sheeting to ensure the work was carried out safely, leaving behind the steelwork and fireproof bricks.

By November all of the asbestos wall cladding had also been removed, leaving just a steel skeleton covering coal hoppers and chimneys.

Demolition of the main building started at the east end and moved west, with the coal hoppers being lifted away first, followed by the toppling of the top portion of the chimneys.

By the time Christmas 2011 rolled around the only piece left was the base of the main chimney, which was easily toppled after the break with a long piece of wire rope tied around the top.

The rubble has since been cleared, with work starting on the new warehouses.

Sources

• Omni Property: 61 Lorimer Street:
  DEVELOPMENT STATUS Sold 2007
  PROJECT BUDGET $5 Million
  Position perfect in Port Melbourne, 610 Lorimer Street totals 2,991 m2 with direct Yarra River frontage of approximately 90 m. Zoned Business3 the site is currently subject to a subdivision application to create four individual 700 m2 lots and the subsequent construction of four 900 m2 triple level office/showrooms.
• Storm Financial Sells Melbourne Office at a Loss After Just 4 Months:
  May 4, 2009
  Another Storm property asset, the former General Motors Holden power station at 610 Lorimer Street in Port Melbourne, is also believed to have sold for about $700,000.
• Administrators to Sell Two Storm Financial Assets in Melbourne:
  March 21, 2009
  Another property, the former General Motors Holden power station in Port Melbourne, was purchased for $1.825 million in 2007, and was to become the Cairns-based financial services group’s Melbourne headquarters.
• BMF Construction: 604-610 Lorimer St, Port Melbourne:
  May 3, 2011
  BMF Construction has been awarded the Design & Construction contract for a new project located at 604-610 Lorimer St, Port Melbourne. The project consists of 3 Warehouse & Office Units.

More photos

• ‘Former GMH Powerhouse, Port Melbourne’ on Flickr

Queues have always formed at the exit of the railway stations in the city, as passengers pass through some form of ticket checking routine in order to prove they are not fare evaders. Unfortunately for regular commuters, a new bottleneck has emerged in the past few months – the half-baked rollout of the new Myki ticketing system, and the hordes of new users attempting to work out how to use it.

The biggest flaw at inner city railway stations are “frankenbarriers” – existing Metcard ticket barriers retrofitted with Myki scanners. Displaying no useful information when a card is presented to the scanner and showing the cryptic phase ‘CSC Pass’ on a successful card read, the passenger is left confused as to whether their Myki has been touched off or not.

This leads me back to the issues at Flagstaff station, where the lines to exit the station have been growing worse and worse. When I first photographed the queues back in May 2011 they were a relative oddity during my morning commute, and usually caused by the simultaneous arrival of multiple trains on the platforms below, resulting in hordes of passengers converging on the ticket barriers at one time. However as the number of Myki users has increased over the intervening months (it has jumped from 30% in January 2012 to 40% in three months later) the size of queues each morning have also grown.

For me the final straw came yesterday morning, when the queues backed up as far as the escalators, which continued to send more passengers into the already crowed concourse. The photo at the top of the page was taken at 8:54:32 AM, with the photo below being 20 seconds later.

A minute after I reached the upper level walkway, I noticed the queues starting to block the escalator exit.

Thankfully this crowding was shortlived: with a lull in trains arriving on the platforms down below, at 8:56:36 AM the crowds started to clear.

My final photo was taken at 8:57:39 AM: only three minutes after my first photo of the crowding, the scene on the concourse is now completely different.

So what does the future hold? Frankenbarriers at stations were only intended as an interim step in the Myki rollout, but with the final Metcard switch off date yet to be announced, this hybrid solution has now been frustrating commuters since 2009.

With the sale of monthly and weekly Metcards to end in one week, the number of Myki users on the rail network will increase, and with no timeline given for the full rollout of the ‘real’ Myki ticket barriers at City Loop stations, the queues to exit Flagstaff station are only going to get worse, before they (fingers crossed) get better.

Sources

• Charting Transport: What’s driving Melbourne public transport patronage? – showing patronage growth trending upwards
• Media Release: Melbourne’s public transport patronage continues to rise – 227.1 million passengers carried in the 12 months ending September 2011
• The Age: The end is nigh for Metcard – Myki usage at 30% in January 2012
• Myki users urged to touch, not swipe or wave – Myki usage at 40% in March 2012