Perth - River Boat Trip

Work did a boat trip down the Swan River to Fremantle and back. Most important part of the trip: all the booze was free.

Kim, aware that this is a company do, was on her best behaviour.
Leaving Perth jetty.
Bit of the skyline.
As it got darker, piccies became more difficult to take. This one ain't bad though.
Kim, on her best behaviour, after a couple of dozen glasses of bubbles.

Perth - Mandurah

Looked up Big Thing on Wikipedia - the on-line encyclodepia that never lies? Check.
Missus and dog loaded into car? Check.
GPS on the new phone (oh, yes) set to stun? Check.

Off to Harvey, then. A town about 140Km south of Perth with a Big Orange...

Except the bloody thing was taken down a couple of years ago for repairs and hasn't been put back yet - thanks Wikipedia, you great steaming pile of worthless crap.

Not to write off the whole day, we came back via Mandurah - and a very nice place it is, too.

In keeping with WA's it-looks-like-what-it-is approach to street-art, here's a metal pelican.
The river has all sorts of bouncy / get wet stuff for the kids.
Looks like there are some very expensive apartments going up here.
A bit of rock and/or roll. You could smell the ganja blowing off these guys.
A proper pelican.
And, finally, a parrot in a tree - noisy bugger.

Perth - Racing Cars

My chrissey prezzie - yes, racing cars.

The circuit is over by the airport and I got to drive hot laps in a V8. Woot.

While waiting for my turn, I watched this other lot drive round cones. It looked OK but driving round children would have been a lot more fun.
These were the cars. There were 4 people in this time-slot, me and three girls of the female persuasion.
That's one of the girls who went first. I would have got to the car quicker but there was a shoe shop on turn 3 and things got a little congested.
Mine, all mine. Red, of course - goes faster - and roll bars for all that off-circuit fun in the trees. I got a video, too, and, as soon as I get it on to some equipment where I can take some screen grabs I'll post those as well.

Perth - Street Sculpture

One of the nice things about Perth - and you've got to get your kicks where you find them on this coast - is the street art. Whereas in Sydney, an art student pukes up on the pavement, calls it 'Journeys through the Mind No. 3' or somesuch, and it gets reviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald, over here stuff looks like what it is. It's generally well made (here's a tip for art students; if you're gonna make stuff out of metal, learn to weld properly!) and there is a fair bit of humour in it.

I'll be adding to this post as I see more.

New arrivals. I looked around for their parents and eventually found them playing the pokies. Fremantle.

This one is in the shopping mall.
Walking into an office block. You can't really see this but they all have different historical costumes.
Yeah, I know, not really a sculpture but a nice piccie of the moon over the St George's Tower.
This bloke has been waiting for the lights to change since 1874 - the year, not the time.
Roos round a pond - and a lot of fun they are, too.
'Come here, little boy, and I'll let you look up my skirt.' I mean, really!

Perth - Fremantle Shipwreck Galleries

The Shipwreck Galleries contain everything that has sunk, foundered or got a nasty scratch. The museum itself is rather big and dingy so photography doesn't work very well. Still, got a few nice piccies although they don't really do the place justice. There's tales of many Europeans sailing over and getting all shipwrecked before turning on each other and ending up in all sorts of bother. In all, a lot of tales that scream 'Fly!'.

Young people. This comes under the general heading of; the street sculptures round here are really nice. Nearby, a wall dedicated to decades of immigration records the first impressions of new arrivals. One reads; 'When I first arrived, there was nothing here'. Still true.
Silly post to have this on - it hasn't sunk yet.
Aha.
An engine lifted from a wreck. I think that someone is going to try and get it going.
Where the engine was when they found it. Noice boilers.
I dunno. A thingy.
That's better. The hull of a wooden ship recovered from the wreck site.
A cannon - probably not in much of a fireable state.
What ships used to look like.
This was lifted from a wreck. Not in one piece, you understand. This was being shipped to Perth as a kind of stone Ikea flat-pack, presumably to adorn the front of someone's house. Someone with very bad taste indeed.

Perth - Submarine Ovens

Fremantle has a thing about sea-going - prolly on account that it's on the sea - and so its maritime museum comes in three parts; the museum proper, the shipwreck galleries and a dirty-great big submarine.

We're going to start large...

Submarine Ovens. While one shouldn't assume the worst, it's probably up on blocks 'cos some local scally has nicked all the wheels.
The pointy-end. This has all the good stuff; torpedo tubes, sonar and an escape hatch.
The way this works is this: The submarine is basically a tube full of equipment and very smelly sailors. On the sides are ballast tanks that keeps the boat positively buoyant when it wants to be on the surface and neutrally buoyant when it wants to sink. The actual sinking is done by the props and hydroplanes. Got that? Good.
You get in down this hatch. It's a bit cramped because when you have a sealed tube under-water, you don't want big holes in it. There's another one at the other end.
This is the inside of the pointy-end and, yes, those are the torpedo tubes. Although submarines do other things, they mainly exist for these. Their main role seems to be sneaking up on things and making holes in them.
The boat comes in 6 main sections and between each there is a hatch that can be used to seal them off if someone leaves the outside door open or something.
Whenever the sub gets to play with someone else - as long as it is a friendly someone else - they exchance plaques and stick them on the ceiling.
This is where the crew sleeps. There are beds crammed into every available space all over the sub. You would really have to sleep soundly with the other watches walking up and down your bedroom.
The kitchen - small, eh.
Though this looks like a fancy under-water toilet, it is, in fact, the rubbish bin. Unable to just chuck stuff over the side, they have to make sure it will sink once ejected rather than, say, getting washed up on a Chinese beach. Which, of course, they have never been anywhere near ever. Honest.
Top-secrect torpedo-steering equipment. It is, apparently, much better to steer torpedos at unsuspecting ships than pointing them in the general direction and hoping for the best. It's probably all computers these days.
The central hatch up the conning tower.
Where the driver sits - or, in this case, where the dummy sits. As I'm not really up to speed on naval humour, I'm not going to take this any further. Must be weird, though, to drive without a window. I'm not even sure a window would help all that much. Most water would be too murky to see much anyway.
Top-secret communications equipment. It's probably all computers these days.
The engines. These are really used to charge up the batteries and don't drive anything at all. That is one hell of a battery charger.
We never really got to see the batteries - I mean, how interesting are a couple of million doulbe-As anyway? This is where they make sure there is enough juice to keep things going.
Just a walk-way, really, but gives you an idea of all the stuff that has to be bolted in to make everything work.
The officer's accommodation is better that the rest of the crew's - but not by very much.
There are a couple of torpedo tubes at the blunt end, too. I suppose they are a sort of 'and another thing' weapon when you're making a run for it.
And that's the blunt end outside.
And those are torpedos. From what I can gather, the technology on these bad-boys evolves very slowly indeed. Some of these wouldn't look out of place in WWII, apparently.