Who is this man and what are the objects piled beside him? Can he be a gambler, perhaps at Las Vegas, and these his lucky chips? Read on and all will be revealed.
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Historian Jim Gibbney records that in Canberra during World War II (when the city was blessed with 18 air raid sirens) "Here and there on the fringes of the city were special wartime activities suspected by few."
Here in our picture we see someone going about the secret, special Canberra wartime activity of manufacturing lenses for binoculars, gun sights and bomb sights for aircraft. He's going about this vital work up on Mt Stromlo.
We mention his wartime work and show this picture now because the brand new Stromlo Heritage Trail just opened on the mountaintop celebrates, as well as astronomy, the "Other Lives Of Stromlo." One of the observatory site's other lives came to pass during the war when the Commonwealth Solar Laboratory closed down its research activities entirely (because of pressing problems down here on our troubled planet that made ogling the firmament a low priority). The Observatory converted its workshop into an optical munitions factory to make the aforementioned urgently-needed lenses.
It was not only that the existing workshop had some of the right tools but also that it had the skilled personnel. Gibbney says, that the Observatory "had absorbed a number of refugee German Jews as optical technicians in the late 1930s".
In wartime (and as today, which is why so many NIMBYs come to live here) Canberra was insulated against the horrors of the real world. And so even though the city had 18 air-raid sirens they were only twice sounded in genuine alarm (on February 22 and March 8, 1943) and even then only in response to distant warnings from the coast.
Another special, sem-secret Canberra wartime activity reported by Gibbney was the CSIRO's growing of plantations of opium poppies with which to make hard-to-procure morphine. There was a plantation on Black Mountain and its seeds, flung everywhere by Canberra breezes, led to opium poppies popping up after the war in suburban gardens.
Andrew Leigh MP and the boat people
Dr Andrew Leigh, the Labor member for Fraser, though disappointingly silent on the plights of today's boat people (and their shameful off-shore treatment his party endorses) has some interesting ideas about the boat people of the 18th century.
In his new book The Economics Of Just About Everything (launched on Tuesday) he argues that just about everything that happens can be illuminated by shining the light of "economic thinking" on it.
"Applying economic thinking can literally mean the difference between life and death," he tantalises, going on to relate how the British government having quite successfuly managed its First Fleet outsourced the Second Fleet to private enterprise.
It paid a company 6d per convict and so, in search of as many sixpences as possible and the lowest possible costs, the contractors crammed 1026 convicts into three ships crewed by useless but cheap scum recruited in low taverns. About a third of the human cargo died on the voyage from cruelty, starvation and scurvy and lots of those who arrived alive were as good as dead.
Learning from this, Leigh relates, the British government changed the payment mechanism for the Third Fleet. It gave the contractors the "incentive" that they would be paid on results, "with around 20 per cent of the payment depending on the convict arriving in good health".
"On this voyage, there was less overcrowding and considerably better treatment of the convicts. The death rate was one in 11. The improvement between the Second Fleet and Third Fleet shows the different tradeoffs that the shipping company chose to make. Once they had a financial incentive to get convicts to Australia alive, they chose a different tradeoff: fewer convicts per ship, more rations per convict, and better treatment on board."
It's an exciting thought, isn't it, that with some artful economic thinking even the most greedy, most Dalek-hearted capitalists might be nudged into doing less harm.
Trevor Dickinson's bus-stop masterpiece
It took Newcastle-based artist Trevor Dickinson (much praised in this column) to alert Canberrans to so much that's lovably quirky and exquisitely Canberran about everyday Canberra.
Now Lauren Ingram, a designated contributor to the Canberra-praising Human Brochure website, reveals that one of Dickinson's shy masterpieces, his ACTION bus shelter, has been adopted by an especially trendy Braddon coffee shop as a decoration for its takeaway coffee containers.
"The awesome [proprietors] gave me my own Canberra cup!" she rejoices.
Are these bus shelters, thanks in large part to artist Dickinson, set to become icons of the true Canberra, the way London's crimson postage pillar boxes are icons of that city? When the existing bus shelters are de-commissioned will the ACT government auction some of them, giving an opportunity to those of us who love this city enough to want one as a distinctively Canberran cubby house for our gardens?