PRECEDE
CAMERON THOMPSON continues his series of Summer Reading pieces.
Sometimes the wacky ideas aren’t as mad as they seem. Probably the most obvious example of a successful wacky idea was the bouncing bomb of Barnes Wallis. His wartime device involved a spinning wheel of TNT that dropped from the bottom of a bomber and bounced its way across the surface of a dam to destroy a large part of German industry.
There aren’t enough examples of wacky success. In 1943, with everything a stake, sure we’ll build your crazy bomb, but can you imagine trying to sell the idea to a government bureaucracy today?
In my book, society is far too timid and while I love our democratic freedom and will always defend it, it tends to produce pollies that are just too chicken to back or build anything that isn’t a rolled-gold certainty.
I’m the product of the 60s and 70s, and in those days kids, in particular, would give anything a go. In Mrs Madsen’s year seven class, the boys would doodle pictures of air battles and motorbikes on their schoolbooks and dream of all sorts of adventures.
Bored with racing gravity-powered soapbox go karts down the middle of Harrow Street, and feeling too mature at 12 for anything without an engine, it was inevitable that we would graduate to building our own motorcycles.
And so began the era of the go-bike. A go-bike is not a motorcycle, but when your only resources are the ones you find scavenging at the rubbish tip, a go-bike is what you will get.
My mates, Peter Richardson, Donald Jones and I were go-bike enthusiasts. Typically, you’d build a go-bike by clamping a motor mower engine to a bike frame, but to use that description would be to over-simplify it.
The challenge is the gearing. Compared to your bicycle, which uses a large drive cog and a smaller driven gear on the back wheel, go-bike gearing is the opposite. You place the motor in the triangular gap below the cross bar, with a small drive sprocket to push a much larger one at the place where you remove and discard the pedals. But a double reduction in gearing is required, so on the same shaft but on the other side of the frame, you need another small cog to power a large one that your dad welded to the back wheel.
All these chains thrashing around was something to behold. No Government or bureaucrat would ever build a go-bike. Rodney McDowall from across the road received some spectacular circular lacerations and bragging rights from his time in the seat. But go-bikes were heaps of fun.
It’s not that we raced the go-bikes. They were far too temperamental for us three to have more than one going at a time. Because they had no clutch and only one gear, top speed was about 35kph. But we would drag them down to the dirt track behind Jonesy’s place. Then, with two pushing and one lucky rider, the engine would kick and A W A Y you’d go.
In year eight, having graduated to Rockhampton Grammar school, I sold my first go-bike to my Agricultural Mechanics teacher, Adrian Evans, for the princely sum of $10. He offered to buy it when I began describing its construction to the class. In distant hindsight, I don’t think he really believed the go-bike existed. I think he thought that by offering the money, he was calling my bluff.
At the time, it didn’t occur to me.
So proud I was, and so empowered by this endorsement from authority, that I delivered it in person, riding it up Archer Street and across the school oval at lunch time.
Today I wonder what Mr Evans did with it.
Anyway, the go-bike is an obvious example of a wacky success. When the dump closed and the council shut it off to let the earth and the underground refuse slowly compact, they saw it as a long term plan for a park. We saw it as a place to drive at high speed on an old Vespa, which we cadged from under someone’s house.
So, with this background, you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that all my life, I have been attracted to alternative ideas. Novel solutions can be the best ones, no matter how much people fear to be caught espousing or implementing them.
In Germany, for example, the town of Wuppertal has an unusual inverted monorail, the Wuppertal Schwebebahn. The Schwebebahn is something of a laughing stock in the world of light rail transport, but its virtue is that it moves people in big numbers through the space immediately above congested roadways and along routes (canals for example) that your average tram or bus can’t use. This it has been doing reliably since 1901, apart from in 1950, when a circus elephant, herded aboard for a publicity stunt, fell from the Schwebebahn into the river Wupper. The elephant survived, but two journalists were injured.
So, politicians, here are two examples of wacky thinking for you to consider:
1: The big plastic bag.
First espoused by the now defunct think tank, the Brisbane Institute, this idea is the permanent solution to providing big quantities of fresh drinking water for the populations of Brisbane and Sydney. It is an idea that makes spectacular good use of the EAC – the permanent southbound ocean current off the east coast of Australia that featured in that well known scientific documentary: Disney’s Finding Nemo.
Here’s how it goes – First you build a giant plastic bag of a gigalitre (a billion litres) or more in capacity. You fill it with water up at the Daintree, the Burdekin or another FNQ river, where the vast bulk of Australian water flows unused into the sea. Second, because of the specific gravity of fresh water, the bag floats. Third, you wait a week while the EAC does its part and…Fourth, you unload the water at the disused Gold Coast desalination plant, or at a similar uptake point in Sydney. Fifth: Cheers! And repeat.
It is a simple, theoretically certain and very cheap source of the best water for the east coast, but can you imagine being the one to advocate it?
2: Airborne search and rescue.
Searches for lost people, vehicles and vessels; searches for criminals and fugitives- as my dad would say: “These things are hellishingly expensive.”
We pay big bucks for searches every year. Lives are lost when rescue missions fail. Police manhunts are similarly expensive and sometimes similarly unsuccessful.
Lately, we’ve been hearing about police using mobile phone data to improve their strike rate. So when a plane goes missing, they can cross reference where the occupants’ phones were last in service and fly to search from that point.
That sounds very clever doesn’t it? Rescue choppers cost a bomb and their operators make a killing every time we send them out, so having a short cut like this sounds very impressive.
Except, when they do this, they are still ignoring the obvious merits of our next wacky idea.
And that is to locate a mobile phone tower’s receiving equipment aboard the damn helicopter.
Telecommunications experts tell us it is easily done.
With this gear and with receiving aerials front and back, any chopper coming into contact with a phone signal – flying over it in a forest, say, or flying within 5km of a castaway with a phone in a life raft on the surface of the ocean wouldn’t be troubled by the fact that the nearest phone tower was 100km away. The two separate aerials on the chopper would allow triangulation to direct the pilot right to the spot.
How much would that save? Time in the air would plummet. Search time would plummet and so would the search bills. More lost people would be found.
And Inspector Plod could get into the act. Today, criminals fleeing the scene of their misdeeds don’t need to throw their phones in the nearest rubbish bin. They can hoof it for a block or two then use their phones to call their wheelman or, more likely, call an Uber.
But not so in the future world of Wacky Inspector Plod, where his eye in the sky would be able to pick up the number, then follow the fugitives at a distance. Any phone linked to a crime could be found anywhere by sending the chopper up into the sky while our heroic inspector has a nice cup of tea.
What a silly world it is, where Elon Musk can follow everything you do, but when you’re lost, or thirsty, or thieves come calling, you have to rely on technology, protections and thinking that were last considered innovative fifty years ago.
Our problem is that too often society is risk-averse. It is ill-equipped to experiment with new ideas or to realise the true potential of old ones.
And the increasingly hysterical criticisms we see every day on social media aren’t improving things.
The next time you see someone having a go, give them points for bravery. They may not be right, but rewards don’t come without risk. And if we continue to delay every venture until it is a certain success, we will fall far behind.
* Cameron Thompson is an Editorial Coordinator for the Today Group, based in Ipswich, Queensland. He has worked as a journalist since 1981, in Gladstone, Rockhampton, Mackay, Brisbane, Melbourne, Longreach and Darwin. In politics, he was the Federal MP for Blair for nine years but served also as a speechwriter and policy adviser to the Queensland Treasurer and as a policy writer and media adviser in portfolios as diverse as Health, Education, the Arts and Attorney General in Queensland and the Northern Territory.
