OT: Australia Day
 

My non-Australian friends are probably not aware that today is Australia Day, a national public holiday. I am very proud of my country and I say to all my Aussie friends happy Australia Day and I hope you all get well and truely plastered, cook up some steaks and snags on the barbie and have a great day.

Is it analogous to Independence Day in the US?

Happy Australia Day.

(as a Brit, I will bite back any colonial banter :) )

Yes, same sort of thing. January 26 1788 was the date that Captain Arthur Phillip, commander of the First Fleet of eleven convict ships from Great Britain and the first governor of New South Wales, arrived at Sydney Cove.

Australia wasn't one nation until 1901. Prior to that it had been a collection of British colonies with limited self rule. The individual colonies became the states of Australia after federation. The first colonies, at Sydney Cove and Van Diemen's Land (now the island-state of Tasmania) were settled using convict labour but my state of Western Australia and our neighbour South Australia were founded by free settlers a few decades later. The Western Australian and South Australian colonies were established by Britain mainly to prevent the French from taking the western half of the continent for themselves.

Paul; that makes it more like Columbus Day vice Independance Day. There is a difference, now send us your women....only the hot ones mind you!

I see what you mean. But Columbus Day celebrates the discovery of the Americas by Christpher Columbus. We don't really have a day of celebration to mark when the Dutch first discovered Australia in 1606, or British Captain James Cook's mapping of (and claiming for Britain of) the east coast of Australia in 1770. Does the USA have a public holiday marking the founding of its first European colony? That would be analagous to Australia Day for us.

hohhoho
 

"French Australia"

what a tingeling thought .
( Yes , I like contrafactual history musings)

Good thing though , or Australia would probably have had loads of wars etc like the other continents that were colonized by the major powers..

Question : do you have oilwells down under ? On land I mean .

Could say Western Australia or any other part of Australia stay organized and survive the events of T2K ?

Or wopuld it be like the excellent documentary about life in Australia:
Mad Max I-III ?

Have a good celebration all Aussies and auxilliary aussies too.

Ah, better make that 1788 Targan, otherwise we had the bicentenial a decade too late!

;)

I believe there are some oil reserves on land, however I can't think of any actual wells in use. We do have a number of offshore platforms, mainly up off the Western Australian coast between us and Timor.

We also have the bulk of the worlds Uranium.....

Oops. Typo :o

Australia is a major exporter of coal, natural gas and grains so we have energy reserves we could use instead of petroleum products. We produce vastly more wheat than we consume domestically so we could produce heaps of alcohol if need be. Also it is a relatively simple procedure to convert cars to run on natural gas. We do use large amounts of artificial fertiliser so I suppose its lack would be a problem. I imagine that most domestic oil production in Australia during and after the Twilight War would be reserved for military use.

Ummmm second place for the Uranium...

Its more like the July 1'st Holiday in Canada when it proclaimed a country...

(And yes we have oil and lots of other minerals that our southern aggressive neighbor would love to steal... )

he
 

better get some wmd`s before they come and grab everything

I hear they envy your bacon ..

Canada might produce more, but I think Australia's reserves are greater, around double the next best contender - Kazakhstan. Canada is a poor 5th on the list behind Russia and South Africa.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_reserves
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf48.html

Australia is also the most efficient producer of sugar cane, a resource even more readily convertable to alcohol production than grain.

James Cook was a Lieutenant when he charted the east coast of Australia in 1770. Upon his return to Britain he was promoted to Commander and later embarked on a second voyage. Upon completion of the second voyage he was promoted to Captain.
While the Dutch sighted Australia decades before the British (as early as 1606), there is also circumstantial evidence to suggest the Portuguese sighted the continent in the 1500s. They were trading in Timor which lies less than 700km NW of Australia and actively patrolling the region to prevent Spanish ships trading in the area. Even the Spanish were lured 'down under' with the promises of discovering some 'unknown southern land' and were the first Europeans to discover Vanuatu.

As for uranium, Cdnwolf is quite right, Canada is the largest producer and exporter of uranium in the 2000s, although Kazakhstan is likely to claim the title by 2010. However Australia does have the largest currently known uranium deposits with 24% of the world's uranium reserves.

There is some oil & gas production on mainland Australia, mostly in the Cooper Basin. The Basin stretches between South Australia and Queensland but the amount available is minor in comparison to offshore sites. However it has also been found to be a potential source of geothermal energy with oil drilling having been responsible for the discovery of this information.
South Australia is sparsely populated and the biggest oil production facility is located in Moomba in the more desolate part of that state. Control would be difficult simply because all food, water and spares would have to be trucked in to the site and although a sealed landing strip is available, whose going to have the avgas to fly supplies in/out of the town?
The temperature sits around 38C in summer and 20C in winter and there is minimal rainfall during the year. While oil and gas pipelines do transport those products to cities such as Sydney, patrolling over 1000km of pipeline would also provide massive challenges in the T2k setting.

You're talking about production. I think Leg was talking about reserves (as in "we have" rather than "we produce"). Estimates vary but some figures suggest that Australia may have greater exploitable uranium reserves than anywhere else.

Edit: Just read Leg and SSC's posts where they say what I just said.

That would be January 1 for us (Australia became an independent nation on January 1st 1901). Which makes it a bit difficult for us to have a special public holiday to mark the aniversary as January 1 is already a public holiday for obvious reasons.

Then, have a happy Australian day:). And yes totally ignored this. Thanks for the short explanation it was very interesting.

Heh heh. Yes, you're absolutely right. Still, although Lieutenant was his Royal Navy rank, as the master of his vessel it is technically permissible to refer to him as the ship's captain *desperate pedantic backpeddle on my part* :D

No no. Absolutely right. Can't you also refer to him as the commander or is it equally confusing?

Bah, Columbus Day! He's just about the last one who "discovered" America -- and started the genocide that characterized the rest of the conquest of America! F*** Columbus!

One of the curses of having a History degree; you learn what really happened.

I'll have to check the satellite photos, and see if Australia glows in the dark.

well - he was the first to publicize ?
 

who were the first outsiders then ?
Irish monks ?

The Norse ?

Asians ?

Yes to all of the above, and more.

According to God... I think Murdoch was there first.

Cook (deliberately omitting rank here) discovered the Australian east coast approximately 11 years before the first fleet of convicts and guards made landfall on the 26th of January 1788. This is the date the first permanent European residents arrived and set up camp in Sydney Cove (not all that far from where the Opera house and habour bridge stand now).

Of course the first humans to arrive were many millenia earlier - something like 40,000 years ago, with evidence suggesting as much as 100,000 years or more. They were little more than nomadic tribesmen for the most part with little we could say resembling a "modern" civilisation and in fact these natives had few to no rights up until mid 20th century.

Congadulations and all that, but wth is a snag? I haven't seen that on the local Outback menu.:D

AND we are still waiting for the good looking Aussie woman to come and visit.

The same thing that the British call a 'banger'.
In a more refined society, they'd call it a sausage but here in Awwstralya, our slang is as rough as our outback roads.

Happy Australia day to all my T2K-lovin' Aussie mates.

Yes, but he was killed with the most powerful artifact ever -- Maxwell's Silver Hammer!

OK, I just realized that made sense to no one but me. Back as a teenager in Hawaii, one of us had a character named Murdoch, and the DM had come up with stats for Maxwell's Silver Hammer (something in a song)...OK, never mind, it still doesn't make a lot of sense.