John Hampshire....reports in
Well, I think it's time for a bit of an update as I actually have some reasonably interesting stuff to report ...
Just had a great three days off work, leading into a weekend (first break in two years aside from week between Christmas-New Year), so a good time to relax. I used it to help transfer Ted Howes' 1968 Fender Rhodes electric piano -- as used by all the stars of the time -- down to Pete Reid's place in Pambula, on the far south coast of NSW.
Ted left it with me when he cleared out his storage unit a while ago, following his move to live in Bangkok, but Laura [for CGS mob -- my 14yo daughter] didn't want to pick up on the keyboards again so it wasn't being used.
Pete has a great group of mates who play music together, record and do gigs now and then, called the Pambula Beach Garage Band (
http://thepbgbblog.blogspot.com/
) -- they have a lot of fun (still got somethin' to say, even when they're old and grey:) and were eager to adopt such an iconic instrument. Peter came up in his Ford Falcon ute (of similar vintage to the Rhodes, appropriately), stayed overnight, then we cruised on down to Pambula via the freeway routes through Canberra and Cooma, crossing the Great Divide via Brown Mountain (great corned beef and leek pie by the open fire in Cooma!).
The Rhodes was unloaded into The Shed, the venue for PBGB practice sessions, Pete got busy with a rag and a can of black spray paint and within a very short time the Rhodes was looking very smick and had been renamed Frhodo.
I stayed three nights, went to a Don Burrows gig on Thursday night (Don is a legend jazz man who plays flute, sax and clarinet at 83 as if he were 30 years younger).
Flew back from Merimbula on Saturday morning, enjoyed the rest of the weekend with Sheila and Laura, then back to work.
On Tuesday I found out that as a result of the illness of a colleague, I was expected to attend the keynote function for CPA Australia -- the accountancy professional body for which we produce our magazine, INTHEBLACK -- marking this year's annual congress. Special guest: Neil Armstrong.
Yep, my new best mate is the first man on the moon -- and, as with Mr Burrows, is a stunning advertisement for the "life begins at 80" brigade. As part of the team that produces the mag for CPA Australia's 134,000 members around the world, I was invited up to the VIP room where we lucky few of the 800 guests got to shake Neil's hand and have a chat. He and I spoke briefly about whether there would ever be human boots on the ground of any other moon or planet in the solar system, or whether all future exploration would be by automated probes: Neil was adamant that it would happen.
Later he entranced the crowd with an outstanding discourse that was erudite, cogent and humble. We were then treated to a stunning exclusive: high-res footage from the modern Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that was matched to the grainy footage of Apollo 11's original descent, shown in split screen with the LRO vision overlaid with shading to match the view through the tiny Apollo 11 porthole -- brilliant stuff! It closed with a view of the original lunar lander module resting on the moon's surface.
Being the gentleman he is, Neil was copious in his thanks for the Australians who had helped with the mission, specifically those who manned the various radio telescopes that helped in the mission, and specifically the Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek stations that transmitted those first TV images from the moon to the US and around the world.
Interesting side note: in 1967, as I was working odd jobs to save for going overseas the following year, [note for CGS mob: this was after McKeon invited me to leave CGS at the end of first term, for not wearing school uniform to a weekend sports day, and I was working while attending night school to complete the HSC] I worked with a cleaning team that was taken to Honeysuckle Creek in the evenings. No projects were under way, but I was fascinated by the control room with its flickering computer number counters and the systems involved in aiming the vast (to me, anyway!) dish clearly visible through the glass that covered one wall. Recessed to half its depth in the benchtop was a heavy plastic sphere, somewhat larger than a tennis ball, that to me was clearly the device for moving the dish around ... and so it proved when I gave the sphere a couple of quick spins! So, perhaps mindlessly disrupting that night's tracking pattern, I played with a couple of hundred tonnes of radio telescope dish that would later be crucial to the vision received from Apollo 11.
(BTW, watched some Jeff Beck (live at Ronnie Scott's) on DVD at Pete's place and came across the extraordinary Sydney bassist Tal Wilkenfeld, who's about 24 now but looks about 16 in this vid -- and is just sensational on the bass. What a pair!)
Best to all,
J.
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