Robot Claw

Yesterday Sue and I went to the Watagan Mountains to do the Gap Creek walk. This is a fairly short walk down into a gully to see a waterfall. While it’s only about a mile return, it’s a fairly strenuous walk due to the descent and return climb.

The above is a view on the way down. It’s a rainforest and Sue had warned me of leeches. Luckily we saw none! The day was overcast but the temperature pleasant, and it was an easy walk down.

The above shows the view down in the fully, with me scrambling along the rocks at the base of the waterfall. It’s rugged and uneven down there, and the rocks are very mossy. Were it damp, I think it would be a bit treacherous!

That’s the waterfall! It’s lovely, and we were there at the right moment since the water caught the morning light as it fell. We didn’t see any sign of animals or even birds during the all, although we heard scrabbling and birdsong (bell birds, whip birds and lyrebirds).

The climb back up was tiring. It’s about 160 meters, with a mix of winding path and maybe 100+ steps. If it had been a hot sunny day this would have been excruciating, so we benefited from the cooler weather. By the time we got back to the top I was starving!

Good thing a fish and chip shop wasn’t far away 😉

Yesterday Sue and I went to more antique/op shops. A lot of you told me you enjoyed the post about op-shop triggered memories the other day, so here’s some more…

I went through a phase in primary school where I collected football cards. The above were from 1982 so may have even been from a set I collected. At the time I didn’t even watch football (and even now I don’t know what the RFL was/is) but – no doubt started by my mania for Star Wars cards – I was big on footy cards. I recall trying to trade with other kids so they must have been a popular schoolyard thing. The above set of nine cards is not arranged in number or team order, but they’re framed so must have been important to someone. I’m sure they’re not worth anything, so the shop owner is dreaming putting $75 on them.

These are money boxes featuring the mascot character of St George Bank. Bank money boxes were popular when we were kids, and the idea was you’d fill them and take them to the bank to have the contents deposited into an account. I don’t remember ever actually having a St George account (my first and only Australian bank account was at Newcastle Permanent) but I do remember using very similar money boxes as a kid, and cutting into them with scissors long before they were filled. The ones in this photo are quite new, since the logo at the bottom was only created in 2011.

We had a lot of Playmobil when we were kids, and while we didn’t own the above set ($350 at the antique shop) I believe we had some like it. We always used to call it ‘Pocket People’ which is surefire way to tell we had the Australia versions, since the local licensee (Toltoys) rebranded them here using that name. I still think Playmobil is a cool toy, and wish they’d one day get a Star Wars license!

Speaking of Star Wars, I saw the above cup last year when I was here, only now the store has a second copy in equally poor condition. It brings back many memories since we owned a few of these back in 1983 when the film came out. I believe these were obtained at cinemas if you bought a coke when you saw the film. If this had been in better condition I would have certainly purchased it, even at the $10 asking price.

I’ve mentioned Smurfs before on the blog, and the above box of them ($160 for the lot) is a window right back to 1980. They were sold in Australia at BP service stations, and I believe you could only buy them if you also bought petrol. They were a popular toy and BP stations were inundated with people when new waves were released, and I’m sure our ever-patient dad went out of his way to only buy BP petrol during those days. We had quite a few Smurfs and treasured them as everyone did during the fad, but I have absolutely no memory of what happened to them in the years afterwards.

Lest you think antique stores are magical places full of childhood memories for me, it’s worth mentioning that the vast majority of the contents are almost literally trash, and I ignored mountains of kitchenware, clothes, DVDs and children’s toys as I photographed the occasional curio. My foremost target is always a box like shown above, which are unfortunately very rare these days. Happily I found a few good examples yesterday, and maybe you may even receive one in the mail one day 🙂

Before I end, there’s one more op-shop related post coming. I actually purchased something from one of these shops that will receive a post of its own. Look for it before I leave Oz…

Went shopping with mum yesterday. Not much of note happened, we just had fun at the mall.

There’s a bookstore there (Kotara) that has a display of used books and one entire bookcase and two adjacent shelves were entirely filled with Star Trek paperbacks. I bought the two most insane classic trek ones I could find and as I was cashing out the girl told me the remaining stock was about half what they originally had donated and that one customer had bought 110 in one transaction. If you want an instant collection, head over with a few large boxes 🙂

The shops are the same as ever here, but food certainly seems more expensive. Much like the USA there is a ‘cost of living crisis’ driven by inflation but certain aspects seem worse than the USA (the economy of which has been largely sheltered). Lollies and snacks in particular seem notably pricier than in recent years, and believe me I should know!

On the way home I did a simple taste test between McDonald’s and Burger King Hungry Jacks frozen cokes. They’re each $1 and they taste more or less identical and are thus virtually interchangeable except for one key point: the straws. Both are paper, but the Hungry Jack’s straw gets soggy quickly and doesn’t even last the duration of the drink! This is reason enough to favour Macca’s if you’re after a delicious frozen beverage.

I always do craft here when I visit. Postcard art, jigsaw puzzles and on this trip one of those Japanese 3D papercraft dioramas, as you can see above.

This post was a little late due to exhaustion. I’ve been going nonstop for two weeks now. I think perhaps I need to have a restful few days before the second half of this vacation…

Sue and I went antiquing yesterday, which meant almost buying Bernard stuff like this:

Jokes aside, one of the reason I enjoy visiting antique/op shops is the occasional bouts of nostalgia they trigger.

Back in the 1980s there was a calligraphy fad sweeping Australia, and we used to own the above kit (or one very much like it). I remember dad used to do it quite a bit, and we even still have examples of his work in our family Bible. I’m sure childhood me scrawled some nonsense in flowery script somewhere, but today I look back at it with the question “Why?” Of the countless fads back in those days, how did calligraphy become one?

Going somewhere and seeing a bowl full of promotional matchbooks was like winning the lottery. Not only were they free, they were also easily secreted on one’s person and could be used to start fires! For a young teenage boy, this was a dream item. Naturally I always took one (or several) when I saw them offered – often in clubs or hotels – and I even had a meagre collection of favourites I liked enough to never light. Usually this was due to the colour of the match head (bright orange or green were exotic!) but sometimes just because the book had a fancy cover. I still regret the ‘big burn off’ sometime in late 198X when I lit them all at the same time in a short but spectacular mini inferno.

Everyone had a coke yo-yo. I even had a Fanta one! I mused about this yesterday, and Sue reminded me that ‘they’ came to our school selling them. This raises so many questions: why were obvious advertising items sold directly to children and how the hell did the company get permission to come to the school? We didn’t care since we were so happy with our yo-yos as we spun and dangled them like maniacs day after day for at least a week! I have such fond memories of those yo-yo days, and if the above was $5 instead of $75, I would have bought it.

The above small sticker was my favourite item I saw in the antique warehouse yesterday. Almost 30 years old, it was presumably given to workers in a now closed (I think) mine. The photo barely does justice to how flashy and reflective the prism effect is. Of course the price is absurd, and at $5 or less this would have already been attached to a postcard winging its way home 🙂

I’m going to make a prediction here you can hold me to: VHS tapes are never coming back! Of course I know records have – and indeed the used stores are now full of them – but the technology behind VHS is completely obsolete and no-one is ever going to mass produce the players any more. So the apparent increase in the number of cassettes I see in used shops must surely be just for collectors? Who’s going to buy the above? (And yes, I know I should have since it would have made a fine Christmas gift for Bernard.)

Speaking of which, we have this fine tome. Now I’m a man that has paid over $150 for a used book – and even over $50 for a 1980s magazine in Japanese I can’t even read! – but I speculate the list of people on Earth who would be interested in buying the above would be incredibly short. I wonder if there’s a wave ski book collector out there that dreams of finding this book like I do one of Jun Suemi’s Wizardry artbooks?

I enjoy the antique shops, and there’s a few others I’ll visit before I leave Newcastle. What will I find?

Afterwards Sue and I went to a club for lunch and to play the pokies. We threw money into this machine with gay abandon, and like mad fools didn’t cash out when we were 50% up. We kept going and going to see the ‘feature’ but when we finally got it (on a $1.25 bet) we won only five cents. The machine was dead to us then and we walked away in disgust. I won’t say how much we lost, but it may have been better spent on a yo-yo 😉