Please find attached images taken by a fellow I met years ago by the name of Ian Cooper. Ian told me he was visiting Canberra from Tasmania. He was drawn from his stroll through Civic by the bellow of a two-stroke diesel coming from the Lake Burley Griffin construction site area. He thus walked in the direction of the sound and soon found the source, a Le Tourneau-Westinghouse C-Pull scraper powered by a two-stroke 8V71N General Motors diesel. The 8V71N is known as ‘The Bird Scarer’. The scraper operator noticed Ian’s interest in the machine and decided to put on a show for him. This is one very brave man. This type of machine has no steering wheel as such. It is pointed into the preferred direction of travel via a toggle switch mounted on the dash fascia panel. The operator hangs on to a horizontally mounted bar on the panel aptly referred to as the ‘panic bar’. From the toggle switch, steering is actuated by a maze of electric contacts and breakers along with pinions and ring gears situated in the hitch. With all that water flying around he was surely tempting fate.
I think you will also find the images of the bridges, old and new interesting. Apparently, the large mobile crane pictured working on Commonwealth Avenue Bridge fell over.
I was born in Canberra in 1960 and have seen a lot of changes. I have been around the world, but Canberra, Narrabundah (Narrahollywood) to be precise, is the best place to live, bar none.
Graeme McKie
Sept 2014
