Hi all,

The internet is a wonderful tool, but I feel that we have come to a point in our engineering progress where we need a place of final training.

Our TAFE Colleges and Universities are churning out graduates at a feroucious pace. But the demand is great, and there never seem to be enough. Some of the graduates might well come from Disneyland. They know so little about the real world. They can point to button, snap and drag it into shape. But what they don't appreciante is that every line on their hardcopy output is an instruction to someone trying to make it work on site.

I have had graduate engineers ask me

Q - "What are those circles on the conveyor schematic?"

A - "Well now, there's the head pulley, the tail pulley, and the bend pulleys making up a Gravity-Take-Up set."

I've had engineers come to me with a problem and ask

Q - "Where is the software which will give us the answers?"

Fifty years ago, the Minister for Planning and Infrastrucutre appointed Professor Alan Stephenson to prepare a strategic 50-year plan for Perth. Where is the 50-year plan for the development of the rest of our 2.5 mil sq.km?

We have now come to the boundary limits of that 50-year plan. We don't have spare land for houses. We don't have enough water. Our energy supplies are having trouble meeting the demands. Our rapid transit system is inadequate even for current public access requirements. Birds are falling out of the sky dead, and our children have high lead concentrations in their veins.

Desperate times demand desperate measures. The only city more than 150 km from the coast was developped by the mining industry - not planned by wise government policy. The water supply for that settlement on the edge of the No-Tree Plane was an engineering marvel of its time. The Project Engineer who supervised the design and construction was under so much pressure from government officials and media that he committed suicide [he had forgotten to allow for the amount of water needed to swell the joints of his wooden beer-barrel pipe-line]. The water arrived a few hours later, and has been flowing ever since.

Now we want to take a town the size of Kalgoorlie and Bunbury combined, and squeeze it in on the coast somewhere between Perth and Mandurah. For power supply we are instructed to design and build depleted uranium generators (DU), and dump the 65,000 tons of highly radio-active waste in the back yard of our traditional owners. We want to turn Cockburn Sound into a Dead Sea with effluent from our desalination plants [if that is not enough we can always engineer more from the Ord River thousands of kilometers away].

Are our lads up to it?

I spoke to the lead lecturer at TAFE.

A - "We don't have sufficient staff to process more warm bodies. We are already stretched to the limit."

Q - "How do your lads bridge the gap between this boot-camp training, and checked, signed-off, ready for construction drawings?"

A - "No problem. The Mining Houses and Consulting Engineers take it from there with their cadet training schemes."

I did not bother to explain that this was the very topic I had come to talk to him about. I have been a product of the training programmes under

1 - Department of Works

2 - Crooks, Michel, Peacock & Stewart

3 - Kaiser Engineers

4 - Bechtel Corporation

5 - Western Mining

6 - BHP

7 - Alcoa

8 - Anglo American Corporation

9 - Iluka Resources

A - "Here mate. We have found four graduate engineers and a team of CAD draughtsmen still doing night classes at TAFE. We want you to document a Bankable Feasibility Study for a $65 mil mining plant in the Congo, and roll-on to issue checked, signed-off, ready-for-construction drawings 6 months later. If there is a bugger up the Mines Department will come down on you like a ton of bricks, and the Insurace Company will sue you, your wife and your children, for professional liability."

"How does $100 k sound to you?"

I feel there is a need for a Place of Final Training for graduate engineers and draughtsmen somewhere in the Eastern Pilbra, in a paddock near the Rudall River National Park. A preliminary Feasibility Study could be done for about $100 k AUD. Yet when I try to motivate such a study, all the paths are blocked. In Australia, you only have to mention the words not-for-gain, and aboriginal, and all the doors are slammed shut (Ozzies prefer to call out the National Guard to deal with such emergency issues).

We could build a nice little community in the Little Sandy Desert. We could declare it a customs-free port, and use it as a mining administration and warehousing centre, with Olympic swimming pool, international airport, tourism icons and theme park [Tourists spent $4.8 bil in WA last year]. And we could house our transit immigrant candidates there. If they be found outside the paddock they could be arrested for trespassing and deported.

Another Johannesburg by the sea? Dream on mate.

Als van die beste - Sgt John.Rz

www.latviantourists.com.au ■