Amazing Australian Ingenuity

Car tyre blown out in the outback? Doesn't matter, just steal someone's garden hose and wrap around the rim !

Australia has some pretty ingenious people, otherwise they would have never been able to settle this vast country with all its extreme weather and poisonous animals.
Below are some examples of some real Australian ingenuity:

Australia's Amsterdam

From time to time in the Northern Territory they come up with some ingenious ways to boost the local economy. One car racing-mad politician once organized a Cannonball Run (this one saw four people die in the first race and was never held again), other want high paying tourists to be allowed to shoot crocodiles and now ( May 2004) a man by the name of Stuart Highway, who is part of the controversial lobby group Network Against Prohibition, has the idea to make Darwin the Amsterdam of Australia by legalizing drugs. Mr Highway is one of seven candidates running for mayor in the Darwin City Council elections on May 29 and he says that once he gets the job of lord mayor he will accelerate the Network Against Prohibition campaign for the re-legalisation of all drugs that would attract thousands of tourists from all around the globe. Cannabis will be sold from local cafes and other drugs would be available from licensed sellers.

Backless G-strings

Some women don't mind if their G string pop out above their pants, others do, so an ingenious Aussie woman invented the backless version!

Beer can boats

What to do with all those empty beer cans? Build a boat out of them!

Big bounce

Tasmanian inventor and artist Steven Whitmore reckons the days of bungee jumping are over as he's got an idea that still needs a little more research and development but could become the next craze for 21st century thrill-seekers. The concept is a person to be strapped inside a huge plastic ball and then be pushed out of a plane, then it would just bounce around until it came to a stop. He is a bit short on research funds himself so has written to Richard Branson, known for having a few dollars and doing a bit of flying and crashing himself in big balloons. Richard thought it was an interesting idea. He has also invented a huge capsule made of bullet-proof glass where a thrill-seeker can be strapped inside and the capsule is then dropped head first into the ocean.

Copshop

Wollongong police gave a whole new meaning to the word "copshop" ( usually refers to a police station) by setting up a fake pawnshop in september 2003 which they ran for a few months. During this time they gathered mountains of information on all the dubious characters that came in to sell their goods, a good percentage having been obtained illegally. When they decided they had gathered enough info they raided the houses of their customers arresting nearly a hundred dodgy characters.

First flight

Lawrence Hargrave is credited with discovering that a curved wing gives more lift than a flat one and having made the first flight.
On November 12, 1894, he flew his box kite off the cliffs at Stanwell Park in Sydney, a decade before the Wright brothers made their first flight in the US in 1903.

GoConnect

Melbourne company GoConnect has made a deal with Canadian company Naked News to broadcast to mobile phones all around the world, they claim to be the only company in the world that can deliver the video to the Microsoft mobile devices in broadcast quality. Naked News features an all-nude cast who deliver both the serious and lighter side of the news and disrobe during the broadcast. Subscribers pay $15 to watch around 200 minutes of Naked News per month.

Government's internet porn filter cracked

In 2007 the Australian Government spent no less than $84 million on providing an nternet porn filter to every Australian family to keep the kids safe from all the smut on the net.
But guess what? 16 Year olf Melbourne schoolboy Tom Wood managed to crack the filter in 30 minutes!!
His technique even leaves the toolbar intact so parents think that everything is working fine.
After this news had hit the media the Government came up with another filter, which took Tom a bit longer to crack, this time he did it in 40 minutes! He also put a how-to video on Youtube.
To get your filter, download it from netalert.gov.au , they should have made a few improvements to it by now.

Joss

33 year old Melbourne boy Matt Thomas designed the 'Joss' you see above, it received much interest at the Melbourne Motor Show in March 2004 and four people straightaway ordered this $450,000 speed monster. He and his team plan to build 25 a year in Warragul, Victoria, each car takes about 800 man hours to build and Thomas reckons it will be a competitor to Lamborghini and Ferrari when it hits the streets late 2005.

Moving house

Truck moving house down the Stuart Highway, Northern Territory.
Photo by Rob Lapaer of Rainforest Hideaway B&B, Cape Tribulation

Whereas a lot of people in this world live in houses that stay in the same place all the time, Australians tend to, especially in remote areas, live in dwellings of lighter construction that can be sold, moved and bought as the situation demands.

One wheeled trailer

One time when I was working as a tourguide going back and forth between Cairns and Darwin through the Gulf of Carpenteria a wheel broke off the trailer. After some attempts to repair it by some well equipped tradesmen with a welder that magically appeared within minutes it only got us five minutes down the road and the same thing happened again. What to do? We were hours away from the nearest town which had no rescue facilities to speak of anyway and leaving anything behind here means the next person passing will help themselves to it and it will be gone. So I ended up pulling a traffic sign aff a post, cut a bit of steel wire out of a fence, folded the sign a bit and tied it under the axle where the wheel was missing. Then with our half sleigh/half trailer we drove an hour to the nearest homestead on a cattle station where we could leave it in safe hands until repairs could be arranged.

Photo and story by Rob Lapaer of Rainforest Hideaway B&B, Cape Tribulation, N.Qld.

Puppetry of the penis

David Friend is an artist with a difference. In the nineties he drew a long line of curious ladies to the Sportsbar in Cairns, north Queensland, where together with Simon Morley he performed the show 'Puppetry of the Penis'. They were banned from the Cairns Civic Theatre by the Cairns City Council. Some years later they performed again for packed houses at the Convention Centre. On their recent overseas tour, US television network NBC defied protests from religious groups and allowed the original Penis puppeteers to appear on the top rating Tonight Show with Jay Leno. They describe their stage show as the ''ancient Australian art of genital origami''. The pair have entertained crowds around the world by bending their private parts into shapes similar to hamburgers, the Eiffel Tower and the Loch Ness monster.

Roo poo paper

Creative Paper in Burnie, Tasmania, decided early 2005 to start mass producing paper made from kangaroo dung and called on all Tasmanians to drop off any unwanted kangaroo shit at their factory.
Tassie politician Brett Whiteley presented the Danish royal couple ( the Danish Crown Prince and his Tassie wife Mary) with a roo poo paper travel journal gift during their 2005 visit.

Shirt with built-in bottle opener

Photo by tanked.com.au

The twist top was a good invention as it allows you to open your beer anywhere without a bottle opener but girls have soft hands and in todays computerage many men's hands are not as tough as they used to be either so to avoid cuts to your hands Tanked Drinkwear was developed. It is a new fashionable clothing concept designed for the drinking enthusiast, with the added convenience of a built in bottle opener. Now you can open twist top bottles without cutting your hands, chipping your teeth or tearing your shirt. To add extra strength, they have double stitched and embroided around the opener making it more durable and appealing. So whether you are at a BBQ, a party, camping or wherever, it's good to know you won't have to look far to find a bottle opener. For more info and to order one see tanked.com.au

Stomach ulcers caused by bacteria

Aussie scientists Robin Warren and Barry Marshall discovered that stomach ulcers are causes by the bacteria Helicobacter pylori, and not stress and lifestyle like the rest of the world had always believed. This means that patients can now be treated with anti biotics, much to the dismay of pharmaceutical companies that make millions of dollars with existing anti-ulcer drugs. The two ingenious Aussies were rewarded with the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine that included $1.7 million in cash. When the whole sceptical scientific community ridiculed them Barry managed to prove them wrong in a very interesting way; he drank a dose of the Helicobacter pylori bacteria that he had grown in his lab and hip, hip, hooray! shortly after he was diagnosed with stomach ulcers. His wife thought he was nuts when he told her in an ecstatic state the good news that he now had stomach ulcers!

Stubby coolers

Australia is a hot country and Australians always need to have their beer icy cold. Despite drinking their beer pretty quick most the time, they still found that the last bit became too warm so something was needed insulate the precious beer from the surrounding environment. So much to the delight of Aussies the stubby cooler was invented, it is made of either styrofoam or wetsuit material, the latter being the choice of serious drinkers as it easily folds up into your pocket so can be carried anywhere and be ready for action in a split second. Another amazing fact is that many Aussies manage to hang on to their favourite cooler for years and even when waking up in the morning and not being able to remember how they got home, the stubbycooler is always there next to the bed! Nowadays stubby coolers are sold in all tourist places with various prints making them a very practical souvenir.

The 1 cent into nearly $1 million trick

This story began after a customer closed his AGC account and the finance company gave him a one cent cheque, the balance of his account.
The cheque then found its way to a Springvale businessman and next was obtained by thieves who changed the amount payable from one cent to read $952,114.01.
The cheque was then deposited at the Springvale branch of the Bank of Melbourne on June 10, 2003.
Incredibly, the cheque was honoured and the thieves withdrew $867,707 in a series of transactions over a week-long period in June 2003 until a man when a fake VicRoads driver's licence was queried by bank staff and disappeared when bank staff refused to hand over more money.

320 kilometres in reverse

This story was told to me in 1999 by a Pommie working at Wollogorang Roadhouse on the N.T. / Queensland border in the Gulf of Carpenteria;

Some residents of a nearby camp were a bit thirsty so decided that a trip to the nearest bottle shop, the Wollogorang roadhouse, had to be made. The fact that this place was 160 km. away and there was only one car in the camp of which the gearbox was stuck in reverse was no obstacle. Driving this distance in reverse could give you a serious stiff neck but being ingenious bushmen they improvised a solution where they knocked out the windscreen so one person could sit on the bonnet and look over the car and do the steering while another could sit inside in the drivers seat and handle the throttle and gears.

Do you know of any amazing Australian ingenuity? Then contact us!

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