Received this nice tray of mixed fudges at work on Friday. About 1.2kg in all - fresh from the manufacturer. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Geena was left home alone all day yesterday while we were in Newcastle. She seems to have the shits with us today ;-)

Linda and I are taking the Volkswagen Golf GT Sport 1.4TSI DSG for a test run. Weeeeeeeeeeee! What a fun little car to drive.

Even made short work of a newish Holden Commodore SV6 which tried to pull away from us at the lights.

What a little beast! I think we've found our new wheels.

This engine is a delight to command.

Seems our suburb, Zetland, is where the "first aerial flight in Australasia by a motor-propelled machine" too place. Sure it was only for five seconds, but still....

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Source: Sydney Morning Herald
Date: 10 May 2008
Author: Max Prisk

When Ehrich Weiss - aka Harry Houdini - left Australia in 1910 he had awed audiences with his escape acts, including surviving a dunking in Melbourne's Yarra River. But his grandest feat - and the one he had sacrificed the down-time of the long sea voyages for - was to go into the record books as the first man to fly a powered aircraft in Australia.

On Friday, March 18, 1910, with a band of reputable citizens including a couple of journalists, he motored out to Diggers Rest, 30 kilometres from Melbourne, fiddled and tested and consulted his mechanic, and then trundled off in his Voisin biplane.

As a showman Houdini knew the value of testimonials, so 15 spectators signed a declaration on what they had seen. Stopwatches were used - longest flight was 3 minutes, greatest altitude 100 feet (30 metres) - there were photographs, and he had it filmed.

"She's like a swan. She's a dandy. I can fly now," Houdini declared in the Herald's report next day. By the time he arrived in Sydney and made the flight at Rosehill shown in today's photograph, he seemed to have pulled off his mission. Even the Herald said he had "fully established his claim to be the first successful aviator in Australia".

Pity poor Fred Custance and Colin Defries. On the day of the Houdini flight at Diggers Rest, the Herald carried a report of a flight made by Custance in a Bleriot monoplane at Bolivar, outside Adelaide, the day before, March 17. He was up for five minutes and 25 seconds, said the report, flying at between 12 and 15 feet, and Custance reported the experience "exhilarating but not disconcerting". But it was about dawn, to catch the still air, and there were no witnesses with stopwatches and cameras, just a few locals who had wandered over to see what was up.

Colin Defries and his Sydney flight - on Thursday, December 9, the year before - is not so easy to dismiss. It was watched by a paying crowd and two journalists, one of them from The Sydney Morning Herald.

Defries, piloting a Wilbur Wright biplane, was the main attraction at a "Flying Fortnight" at the now gone Victoria Park Racecourse at Zetland in inner Sydney. After six days of motor-revving and flightless circuits of the track he finally took to the air. "As he left the ground there was an involuntary cry from about 150 spectators, 'He's up!' and he was up," wrote the Herald reporter. "As the machine rushed forward it kept in the air, and rose quickly from 3 foot to fully 15ft or 20ft, and then tapered down again to earth, after covering about 115 yards [103.5 metres]." There it was in black and white, "the first aerial flight in Australasia by a motor-propelled machine". Duration of the flight: 5 seconds.

Defries, who had previously been a racing car driver in Britain, has a small but dedicated band of supporters, mostly in NSW, and an airworthy replica of his Wright biplane has been on display at air shows. Between now and next year his supporters will decide if they will celebrate the centenary of his flight by making Houdini disappear from the record books.

A note on the picture: the Herald's George Bell was probably the photographer. He had taken aerial shots over Sydney from a balloon some years before and flew in a Bristol biplane piloted by a 21-year-old Englishman, Leslie McDonald, at Ascot Racecourse - now part of Mascot Airport - on May 8, 1911.

It was cold and misty, but Bell got his photographs, although there was a little tension during landing as a fence loomed. "I heard the spectators below laughing at something, and they told me afterwards it was because they saw me trying to hold the aeroplane back."

Mmmm... two new flavours of chocolate in Cadbury's Desserts range. So tempted.

$3.50 for 500ml of coloured "vitamin water".

(Coles @ Surry Hills)

....it might have an "error in throat".

(Surry Hills Shopping Village)