Kurt Johannsen
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Kurt Johannsen
Kurt Gerhardt Johannsen (11 January 1915 – 23 January 2002) was an Australian bush mechanic who developed the world's first commercial road train. He was also an aviator, fencing contractor, inventor, labourer, mailman and miner and known a "true son of the Red Centre", referring to the southern desert region of the Northern Territory in Australia. Early life Johannsen was born at Deep Well Station, 80 km south of Alice Springs, to Gerhardt and Ottilie Johannsen. Gerhardt had emigrated from Denmark and Ottilie was of German descent and the family often experienced discrimination throughout Kurt's childhood, the period in between the two World Wars, and Gerhardt was often referred to as "The German" or "The Hun". In 1922, when Johannsen was 7, the family moved to Hermannsburg Mission Station where Gerhardt worked as the station manager; this was following the sudden death of Pastor Carl Strehlow in October 1922. The family remained there until 1924 before returning ...
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Diamond T 980, National Road Transport Hall Of Fame, 2015 (02)
Diamond is a solid form of the element carbon with its atoms arranged in a crystal structure called diamond cubic. Another solid form of carbon known as graphite is the chemically stable form of carbon at room temperature and pressure, but diamond is metastable and converts to it at a negligible rate under those conditions. Diamond has the highest hardness and thermal conductivity of any natural material, properties that are used in major industrial applications such as cutting and polishing tools. They are also the reason that diamond anvil cells can subject materials to pressures found deep in the Earth. Because the arrangement of atoms in diamond is extremely rigid, few types of impurity can contaminate it (two exceptions are boron and nitrogen). Small numbers of defects or impurities (about one per million of lattice atoms) color diamond blue (boron), yellow (nitrogen), brown (defects), green (radiation exposure), purple, pink, orange, or red. Diamond also has a very ...
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Bush Mechanic
A bush mechanic (Australian slang) is somebody who out of necessity and with immediate available materials, is able to solve practical problems using sometimes untraditional and inventive techniques. Generally an inventive technique is required due to the lack of proper resources or the other constraints in solving the problem using traditional means (for example, using a tree branch to fix a broken axle). Bush mechanics may also be known as "bushies". The bush mechanic promotes competent behaviour and has a strong emphasis on practical knowledge and wisdom instead of technical skills. The 2001 Australian television show ''Bush Mechanics'' displayed bush mechanic skills used by a group of Indigenous men from Warlpiri Country as they travelled through the rugged central region of Australia. See also *Culture of Australia * Shadetree mechanic *''Bush Mechanics'', the Australian television documentary series (2001) *''MacGyver Angus "Mac" MacGyver is the title character and ...
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Road Train
A road train, land train or long combination vehicle (LCV) is a trucking vehicle used to move road freight more efficiently than semi-trailer trucks. It consists of two or more trailers or semi-trailers hauled by a prime mover. History Early road trains consisted of traction engines pulling multiple wagons. The first identified road trains operated into South Australia's Flinders Ranges from the Port Augusta area in the mid-19th century. They displaced bullock teams for the carriage of minerals to port and were, in turn, superseded by railways. During the Crimean War, a traction engine was used to pull multiple open trucks. By 1898 steam traction engine trains with up to four wagons were employed in military manoeuvres in England. In 1900, John Fowler & Co. provided armoured road trains for use by the British Armed Forces in the Second Boer War. Lord Kitchener stated that he had around 45 steam road trains at his disposal. A road train devised by Captain Charles Renard of ...
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Red Centre
Central Australia, also sometimes referred to as the Red Centre, is an inexactly defined region associated with the geographic centre of Australia. In its narrowest sense it describes a region that is limited to the town of Alice Springs and its immediate surrounds including the MacDonnell Ranges. In its broadest use it can include almost any region in inland Australia that has remained relatively undeveloped, and in this sense is synonymous with the term Outback. Centralia is another term associated with the area, most commonly used by locals. As described by Charles Sturt in one of the earlier uses of the term "A veil hung over Central Australia that could neither be pierced or raised. Girt round about by deserts, it almost appeared as if Nature had intentionally closed it upon civilized man, that she might have one domain on the earth's wide field over which the savage might roam in freedom." In a modern, more formal sense it can refer to the administrative region used by t ...
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Simpson Desert
The Simpson Desert is a large area of dry, red sandy plain and dunes in the Northern Territory, South Australia and Queensland in central Australia. It is the fourth-largest Deserts of Australia, Australian desert, with an area of . The desert is underlain by the Great Artesian Basin, one of the largest inland drainage areas in the world. Water from the basin rises to the surface at numerous natural springs, including Dalhousie Springs, and at Water well, bores drilled along stock routes, or during petroleum exploration. As a result of exploitation by such bores, the flow of water to springs has been steadily decreasing in recent years. It is also part of the Lake Eyre basin. The Simpson Desert is an erg (landform), erg that contains the world's longest parallel sand dunes. These north-south oriented dunes are static, held in position by vegetation. They vary in height from in the west to around on the eastern side. The largest dune, Nappanerica or Big Red, is in height. Hi ...
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Northern Territory
The Northern Territory (commonly abbreviated as NT; formally the Northern Territory of Australia) is an states and territories of Australia, Australian territory in the central and central northern regions of Australia. The Northern Territory shares its borders with Western Australia to the west (129th meridian east), South Australia to the south (26th parallel south), and Queensland to the east (138th meridian east). To the north, the territory looks out to the Timor Sea, the Arafura Sea and the Gulf of Carpentaria, including Western New Guinea and other islands of the Indonesian archipelago. The NT covers , making it the third-largest Australian federal division, and List of country subdivisions by area, the 11th-largest country subdivision in the world. It is sparsely populated, with a population of only 249,000 – fewer than half as many people as in Tasmania. The largest population center is the capital city of Darwin, Northern Territory, Darwin. The archaeological hist ...
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Deep Well Station
Deep Well Station is a pastoral lease that operates as a cattle station in the Northern Territory of Australia. Description It is situated about South South East of Alice Springs and East of the Stuart Highway in the Northern Territory just off the Phillipson Stock route. Lying between the MacDonnell Ranges and the Simpson Desert and taking in much of the Ooraminna Ranges, the property is composed of a variety of land types including red sand hills, rocky outcrops and spinifex plains. Deep Well is just east of the former Central Australia Railway which had a stop also called Deep Well. History William Hayes and his wife Mary arrived in Alice Springs in 1884 with steel telegraph poles to replace the original wooden ones used to build the Overland Telegraph. They also worked on other properties in the area such as Mount Burrell and Owen Springs Station. The Hayes established the property in the late 1880s and it has remained in the Hayes family ever since. Billy Hayes, the f ...
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Alice Springs
Alice Springs ( aer, Mparntwe) is the third-largest town in the Northern Territory of Australia. Known as Stuart until 31 August 1933, the name Alice Springs was given by surveyor William Whitfield Mills after Alice, Lady Todd (''née'' Alice Gillam Bell), wife of the telegraph pioneer Sir Charles Todd. Known colloquially as 'The Alice' or simply 'Alice', the town is situated roughly in Australia's geographic centre. It is nearly equidistant from Adelaide and Darwin. The area is also known locally as Mparntwe to its original inhabitants, the Arrernte, who have lived in the Central Australian desert in and around what is now Alice Springs for tens of thousands of years. Alice Springs had an urban population of 26,534 Estimated resident population, 30 June 2018. in June 2018, having declined an average of 1.16% per year the preceding five years. The town's population accounts for approximately 10 per cent of the population of the Northern Territory. The town straddles th ...
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Gerhardt Johannsen
Gerhardt Andreas Johannsen (14 November 1876 – 4 April 1951) was a stonemason, builder and pastoralist in the Northern Territory. Early life Johannsen was born in Denmark on 14 November 1876 and, in 1899, he left to emigrate to Australia: working his passage as a crew member. He had originally planned to emigrate to South Africa but the Boer War prevented this. When he arrived in South Australia he went to the Barossa Valley where he met an married Marie Ottilie (Tilly) Hoffmann in 1905. In 1909 Johannsen responded the a call for help from the Hermannsburg Mission and the family, which now included a three-year-old daughter Elsa Margaret Johannsen (born 21 June 1906), travelled by horse and buggy to Central Australia. Life in the Northern Territory In Hermannsburg Johannsen erected buildings, stockyards and performed general repairs. He was often assisted by and taught Aboriginal men building skills. In 1911 the family left the mission and moved to Deep Well Station; wh ...
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Hermannsburg, Northern Territory
Hermannsburg, also known as Ntaria, is an Aboriginal community in Ljirapinta Ward of the MacDonnell Shire in the Northern Territory of Australia, ; west southwest of Alice Springs, on the Finke River, in the traditional lands of the Western Arrarnta people. Established as a Lutheran Aboriginal mission in 1877, linguist and anthropologist Carl Strehlow documented the local Western Arrernte language during his time there. The mission was known as Finke River Mission or Hermannsburg Mission, but the former term was later used to included a few more settlements, and from 2014 has applied to all Lutheran missions in Central Australia. The land was handed over to traditional ownership in 1982 under the ''Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976'', and the area is now heritage-listed. Geography Hermannsburg lies on the Finke River within the rolling hills of the MacDonnell Ranges in the southern Central Australia region of the Northern Territory. It is within the jurisdiction of the ...
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Carl Strehlow
Carl Friedrich Theodor Strehlow (23 December 1871 – 20 October 1922) was an anthropologist, linguist and genealogist who served on two Lutheran missions in remote parts of Australia from May 1892 to October 1922. He was at Killalpaninna Mission (also known as Bethesda) in northern South Australia, from 1892 to 1894, and then Hermannsburg, west of Alice Springs, from 1894 to 1922. Strehlow was assisted by his wife Friederike, who played a central role in reducing the high infant mortality which threatened Aboriginal communities all over Australia after the onset of white settlement. As a polymath with an interest in natural history, and informed by the local Aranda people, Strehlow provided plant and animal specimens to museums in Germany and Australia. Strehlow also collaborated on the first complete translation of the New Testament into an Aboriginal language (Dieri), published by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1897. He later translated the New Testament into t ...
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Tennant Creek
Tennant Creek ( wrm, Jurnkkurakurr) is town located in the Northern Territory of Australia. It is the seventh largest town in the Northern Territory, and is located on the Stuart Highway, just south of the intersection with the western terminus of the Barkly Highway. At the , Tennant Creek had a population of approximately 3,000, of which more than 50% (1,536) identified themselves as Indigenous. The town is approximately 1,000 kilometres south of the capital of the Northern Territory, Darwin, and 500 kilometres north of Alice Springs. It is named after a nearby watercourse of the same name, and is the hub of the sprawling Barkly Tableland – vast elevated plains of black soil with golden Mitchell grass, that cover more than 240,000 square kilometres. Tennant Creek is also near well-known attractions including the Devils Marbles, Mary Ann Dam, Battery Hill Mining Centre and the Nyinkka Nyunyu Culture Centre. The Barkly Tableland runs east from Tennant Creek towards the Qu ...
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