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Life Down Under |
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Brisbane from Mt. Coo Tha 2001 |
Perth Skyline 2000 |
Sufer's Paradise - Gold Coast 2001 |
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Karakin Lakes 2001 |
Campsite and staging area 2001 |
Nearly Outback |
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Signature tree |
Fremantle Welcoming Committe |
Noosa 2001 |
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Noosa Heads Welcoming committee 2001 |
Dolphn Poin |
Coral Sea shelf |
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Rockingham Beach |
Mt. Pleasant on the Swan |
Sailboat off Point Peron |
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Cottesloe Beach to Fremantle |
Julian Bond's Hotel |
Cottesloe Beachers |
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Fremantle Armory |
Fremantle City Hall |
Hillary Boat Harbor |
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Alexander Heights home |
Mooloolaba Inlet |
Mooloolaba home |
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Rottnest island harbor |
Woodman Point beach |
Supreme Court Gardens |
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Barrack Street Jetty |
Looking toward Kings Park |
Cottesloe view |
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Trigg Beach |
North Beach on Indian Ocean |
Sorento Beach |
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Waters of Deception Bay |
Whiteman Park Forest Fire |
Moreton Bay home of "bugs" |
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| Australia's East and West coasts are distinctly different with similar temperatures. Humidity in the west is extremely dry to the point that you can wear the same clothes several days without sweating while in the east you may want to change 3-4 times a day. While Indian Ocean waters in the west are cold coming directly up from the Antarctic, Coral sea and south Pacific waters in the east are warm and comfortable. | West Australia is a relatively flat topography havng a peak at 457 m. In Queensland, about 50- 150 miles from Brisbane peaks rise to 1135 m. | ||||
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All photos© by Gene Zarwell | ||||
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Interesting & Intruguing |
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Neither an obssession nor a goal. Well, maybe a subconscious objective. At age 10 during a thanksgiving day - relative - celebration, our cousin Susan, a high school student, took me and my brothers and her brother by bus downtown to Milwaukee's movie theatre along-side the Milwaukee river. Several years later I met Frankie Avalon there and Dion of the Belmonts took a photo of us for a teen magazine. Back to the future. Our movie date was to see "On the Beach" by Neville Shute. A film about an end to civilization from residuals of atomic warfare slowly eradiating life from our planet. It hadn't reached the South Pacific. A submarine crew surfaced safely near Australia and from there it was a party of "Waltzin' Matilida" and living a fast life as radiation increased and annihilation eminent. Crew emotions yearned for a return to America only to find it devoid of life and quite radioactive. End of movie. However; there was a automobile race in which Fred Astair drove a little "red" 1952 MG motor car. Mind you this was a black and white movie. That car became my dream car through my early years until in 1979, I learned of FibreFab in Minnesota, a company that manufactured "kit Cars" for a reasonable price. I ordered its MiGI kit, a replica of MG's 1952 TD. It arrived in a huge box with proportions of "AMT's" 1/25th scale model car, but quite a bit larger. There were many similarites between those table tops and this full scale kit. There were differences, too! Instead of glue and plastic parts it had fiberglass, real tires, bolts and washers and nuts, and wires, wood panels and more parts than ever expected. Scary almost when looking at it as an enormous effort. There were no instuctions. Well not for long. Parts were very similar to AMT's making it easy to compare and use those modeling skills in real life size. My 12 year old son and I attacked this project with intensity and fabaricated this car body in three and a half days raising it to the garage ceiling as we refurnbished an old VW "Bug" chassis into a steel reinforced frame for our MG-EZ. It took 11 days to complete our restorations and several test drives around our West Bloomfield community sitting on concrete bricks with a 2 gallon gas can connected by rubber hose to its rear-end Porsche engine hanging on a VW autostick transmission. Whew, what a mouthful! A photo of that dream car is on my Photo Album page of this site. Note: It ain't red. It matched our 1978 aiplane and an 18- foot inboard ski boat back then. That car attracted a lot of attention. Being in advertising, I suggested to FibreFab to stage an auto-show in Troy during Detroit's major, major auto show weekend. I made arrangements for three assembled cars and a kit to be displayed and produced a "PM Magazine" story through WXYZ-TV in Detroit that aired several times that week. FibreFab provided financing, reps to write, and we sold 40 kits that weekend. I received $2,000 a copy. Not bad for a little time and a $2,400 investment. Alas, when military duty called in 1983, I sold my dream car before reporting for duty for several years of very diverse assignments. So, how does this relate to Australia? That's where I experienced a sports car race through camera work in "on the Beach". It only took 50 years to get there by invitation. Having lost everything to a debit card fraud, I stayed at a local hotel where I met some Aussies who befriended me and ask for help in setting up computer mangement of a Courtroom Recording manufacturing and legal software devlopment corporation. Sounded interesting at first, but then intriguing as investors in London, Perth and Brisbane started asking me to investigate it. Seems a lot of money was raised by this team in similar ventures over several decades. No product ever developed and shares never honored. Now, my curiosity was peaked as I gathered information to learn it was two Con artists competing for control of their scam. They were in the U.S. to take advantage of NASDAQ or at least speculation of an IPO. It didn't pan out and the President went back to Brisbane. Two separate groups of investor invited me to Perth in 1999; one to head up a venture in merchanidsing and promoting |
Baby Boomer music by baby
boomers; and the other to corroborate investment fraud. I was even asked to speak at an annual meeting of investors from Australia, Germany, Sweden, and Belgium. Six weeks were spent in Australia writing business plans, financials, meeting with financial institutions, promoters, and real estate executives. We tested markets, researched distributions centers, identified manufacturing and production operations, plus developed several startup packages and investment plans. Thinking our plan was ready for implementation, I went to England to meet with a marketing/PR firm and later to Eastern Europe to reseach marketing concepts using available media in former Soviet Union republics. I returned in May 2000 anaticipating a two-week break before heading back to Perth. Investors dried up down under after I left and planned activities were never implemented. Then, one day I had a phone call from Brisbane to assist in another venture to develop a legal desposition recorder, something I had proposed in winter 1998. It would be a virtual product selling for about $250. It had been proposed by a third party as a project to seek welfare monies from Australia's equivalent to Maryland's Business & Economic Development Department in consort with its Unemployment agency. He was willing to take my idea for a government dole and asked me to come down-under to get it going. Obviously he was palnning yet another scam and this time I was to be the scape goat. He had no product, but enlisted two programmers to develop code. One of them was sincere and qualified. The other was in on the fraud. It didn't take long to determine where this was heading after spending three weeks in Perth devloping the device. It worked and I returned to a shocked entreprenuer who stated, "I've never had a product before." He then proposed that I set up an American Corporation where he could hide the funds so his investors couldn't get to them. Rejecting that idea in a way to regroup his investors, proposed, planned and created a website using servers around the world to capture and distribute this virtual recorder with simulataneous playback and recording without stopping during witness testimony. With a working site, investors backed my plan and we introduced it at ABA's 2001 Chicago Technology conference. I came up two days early to set up show demos and meet with media. Fees had to paid before we could attend and the money was coming from investors, but was really taken out of my account and never repaid. Shows like that cost about $45,000 which to me was inexpensive in comparison to the close $100,000 per booth we sold for SofTool USSR '90 conference in Moscow. Being up here with monies to be forwarded, never were, survival became a life style. Living in my car and later in an office sleeping across three chairs wasn't all that bad considering I pursued legal remedy in Australia through the IMF and World Bank until financial networks went down in September 2001. On top of that, I learned of rumors in Brisbane accusing me of embezzling funds traced to one of the programmers bank accounts as he attmepted, but was blocked from rerouting links away from company accounts to his own. It has never been resolved financially, but my concept works and will be implemented in this or next year. Remember, our markets close last in global financial transactions which makes us the last word of a financial day. Also remember that Asian markets open just a few hours after we close making them wealthy in morning bumps. Yes, my adventures in Australia and New Zealand have been exciting and challenging without ever corrupting my values. It gave me a chance to earn accreditation in 130 countries through certification with opportunites to meet with hundreds of people looking to find an opportunity to live a life style they perceive I live. I've been told that 25 percent of thieves, thugs, and criminals from Merry Old England were deported down-under. Did you ever read that 75 percent came to our U.S. 100 years earlier? Now you did. Only few remain. More than 20 million Australians are friendly, hard working people loyal to the Queen. The guys I got involved with were from Canada. |
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Copyright 2003, Axis International Marketing inc, Wilmington DE. All rights reserved and proprietary it exerpted out of context. |
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