AWA calls in administrators AWA – once Amalgamated Wireless Australia – may be nearing the end of its 105-year-long road, with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reporting that it's called in the administrators. The ABC's report, here, says administrators are seeking expressions of interest for companies interested in acquiring the business. During …
turn off the lights and say goodbye Australia. Agribusiness managers and mine supervisors don't count as citizens. The only question left is where do the expat kiwis go when the West Island ceases to exist except as a mine tailings dump. The Ozzies will have been sold as dog food long before.
The whole school was a-buzz * when one day an AWA van appeared.
Two men in brown coats unloaded a huge wooden cabinet, complete with lockable front doors.
They positioned the cabinet in pride of place inside the room used by 2nd class.
Later, the whole school sat on the floor, about 80 kids, to watch parts of the Apollo 11 mission. Some probably chose the kneel *
Not a word was heard but the scratchy voices from a distant mike* emanating from the black and white TV.
Amazing.
* intended
The doors of high-tech industry have been shutting for years in Oz, last week it was the car industry closures, now this week even the fruit canneries are closing!
We've been raped by free trade with a more-level-playing-field-than-anyone-else, incompetent governments run by accountants and lawyers--sans engineers and scientists, multinationals running amok sans regulation, a fucked tech education system, and a population who has about as much interest in manufacturing and high-tech industry as I have in used toilet paper!
We've moved to a service economy where now nobody knows one end of a screw driver from the other let alone how to use an oscilloscope or a spectrum analyser. And here in Oz we've even screwed that up--we're so bad at the service economy we even outsource it to India and other places. ...And we live off the earnings of digging big holes in the ground and selling their contents to China.
AWA once led the world in items of high-tech audio and other electronic instrumentation. As I write this, I'm looking across the lab to shelves of equipment and I can see an AWA G233 Ultra Low Distortion Oscillator. Designed nearly 40 years ago, it is still state of the art--its distortion is less than 0.0003% from 20Hz-20kHz and less than 0.0008 from about 5Hz to 50kHz! And I've not yet mentioned the matching F242 distortion analyser or the myriad of other high-tech stuff AWA once made--from microwave links, to TV transmitters to traffic light controllers to marine electronics, and so on and so on.
Now there's no AWA, no new-comers, no innovation, nothing! Here in Oz, we live in a technical and intellectual desert--a tragic wasteland of lost opportunities. We've truly fucked it up, big-time--a much higher precedence is given to dedicated TV shopping channels than those for education (where there is none!).
The only remaining things to do are to cry, turn off the lights and hang out the sign: "China, the fire-sale is over, it's now all yours".
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