Discussion: 1990 Schools Champs were in SA

I don't remember anything about buses - but then the SA team possibly didn't have a bus. There wasn't central accommodation; teams were billeted out. We had ACT junior girls at our house, I think that included Cassie (but it is stretching my memory).

Of course, SA blamed the Qld bus for stirring up the quicksand into which the SA bus then sank in 1992 in the Warbys, but I don't think they realised that.

While on the subject of SA and buses getting stuck in foul weather, I was doing some newspaper-trawling to research something I'm writing on the floods of February 1946 and found a reference to stranded bus passengers between Whyalla and Cowell surviving by slaughtering a sheep in a roadside paddock (it was printed in the 'Advertiser' so it must be true). Any of your relatives in on that?

I shall ask my father. Later I shall decide whether or not to be offended by the implication that the Casanovas could have been sheep-rustlers. Surely they would have had the foresight to take their own sheep along for the trip :) (Incidentally, dad says his grandfather was a shepherd inside Wilpena Pound at the turn of the previous century.)

In most parts of Australia being able to find a sheep-rustler somewhere in your family tree is a matter of some pride, although I realise that such things are still thought of differently in certain South Australian quarters :-).

(Note for any international readers: South Australia is the only state that never received convicts, and this still generates a certain superiority complex among some of the more snobbish elements of the South Australian community - although I doubt amongst any South Australians I know :-)

Let's see...you know a bunch of orienteers. They are nerds not snobs. Which is why I was delighted to read on the final setters' instructions for this weekend's rogaine, a footnote below the BOM address: "Warning: use of this website can lead to accusations of nerdiness" and not surprised to see that this was written by Mark Corbett. He and I were in the SA schools team in 1991 in Qld, and had to clean the bus out together.

There, I've brought the conversation back to the topic of buses and Qld without ever having answered your original question! Quite proud of myself :)