Swimming 34:00 [2] 1.0 km (34:00 / km)
Swim at MSAC after dropping my car off for a service. Felt generally rather sluggish.
I'm currently researching a piece I'm writing on the northern Tasmanian floods of April 1929 (with some help from Kirsten in determining which bits of Launceston go under when the Tamar's 4-6 metres above its normal level). As usual I've had some fun going through the papers, including the discovery that hooning was a problem in Adelaide 81 years ago (someone appeared in court on a charge of riding a motorbike down Anzac Highway at 50 miles per hour, which doesn't sound too exciting now but would have been in 1929). I was wondering if the Mercury was taking a particularly parochial view when the worst natural disaster in the history of northern Tasmania was relegated to a position well behind a court case in which a Hobart man was acquitted of stealing a tarpaulin valued at 10 shillings from the Tasmanian Railways, but it turned out that virtually no news of the goings-on in the north actually made it to Hobart until three days later. One picture showed a large crowd watching the show from the bridge at the bottom of Cataract Gorge, a somewhat brave move given the number of northern Tasmanian bridges that ended up somewhere in the middle of Bass Strait (where they were joined by the Duck Reach power station).
And there was an 'oops' in a more recent paper, today's Herald-Sun, which reported on a case in which the Minister for Immigration had stated that an American facing charges in Alabama would stay in immigration detention until a decision was reached on his extradition, which wouldn't happen until assurances were received that "Mr Bowen would not face the death penalty". I know his performance as Minister for Immigration hasn't been to the taste of everyone (especially in Woodside), but the death penalty sounds a bit extreme.