Wildlife

There’s lots of wildlife around Lorne. We’ve seen koalas and echidnas in previous years, and although we haven’t seen any of these so far this year, we’ve seen the seal and stingrays at the pier as well as kangaroos in Queen’s Park.   In fact there’s quite a school of stingrays, near the pier, including several large ones and a couple of smaller ones.   They like the shallow water close to shore and are best seen at high tide.     And there are plenty of birds around as well. The cockatoos are notorious of course, but there are also kookaburras, black cockatoos, galahs, rosellas, magpies, ducks and honey-eaters to name just a few.

Seal

Stingray

Many warnings about snakes, but we haven’t seen any

The cockatoos are troublesome

Ducks on the river

Galahs

Timber tramway

A and I walked to St Georges River along the timber tramway path.     In the early days of the 20th century, timber was cut in the Otways and shipped from the Lorne pier.   Actually, as the placards along the route tell us, there were several tramway routes, but a couple were mostly destroyed when the road was built.   The remaining route, which is now a walking track, climbs up and over the spur, but even it (so a placard informs us) doesn’t follow the original route in its entirety due to the building of the road.    Just the same, it’s a very pleasant walk, albeit a bit steep and rough in some parts,  with some great views out over the ocean and along the coast.

At Lorne

Our holiday house accommodation at Lorne this year is past the pier. I’ve walked around here in previous years, but never before stayed in this part of town. It’s a pleasant 25 minute walk into town to get the paper each morning. Yes, I still buy a paper every day; it’s part of my daily ritual to have a newspaper beside me while I’m eating my muesli.

View from deck

The remnants of the old timber tram track are close by, a reminder of the very earliest days of Lorne when timber was harvested in the Otways and despatched by ship.

The accommodation is quite good. While it’s not the newest property in town, it’s been satisfactorily maintained and is spacious and nicely “zoned” into different areas, making it suitable for our extended family.

Lorne in lockdown

Lorne, like the rest of Victoria, was in lockdown the Saturday before Valentine’s Day.   Early in the evening, hardly any of the eating places were open even for takeaway and the main street was deserted.

But, perhaps most telling of all, no-one had been fishing on the pier for the whole day.

Early evening – no one on the beach

Mountjoy Pde – empty

Not a fisherman in sight.

What was once the Arab is now a fish and chip shop! The Chinese restaurant didn’t last for long.

To Lorne

Well, what a saga! During the course of Friday morning rumours started circulating about another Victorian lockdown.    Our stay at Lorne was scheduled to start on Saturday…….

We started giving thought to “Plan B”. Perhaps head to Lorne a day earlier, and stay overnight in a local motel?   Then the agent rang and generously told us the owner would allow us to arrive a day earlier (no extra cost) if a lockdown was imposed. So when the bad news was confirmed that there was in fact going to be a lockdown – including a 5 km limit on travel! – we were mentally ready. It was somewhat of a challenge to fit into 2 hours the amount of packing that would normally take a day, but we managed.   We forgot a couple of small items that we would normally take, but nothing too serious. At least I had done the legwork to ensure we have basic internet access.

So, we’re sitting out the lockdown at Lorne.    We’re within the rules because we were in our accommodation before the lockdown started, but because the rules apply throughout the state, there’s only takeaway from the restaurants. But we got in dinner at the pub before the lockdown started. I think we’ll manage. There’s a BBQ on the deck, and the view extends from Airey’s Inlet to Cape Otway (well, we would see it if it wasn’t over the horizon).

Surfing at Lorne

Mobile broadband

We’re getting ready to go away for a little while. So I’ve fired up the notebook I take with me when travelling.    As usual, it takes time to catch up on the updating that it’s missed out on, even though it’s not very long since I last used it (when we were away for a few days).  And inexplicably, it resulted in a spate of “unrecognized activity” emails from Google/gmail.  If only Google took privacy issues as seriously at their end as they do at the user’s end.

A bigger concern is that the accommodation (holiday rental house) makes no mention of providing wi fi or other internet access.    It’s a long time since we haven’t had access to wi fi while away, but that’s because we haven’t stayed at private accommodation since we were at Lorne last year. 

The easiest internet option is to use my phone as a hot spot, but that comes at a relatively high cost on my phone.    I spent some time seeing if I could “unlock” my phone so as to use a different provider, but with Telstra, nothing it seems is quite as simple as making a phone call  (so this is still “work-in-progress”).  In the meantime, I’ve paid $2 for a Telstra SIM so I can set up an different account with Telstra (for “data-only”) if I need to go that way.   A Telstra data-only plan wouldn’t provide data at cheapest rate around, but it’s a fraction of the price of data on my normal account.   

But I’ve also  located my trusty Vodafone USB modem.   Vodafone aren’t my favourite network (at holiday destinations, it can get congested at busy times), but unless we need to stream movies or attend Zoom meetings, it should be OK.  Catch?   When I tried to use it, it told me the account had been “de-activated”.     This wasn’t a real surprise, because last time I added funds to the pre-paid account was more than a year ago, and I was once informed that SIMs “die” if they’re not used for 6 months.   However, a call to Vodafone (answered immediately I navigated the slightly complex menu) told me that by just a few days I was still within the grace period.  Sometimes things do indeed fall the right way!    So, I made a top-up of the minimum account, and, yes, seemingly we’re back in the land of being “activated”.

So, hopefully one way or another we’re going to be able to remain in contact!

Crumbling Stations (2)

There’s been a structural issue at our local station for some years (since 2016 in fact, when work was done to stabilise it), but still nothing has been done about it. We were told at a Council ward meeting that VicTrack or Metro (whoever it is that’s responsible) just want to demolish the problematic structure, but it’s got heritage value, and they’re not allowed to. But neither the Council nor anyone else is ready to put up the money that’s needed to fix things. So, nothing happens. In the meantime, the guy who used to operate the little shop was forced to move to the old newspaper kiosk at the head of the ramp, but although he made a brief return after the Covid lockdown, he hasn’t been seen recently. I always tried to support him by asking him to do my Myki top-ups, but for now I’ve had to use the machine.

Unstable structure

Unsightly supports down on the platform

Unused kiosk

Sunday Schools

I was assisting in sorting out material to go the the Church archives, and we came across a framed certificate. It was dated 1831.    So it’s 190 years old!  The annotation stated as follows –

“Presented to the Armadale Methodist Sunday School by Miss F E Jackson on the occasion of the dedication of the new S. S. building March 16^th 1929.

This certificate was given to Miss Jackson’s mother in 1831 to commemorate the Jubilee of the Establishment of Sunday Schools in the British Isles, and also the anniversary of the birthday of Robert Raikes founder of the Sunday Schools.”

The context is that Sunday Schools first evolved during the 18th century.    Robert Raikes, a Gloucester newspaper proprietor, was a strong promoter of their spread.   They’re seen as the forerunner of the State school system, with their intention being to develop literacy, usually using the Bible as the textbook.  They were held on Sundays as the boys were often working in the factories the other six days.  Wikipedia tells us that,  “[t]he movement began in July 1780 in the home of a Mrs Meredith” (although there had been earlier instances).   I found it fascinating to learn that their foundation was being commemorated as early as 1831, in which year they were schooling 1,250,000 children.    After that they were increasingly supplemented by “ragged schools” (charitable provision for the industrial poor), and eventually by publicly funded education under the terms of the Elementary Education Act 1870.

Pediophobia

I saw the sign in the Degraves St subway referring to “pediophobia”.

My instinctive reaction was that this was some form of graffiti, but no, the word means “fear of dolls” and the reference was to an interesting display by Kitty Calvert.

GameStop (2)

Well, the GameStop issue seems to have been a case of hyped-up keyboard jockeys getting over-excited.   Yes, some of the coverage saw the issue in terms of the “little guys” outsmarting the big Wall Street guys – but the inflated price (a peak of over $US400) didn’t last for long.   At the time of writing, it’s been bouncing around a bit for a few days, and is around about $US63, which is probably still way too high on the fundamentals but much below the peak.    Even the ABC said the Reddit army was doomed.  The article points out that “Reality can only be suspended for so long”, and that the true value of GameStop is nowhere near the price that the Reddittors have ascribed to it.

But has this really been a triumph for the amateur individual investors over the professionals?   I suspect not.  Sure, one hedge fund appears to have suffered, but if so, they deserved all that befell them as a result of getting involved in a “crowded short”.  It was pretty obvious that GameStop was a very “crowded” market, so not a good playground for short sellers.   Any professional fund manager would be aware of the risks involved.    Overly aggressive short positions in stocks with limited liquidity are vulnerable to a short squeeze.

The fact that it appears (depending on whose figures you believe) that shares amounting to nearly the entire capital of GameStop – or perhaps more than the entire capital – were short-sold suggests that many of the short positions weren’t conventional shorting (where shares are borrowed and then sold) but were the result of complex derivatives.    This is highly suggestive of the fact that other funds have been involved, not merely the “Reddittors” – and those funds have probably made money in the process.

On a more general note, I’m at a bit of a loss to understand why short-sellers are condemned so much.   If your view is that a stock is under-valued, then you buy “long”, that is, buy it in the belief that the price will go up.  This is usually regarded as prudent investing.   So why is it not equally acceptable, if you believe a stock is over-priced, to sell it short, taking the view that the price will drop so as to be in line with the underlying fundamentals?

Sometimes there’s a concern that this can lead to “market manipulation”.  But if so, this would come about from coordinated conduct and placing dodgy orders, so these are the things that need to be addressed.  I can’t see that short selling is any more manipulative than any other transaction.   But there should be no suggestion of “changing the rules” if the “big guys” (or anyone else) gets squeezed because they’ve allowed themselves to get over-exposed.  Let them wear the consequences.

There have also been suggestions that the apparent “rise” of amateur traders means that the funds sector will avoid shorting illiquid stocks where their positions might make them a target for co-ordinated retail investor attacks.   Perhaps traders will need to be a little more careful about telling the world what they’re doing but I have no problems with this at all;   let the traders be cautious where they tread.   Traders are quite capable of monitoring Reddit, and if a stock turns up in discussion, there are no doubt other stocks they can look at.

I just hope that not too many Redittors placed the trust in their on-line forum and invested money that they couldn’t afford to lose in GameStop stock when it was at high prices.  A comment on another forum stated, “Looks like Reddit has given up on GME and calling anyone who didn’t sell stupid”.   So, where’s the logic or sense in trusting an anonymous on-line forum when making investment decisions?   Who is to know the motives of the forum participants?