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Impressions of Australia
From: David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 1994 09:36:12 -0400
As most of you know, GG and I were downunder for the past three weeks. We spent most of our time in Sydney and Canberra with just one day in Melbourne. It is winter in Australia and cool. Sydney had temperature ranges of a high of 19 ish and lows overnight of 1. Canberra had lows of -8 (a record) and highs of 16. There was little if any rain. We arrived in Sydney and staying at the Regent Hotel by the Circular Quey. They have a great rate via AMEX and was one of the best hotels I have ever stayed in. Their Chief Concierge, Jacque, is a rare gem. Since Sydney was largely planned as a rest stop, I tried to minimize my work and thus ended up doing just an interview with ABC -- their public radio system (I will be Live again next week on their national technology talk show); an interview with Communications Australia -- their trade magazine in Comm.; a lunch talk for EFA (Electronic Frontier Australia)/ ACS (Australian Computer Society); and an afternoon at the University of Sydney giving a technical talk on the Gigabit Experience. Since I tend to judge a town by its sights and food, I give Sydney very high ratings. The view from the hotel of the harbor and opera house is unexcelled. We had a chance to take the Jetcat to Manly and stroll along the beach (a bit cold for swimming). The restaurants in Sydney are very good. As I said before the Rookpool on the Rocks was one of the best I have ever been in but there were many good to excellent places from the Seibel Hotel's dinning room to the Ox on the Rocks -- a small "bistro". Ethnic eating is fine and even kangaroo is great. Some technical observations re Sydney. I was surprised by the scarcity of computer stores and the lack of variety of what they carry. Given the seeming emphasis on computing as shown by a weekly computer section on it in the Australian -- their national newspaper (and much much better than USA Today), I was surprised not to see more. There is a "fight" over cellular systems with GSM and Analog in use (GSM is still small). The AU government has stated that analog will go in 2000. The cellular industry is deregulated and lots of competition. I called Telecom Australia to see if I could get my phone activated in AU. They never said no but the hoop jumping looked to long. By the way, it is trivial to get an AU activated in the USA. In Sydney I did not see evidence of a lot of telecom activity in the academic world. There was a lot of interest in the NII. As a side, I got a lot of comments in Australia on the imperial tone of Gore's GII speeches and defended him in the main (wish he would go low on the spreading democracy via the GII. It tends to be read as American style and American culture). We went down to Canberra to spend time at Australian National University -- ANU -- Center for Information Science Research with Prof. Michael A. McRobbie who were my host for the trip to Australia. Canberra is a small but quite nice city very much like DC in architecture and like Ottawa in living style. I met a lot of interesting people in the Federal Government's Science establishment and at ANU and helped them celebrate the launching of a cooperative agreement with Storage Technology and their getting a large Storage Vault. ANU has a large Fuijitsu Supercomputer and a Thinking Machine system. We were invited to attend a Rugby game by a Minister of the ACT (Australian Capital Territory) and sat in a box eating pizza (a native dish now) and beer (very good) and cheering on the home team (they won). Tradition calls for a Au$2 bet into a pool on game attendance and I won by using 20000 plus three digits from 1776 (an American I am). I took away $67 and they did not even deduct taxes ;-). Great people!! I gave two talks in Canberra and gave an interview that appeared in the Australian. Talk one was an University talk on the NII and the American experience in information infrastructures. I pitched the importance of the GII and used the Gigabit Testbed as an example of Government/University/Industrial collaboration that Australia may want to try. Very well received. I then gave again for the EFA and the ACS a lecture on Democracy in Cyberspace that looked at the issues of law, privacy etc. In the future. Australia is trying to deal with similar issues as we are trying to face. Again well received. With all my comments on the state of Australian Information Infrastructures -- to quota a comment of mine from the Australian "I don't see the realization down here yet that data networks are a huge driver of the economy for supplying goods and services." -- and because they wanted to hear from and chat with me I was invited to go down to the Telecom Australia Research Labs in Melbourne. I did a one dayer. For those who have never been to Melbourne (I stayed there for a week several years ago), it is an old city with charm. It is the home for many of the ethnic groups who migrated to Australia. It is the third largest Greek city. It is however like Tokyo in traffic congestion with no beltways and everything going into downtown. It is also LA in sprawling out. Took one hour from the airport to the Labs at non rush hour. Telecom is undertaking an ATM experiment in Australia at 155 mb involving some Universities etc. I met with the Lab Director and some of the key staff and they got my usual blunt comments and advice. I learned a lot and hopefully so did they. They kept asking when I would be back. I gave a talk to a rather full auditorium on the NII/Gigabit testbeds from a technological perspective and again had fun. We tried to leave Australia on the 12 th but the plane broke and had to deadhead to Tokyo to get fixed so we stayed in Sydney, met with a Government official, had much and dinner at the Rockpool and finally got back. A meta comment about Australia. It seems to have taken its position as a bridge between the West and the East. The entry of the UK into the EC closed a lot of markets and brought home the location of Australia in the Pacific. It is still English in many ways but more and more Australian in many important ways. It has a talented workforce and is, in my opinion, better leverage to become the information center for the Pacific than is Singapore both for "technical" reasons and for future stability reasons. But it needs to develop a much better program for getting into the 21 St. century and the information society. I pushed them to think of more experiment such as a Capital Network as a show piece experiment linking together the state and national capitals with each pushing their technology and applications as far as possible. Starting with Canberra may be the easiest. Besides experience gained and companies started who could export their experiences and products, it would act as a focus for the training of people who would form both the leadership and the workers for the future in telecommunication. Australia claims to have the largest number of computers per capita and should push toward the same position in networking. I loved my stay. The Australians are great people, still a bit of outback attitude and spirit, friendly, open and neat. They are in transition and it will be interesting to see where they go. Dave ps Sydney in 2000 !!!
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