Word: outback
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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JILL CONWAY: From Outback...
...Pilbara district of northwestern Australia's outback is a sort of hell. There is barely enough vegetation on the stony hills and sere plains to support the area's population of wild donkeys, kangaroos and emus; only rock pythons, death adders and hoards of stinging insects seem to have adapted comfortably to the climatic extremes: winds that reach velocities of 140 m.p.h., dust storms that swirl out of the nearby Great Sandy Desert, noonday temperatures as high as 180° F. For man, it is as hostile a place as any in the world...
...Stresses. Shay Gap was founded for sound business reasons. Officials of Goldsworthy Mining Ltd., aware that high wages alone could not keep needed workers in the Pilbara for long, decided to build a community that would make life in the outback more tolerable. Their Perth-based architect, Lawrence Howroyd, 45, quickly realized that merely air-conditioning the houses and sealing the windows to keep out dust and insects would not be enough. In the Pilbara, he explains, "the environment throws up all kinds of stresses to which people are not accustomed-the heat, the isolation, fear of children...
...short a European tour, to oversee the most massive rescue operation in Australia's history. Darwin is the continent's most isolated city: almost 2,000 miles from the nearest metropolis, with no rail link to the rest of Australia and only one paved road through the outback. Navy units were immediately dispatched from Sydney with emergency supplies, but it will take them a week to complete the 2,500-mile voyage. Meanwhile, air force planes, commercial airlines and private jets donated by several Australian companies were airlifting 3,000 people a day out of the stricken city...
...Triple Crown winner). When drought threatened the King herds in 1917, Kleberg painstakingly began breeding Indian Brahman bulls with Texas shorthorns to produce a new and hardy breed, the Santa Gertrudis; their toughness enabled him to expand to such forbidding pastures as the Brazil ian jungle, Australia's outback and the plains of Morocco. Well into his 70s, the gauntly handsome, gimlet-eyed centimillionaire rose near dawn to ride herd with his feudally loyal vaqueros, lassoing calves and searing them with the King Ranch's running-W brand...