Transcript:
Okay, so the first tents we really had a part in designing and I worked with a fellow called Peter McGinnes out of Newcastle in those days and was a really good relationship.
And we developed a range of tents and we put our own names on our own version of the. And we had a four-man tent an a-frame four man tent called the Alice was one of the first tents around with the first version of the VentraFlow if you like underneath it.
And, oh there were a variety of those but mainly we called them after the island so we had a Straddy which was a four-man cabin sloping wall tent. And there was a Moreton and which was a 12 by 9 and a Fraser of 15 by 12. I just can't remember the straight wall tents there were a couple of others.
But they were called after the islands, Australian islands or you know and then as the tents developed we got onto the western rivers the Cooper and and I worked out at Charleville in my young days and so hence the Cooper for Cooper's Creek and Tanbar for what was Tanbar Station. So which was sort of part of my roundabout sort of route and yeah so that was you know it was that was fun they the Alice was an interesting little tent it was a as I say four man cabin a 9 by 7 feet.
One of the guys we sold to actually took them up into Siberia in the winter and he said it was so cold you could put a guy rope straight into the snow and it would stand like that, but the beautiful thing about it was that it's it's interesting that they went out of fashion because they were the quickest tent to put up.
You just climbed inside the thing and push them, you pegged it out and your climbed inside and pushed the back pole up and then you know you could you could actually do it without getting inside the tent. You pulled the back of the tent forward, put the pole in and put it up and then put the pole in the front. So it was a brilliant little tent and it was the first tent really made out of a hundred percent polyester into Australia.
And the big trick with that was in those days though the dyeing process was a hot dye and high pressure and it used to destroy a lot of fabrics and eventually they came up with techniques to do this dye this hot dye and then a everything developed from there of course and now polyester tents are everywhere of course.
So yeah we like to, you know got a bit of attachment to the country we came from I guess and yeah we like to just have tents that are a memory of someplace we've been
