Herd on the Terrace

Site stirs web of intrigue

Things have been quiet lately in Perth’s fringe business scene, but we have detected some intrigue that somehow links ancient St George Terrace tiffs with real war zones of Somalia.

Readers of this column will no doubt remember an uneasy truce that was struck earlier this year between former Rothwells financial whiz turned payday lender Oliver Douglas and his one-time business associate Terry McLernon, a Northbridge private dick.

The truce involved Douglas taking down all the content of a website dedicated to bagging McLernon and McLernon stripping all material about Douglas and several pals from his own scandal sheet.

But we have discovered a new burst of activity on Douglas’ site, including some very tribal looking African chaps. “The website has been sold to a businessman who resides in Somalia and who operates charitable organisations for underprivileged children in Africa,” it said.

A quick check of internet site ownership records, which are about as reliable as Windows 95 in a thunderstorm, lists the site as being registered to an alleged Mogadishu resident named Eli Matelosa with an Aussie mobile phone number and email address.

We rang the mobile and the bloke who answered the phone was one Terry Donnelly, who yonks ago led a campaign against pawnbroking group Cash Converters and found himself in a legal battle with McLernon over some spade work the private dick did for Cashies.

Donnelly now runs a charity for Somali kids and spends a lot of his time in the self-declared independent Somali province of Puntland.

He told HOTT he knew nothing about the Douglas site and had nothing to do with it.

He said he would immediately get his phone number and his charity’s email address taken off the internet registration records for the site, something that was achieved when the registered owner was changed to some bloke apparently based in Athens called Abdulahi Bashir.

We could find no trace of Bashir on the internet. But Donnelly is the subject of two long articles on a Somali website that are written in the local lingo. He is pictured with some Puntland bigwigs and the question is apparently asked: “Who is Terry?”.

McLernon said he knew nothing about the latest activity and HOTT could not reach Douglas yesterday.

More intrigue, this time with a dogfight between Skywest and Qantas after regional arm Qantaslink hit Skywest with a $925,000 bill for airport security services. Skywest fired off a media missive containing a boots and all response, but its new PR flak Paul Plowman later called to withdraw the blurb.

Memories mined for Ol’ Lang’s li ne

Queensland spruiker Shane Condon’s dream of a trans-national railway linking the Pilbara’s vast iron ore mines with the Queensland coalfields certainly sparked a flurry of interest from old timers keen to point out similarities with the vision of Lang Hancock 30 years ago.

But local oilie Craig Marshall proved that the germ of Condon’s idea could be sheeted even closer to home — to this very newspaper in fact. Craig’s old man, Lloyd, was a noted scribe with WA Newspapers in the post war years, and even broke the news of Australia’s first big oil strike at Rough Range near Exmouth in the early 50s.

But, according to Craig, it was Lloyd’s cross-country trek with veteran West photographer Max Holten from Port Hedland to Brisbane in 1965 that inspired Lang’s vision.

As reported in the May 1966 edition of WAN’s in-house Quarterly Bulletin, Lloyd and Max set out on their venture in a company Land Rover with the express purpose of proving “the possibility of direct access from the Australian industrial east to the booming Pilbara, cutting out the coastal hauls”.

They also aimed to show that the same route could be used by Australian defence forces to fend off any invasion from the west.

“Soon after we had proved the point rather resoundingly, Canberra asked us for every bit of information we could supply on the crossing,” Lloyd wrote at the time.

With WAN’s role in the east-west crossing debate now certified, we can smugly quote the opening line of Lloyd’s yarn: It is part of the traditional role of a newspaper to point the way of progress and demonstrate that it is a practical way.

Still on the Marshalls, it’s worth mentioning that Empire Oil & Gas, of which Craig is managing director, expects to truck the first commercial barrels of oil from the Rough Range field this weekend, 52 years after Lloyd reported WAPET had discovered oil at the site. Empire expects to produce around 250 barrels a day at Rough Range, and truck it to Kwinana for refining.

Who needs a line anyway?

With iron ore prices running hot, aspiring miners are doing everything to ensure they get onstream before the current boom tapers off.

Mal Randall’s Iron Ore Holdings, one of the hottest floats this year, is no exception with plans to fast-track work on a swag of Pilbara tenements which separate the big Yandi and Yandicoogina mines of BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto.

To show it doesn’t need rail access to make a quid, IOH this week released the results of a scoping study which indicated trucking ore from its tenements to Port Hedland could generate a gross operating margin of about $10 a tonne, based on a two million tonnes a year mine.

Now all IOH has to do is start drilling to see if it actually has a resource. IOH may seem to have put the cart before the horse, but it is confident a resource can be outlined soon given the incidence of exposed pisolite already spotted on its leases.