‘Without trucks, Australia stops’.
Well, I guess. I’ve never looked into the statistic regarding how accurate that is, but I’m forced to conclude that it’s pretty much a thing. Imagine all those steel girders, gigantic logs, horses, bags of seed and whatever else being transported in little courier vans, or on the back of motorbikes. Loading a massive steel girder onto a motorbike defeats the entire purpose of being a motorbike, which is to weave in and out of traffic and generally be a nuisance without taking up enough road-space for people to make campaigns against you.
Trucks are big, everyone sees them. But what else would stop Australia? Baristas, almost certainly. That one is so obvious you could almost go without mentioning it. No coffee, and we all drop like flies. Sewers, as well. Aluminium work platforms, for another. That’s about as subtle as it gets. “Oh, we’ll just use wooden work platforms, they’re just as good!” But no! A lot of building materials nowadays are heavy enough that simple wood just won’t cut it any more.
Okay….it might not be to do with how heavy they are. Let’s just say work platforms in general. They hold people up, let them work up high, make it so painters can reach those hard-to-see places and just generally make building a large building possible. No more scaffolding, no more construction. Well, not large-scale construction, anyway. You could still get away with building things that were MAYBE two stories tall, but that’s as far as you’d get. Even the ancient Egyptians used scaffolding for their own purposes, making the pyramids and the Sphinx and all that. So without scaffolding, we wouldn’t even have the greatest wonders of the world! They didn’t have trucks back then, I might add. How interesting.
So mobile scaffolding certainly predates most of the stuff we ‘need’. Goes WAY back…except maybe for doctors. Farmers, as well…people have got to eat, after all.
-Clarence