A place on Mars has been named Nobbys Head/Whibayganba

We have Kurri Kurri’s Col Maybury to thank for this notable achievement.

A while back Col managed to convince NASA to name a small hill beside Endeavour Crater as Nobbys Head.

This is what Col does. After all, he’s president of the Astronomical Society of the Hunter.

Some time later, Col heard Nobbys had been given the dual Aboriginal name of Whibayganba. He went back to NASA to set things right.

Could the area on the red planet named Nobbys now be given the dual name, he queried. The answer was no. Col wasn’t deterred.

NASA offered to call another place on Mars – Marathon Valley – as Whibayganba.

This didn’t sit well with Col. He asked again if the Nobbys site on Mars could carry the dual name.

This time a superior was at hand. He agreed. Col was chuffed. And rightly so.

This all began some time ago when Col was reading Captain Cook’s journal about him sailing past Nobbys in May 10, 1770.

Then, Col read about the Mars rover heading towards a new crater. He looked up a map of Mars and discovered areas on the crater had Australian place names such as Cape York, Cape Tribulation and Botany Bay.

He thought it would be a good idea if they named a little promontory on that crater after Nobbys Head. The rest is history.

It was just like the first day at school. Soon though, Topics suspects, it will be like the School of Hard Knocks.

After all, the Federal Parliament is not for the faint hearted.

Paterson MP Meryl Swanson spent her first day at Parliament House in Canberra on Monday. Topics was told the kids played nice. We hate to say this Meryl, but somehow we don’t think this will last. Soon, those kids will be pulling your hair and stealing your lunch money.

Who knows, good fortune may smile upon her. Meryl posted a picture of her new office on Facebook, which was numbered “Suite 97”.

Joshua Lloyd quipped on Facebook that “97” was “a good omen”. It was the year the Knights won the grand final. 

Topics reported a few weeks ago about Kahibah’s Glen Hawke, who scored a gig as a ground announcer at the Olympics hockey tournament.

Glen blogged about his experience on the Herald’s website. 

In his latest blog post, he wrote: “With my Olympic Games finished, I headed out with three of the other announcers to have a couple of celebratory drinks and reminisce about the experience we had shared.

“The question was asked: When you signed up for this, if you knew then what you know now, would you still have come here? A couple of the boys stopped and thought about it. My answer was an immediate yes. This experience has been unlike anything I have been part of in my life.

“I may have been crapped on by a giant bird, pick-pocketed by a ‘street girl’, witnessed a controlled bombing, saw a dead body on the side of the road, run the gauntlet on a fairly hairy public transport system – just to name a few things – but I've also worked with amazing people from around the world, made life-long friends and been part of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games.

“I would trade none of it for the world. And let's face it, without all those things these updates would have been pretty boring!”