Apologies Jake. I probably fired off a bit quick. If you will bear with me, a quick outline as to why small countries, such as Australia are sensitive on subjects like this, that the big boys just casually roll over the little guy and are told, no you won't get anything so just get into line, get use to it, shut up and pay up. We had a quite large and very innovative combine manufacturing company in Australia called H V McKay Sunshine Harvesters who were amongst the first in the world to develop self propelled headers [ combines ] and a number of other innovations as well as exporting large numbers of machines to south america and elsewhere around the world. In the 1950's, Massey Harris, admittedly a Canadian based company at that time, bought a controlling interest in H V McKay. They continued to produce combines for a while but did little development work, sucked out the profits and eventually shut the works down. H V McKay also had a full collection of all models of all the machines they had produced, including the first truly self propelled combine and some other world first developments in their museum. On the order of the MH executives, all of these machines, a part of Australia's national heritage, were taken down to the local tip, destroyed and bull-dozed in. Quite openly, some MH executives said they did not want any evidence around that would challenge the line that North America was the only place where the combine harvester was developed. I will let you work out what your feelings would be like if this was done to some of America's most treasured national heritage! International Harvesters also had a works down here but found they could not make a go of it despite large government subsidies, probably due to poor management. Imported American machines also helped destroy the market for another couple of small Australian combine manufacturers who actually produced machines that matched any american machines but due to the small size of the Australian market, they just did not have the financial backing to take on the might of the American manufacturers. Perhaps the lesson for Americans is that they should make sure that any of their heritage that is of national importance should be placed in a separate collection where, if somebody else, such as the Chinese gain control of an industry, your heritage cannot be got at and destroyed for business political reasons such as some of ours was.
