Indeed, it is just possible, I suppose, that it was still being used somewhere in the country at the dawn of the computer age.
It is confirmation of its extraordinary longevity that it was still possible, until fairly recently, to find old ones tucked away at lands and cattle posts. There will also be many people, myself included, who knew immediately from the state of the road or track that a selei had recently passed. I seem to remember that it was unable to move in a straight line and instead swung from side to side thus making an absolute mess of the road. Such has been the rate of change that the grandchildren of the ladies uncomfortably ensconced in the selei in this photograph could well have had jobs as computer specialists. The very possibility is extraordinary. Breath-taking. It also has to be said that when those ladies were sitting in their selei there were others in the country who were more comfortably sitting in planes. There were two types of selei I seem to remember, one with a pointed front and the other without. Both were presumably made from the same kind of wood. They were incredibly crude and clumsy. Their principal advantage was that, unlike the ox wagon, they were so easily repaired and at no cost. Their principal disadvantage was that they required enormous animal power to move them forward even an inch.
