Thursday, January 30, 2014

The Australian editor Chris Mitchell: 'I Love The Sydney Morning Herald'

The Daily Telegraph's editor Paul Whittaker, Rupert Murdoch and The Australian's editor Chris Mitchell (right)

Well this was unexpected. The Australian's editor Chris Mitchell, that is the newspaper that regularly feasts upon the alleged fetid "Leftism" of Fairfax media actually believes The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald are fantastic newspapers.

Via Mumbrella:
Chris Mitchell: "...the Saturday Age and SMH...remain very strong products with breaking news, a colour magazine, good arts and sport coverage, very strong business sections and lots of heavyweight opinion from people who really move national debate."

Eh? What could have motivated Mitchell to sing the praises of The Australian's key rival in this age of rapidly declining newspaper circulations?

The arrival of a third Saturday newspaper, called The Saturday Paper.

So incensed are Mitchell and Fairfax's Gary Linnell they have supplied some absolutely choice quotes to Mumbrella, desperately trying to hose down any interest The Saturday Paper might be generating.

This quote from Linnell is pure gold, and pretty much sums up far too much commentary content in Murdoch and Fairfax newspapers, beautifully so:
 "I desperately hope it doesn’t end up being a boring collection of opinion writers sifting through each others’ navel lint..."
Mumbrella has the full story here.


Rupert Murdoch Admits He Does Tell His Media What To Print And Who To Back

2007: The Australian Editor Chris Mitchell Claims Pro-Peace Aussies Hate Hearing Less Iraqis Are Being Slaughtered

Chris Mitchell's War On Australian Bloggers

The Australian's Obsession With Twitter Is Just Plain Stupid



Thursday, January 16, 2014

Slow Mo Croc Porn

Beautiful slo-mo of saltwater crocodiles in action, by Allen Dixon at NT's Crocodile Cove. Quite hypnotic:




Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Aboriginal Martial Arts 'Coreeda' Based On World's Oldest Martial Arts?






'Coreeda' is being used to control aggression in young people in Western New South Wales, but it's also good for fitness, fun and community ties:

Based on Aboriginal combat, the ancient martial art of Coreeda has played a crucial role in controlling hostility for thousands of years.

Gavin Dickson of the Coreeda Association of Australia is using this art form to similarly manage the aggression among kids on Mornington Island.

He said the children often resorted to violence and experienced aggression as a result of boredom.

"We were invited to Mornington Island to try and utilise the sport to help the kids in town manage aggression and inspire them towards traditional culture," Mr Dickson said.
 Great background story from Living Black:
  

Some more background:
"The legendary Dreaming account of how Coreeda first came into being was told in the Ngiyampaa Nation of Western NSW and is about a lizard man named Beereun, who was told by a giant snake to watch the Red Kangaroo bucks so he could learn how to fight without weapons. He then brought these fighting techniques back to his clan and initiated a wrestling tournament as an important peace-keeping ceremony, which instigated an era of great prosperity for the Ngiyampaa people.


Based on the dating of rock art at sites like Mt Grenfell near Cobar in Western NSW, it is estimated this first Coreeda tournament began over 10,000 years ago, making Coreeda one of the oldest documented styles of Folk Wrestling in the world"


More at the Coreeda Association here

More Australians Die From Heatwaves Than From Fire And Floods Combined

 How crazy are the heatwave extremes now frying West Australia, South Australia and Victoria? Well, the Northern Territory News is claiming Darwin is "chilly" and just the place to "beat the heat":


From the Sydney Morning Herald:
The number of heatwave-related deaths in Australia’s major cities is set to quadruple by mid-century, research shows.

There will be more than 2000 heat-related fatalities in 2050 compared with about 500 recorded in 2011, according to a federal government report.

The meteorological bullet will hit Brisbane and Perth the hardest, with deaths predicted to climb to nearly 800 in each city by 2050, compared with less than 200 in 2011.

Launching the State of Australian Cities Report on Tuesday, Deputy Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said climate change, population growth and the ageing population would all contribute to the growing death toll.

‘The overriding evidence is that our cities are getting hotter,’’ Mr Albanese told reporters in Sydney.

‘‘Heatwaves are our biggest national killer, well ahead of fire and floods.

‘‘This has particular relevance as our population ages.‘‘City residents are more vulnerable because of the Heat Island Effect (HIE) ... which can add up to four degrees to temperatures.’’

The report shows that heatwaves in the major cities are more deadly than other natural disasters, causing 2887 deaths since 1890.

This is more than bushfires (843), cyclones (935), earthquakes (13), floods (453) and severe storms (124) combined.

More than 400 people died in Melbourne and Adelaide alone from the 2009 heatwave in southeast Australia.The 1939 and 1895 heatwaves also caused more than 400 fatalities.
Here's a graphic of Australia's hottest days on record: 
 
 
 





Sunday, January 12, 2014

Robin Williams On Australians: "I Hate Them, They're So Smug In Their Board Shorts"



Comedian Robin Williams knows more about Australia than most Australians might think. He practically lived here, in a beach house on the Central Coast, for many years during the 1980s. This gave him opportunities to make unannounced appearances at Sydney stand-up comedy venues, like The Harold Park Hotel. During one of these shows, he improvised about Australian men and culture for more than 20 minutes, and it was absolutely brilliant.

Williams is still riffing on Australia, in his new show The Crazy Ones about a NYC advertising agency:
In a recent episode, he pitched a campaign to officials of the Australian Tourist Board, who kept telling him to “dumb it down”.

Williams improvised this aside to his colleagues: “Oh God how I hate them. They’re so smug in their board shorts. And that accent. It’s like sand in your ears. Gday mate, no worries, put another shrimp on the barbie, Sheila this is Bruce. Their two dollar coin is smaller than their one dollar coin. Every single animal down there can kill you. And it takes forever to dry your hair.”

One of his colleagues protested that “they gave us Naomi Watts”. Williams replied:  “They also gave us The Wiggles, which are only enjoyable if you’re high. What kind of message is that for kids?”.

Williams admits his only experience of Australia was a drinkathon, after which “I woke up in a speedo on a beach in Perth, being pulled into the bush by an eastern grey kangaroo. An Aboriginal woman fought him off and I was with her for a while. There’s more, but I don’t want to bore you.”
Eastern grey kangaroo? In Perth?
 
Williams sparked a mini-controversy in 2010 when he called Australians "rednecks":


Friday, January 10, 2014

PM Tony Abbott On Australia's Booze And Violence Culture



Australia's prime minister Tony Abbott writes for the Daily Telegraph, in a front page "exclusive" about Sydney's drunken street violence culture, and reveals details of his personal opinions about alcohol and it's role in Australian society that may surprise some:
"...there's a world of difference between having two or three drinks a night and occasionally a bit more on a Saturday night and this new binge culture which sees young people drinking nothing from one week to the next and then, when they drink, not knowing when or how to stop."

So it's not drinking, it's not knowing how to, well, hold your piss (as Australians used to say).


Here's the full piece by PM Abbott:
Like most Australians, I enjoy a drink on social occasions.
However, as a father and as a citizen, I'm appalled by the violent binge drinking culture that now seems so prevalent, especially at "hot spots" in our big cities.
I'm sick of the fact that alcohol-fuelled violence has turned places that should be entertainment precincts into "no-go zones".

Hospital emergency departments should not be overflowing with the victims of substance abuse every Friday and Saturday night. The media should not be full of stories about the latest casualties from our own streets.
 
We've got two problems. The first problem is the binge drinking culture which has become all too prevalent among youngsters over the last couple of decades. I'm realistic enough to know that young people won't always be perfect and that making mistakes along the way is a normal part of growing up.
I certainly made a few mistakes as a younger man and have got into some embarrassing situations.
However, there's a world of difference between having two or three drinks a night and occasionally a bit more on a Saturday night and this new binge culture which sees young people drinking nothing from one week to the next and then, when they drink, not knowing when or how to stop.

The second problem is the rise of the disturbed individual who goes out looking not for a fight but for a victim.

We are seeing these king-hits, or coward punches as they are now being called. They are random acts of unprovoked, gratuitous violence.

Inevitably the target is an individual quietly getting on with life. This is a vicious, horrible change.

Brutal people, often with a history of violence, are getting it into their heads to pick on a vulnerable individual. It is utterly cowardly. It's brutal, it's gratuitous, it's utterly unprovoked and it should be dealt with very severely by the police and the courts.

It is well known that as a university student I played rugby and boxed. Boxing taught me many things, including the power of a single punch. If there's danger from a single punch in a boxing ring, it is multiplied exponentially when it's delivered to an unsuspecting or unprepared victim on a concrete footpath, or in a crowded pub or club.

Tragically, it's not just one young life that is destroyed but many. In an instant, one person becomes a victim, another a criminal - and the lives of their families are irrevocably damaged.

As Prime Minister I accept that the fundamental responsibility in this area lies with state governments. It's not just Barry O'Farrell's problem, it's an issue that communities are facing in suburbs and regional centres across Australia.

While we all want to see the courts absolutely throw the book at people who perpetrate this kind of gratuitous, unprovoked violence, we have to recognise that courts can act only after a crime. The challenge for officialdom at every level, for the police, for pubs and clubs as well as for parents and young people is to tackle the binge drinking culture and the violent behaviour that is accompanying it.

We also have to identify if drugs like steroids are also contributing to this outbreak of violent behaviour. There is enough anecdotal evidence from police and our emergency rooms that what we are seeing is not fuelled by alcohol alone. Alcohol is consumed along with other drugs such as ice and other amphetamines.

We need to tackle this issue in a comprehensive and considered way. We don't need kneejerk reactions and stunts that give the illusion of action, but don't make any real, lasting difference.

We need community solutions between police, local government, pubs and clubs and residents. Some communities have already demonstrated that progress can be made and many pubs, clubs and alcohol providers have discovered it is better to solve a problem and be part of the solution, than have a solution imposed on them.

We have to approach this in a way that makes our streets safer. That means resisting the idea one single action will change everything; that one group is responsible for this problem or one politician has the answer or is the cause. While this is not an easy area, with much control in the hands of state and local governments, the Commonwealth stands ready to work with the states, parents and communities. to tackle this scourge.

Alcohol has and always will be part of life in our country - and most countries. Our challenge is to get the balance right.
Abbott is giving a free pass to alcohol profiteers, saying alcohol is a part of Australian society, and that's it. Is this really the right message to be sending out to youth? It's OK to drink 20 or more alcholic beverages a week, as long as you learn how to hold your piss?

He is also claiming that alcohol alone might not be responsible for drunken rages, and while that may be true, the proof is not in yet. Violent idiots are getting pissed and attacking innocent people. This was happening long before steroids or amphetamines infiltrated Australian culture.

The rest of the story is here

Education Minister Christopher Pyne Warms Up For His Rewriting Of History Curriculum

This piece written by federal Education Minister Christopher Pyne was paywalled by The Australian. Here is is for free:
A robust, relevant and up-to-date Australian Curriculum is essential to improve the quality of education of all school students.

The Australian government wants a curriculum that delivers what students need for their future, what parents want and what the nation requires in our increasingly competitive and globalised world.

It must be both content-rich and, importantly, focus on the 21st-century skills of critical thinking, team work, problem solving, creativity, analytic reasoning and communication.

It must help students to be the best they can be. It must be based on high standards and high expectations for all students.

A modern and relevant curriculum must also be one that teachers are excited to teach.

More than anything else, we want to take the politics out of this issue. What really matters to students and parents is whether the curriculum is the best possible that we can create.

That means a curriculum that is balanced in its content, free of partisan bias and deals with real-world issues.

But that doesn't mean the curriculum should be dull. Australia needs a curriculum that helps teachers to breathe life into a child's time at school, one that challenges students and assists them to make the right choices for their future.

It means a curriculum that is dynamic and evolves as necessary while maintaining an independent, robust foundation so it is effective in meeting student needs.

A small nation like Australia must develop a curriculum that is national in breadth, rigorous in content, flexible and innovative in delivery and is a key driver in our goal to improve genuine education quality results for all Australian students. We cannot afford to do otherwise.

Working with the state and territory governments, the Howard government got the ball rolling. The previous government continued this work and now it is timely to review the content of the curriculum to take into account the many views expressed so far.

In particular, concerns have been raised about the history curriculum not recognising the legacy of Western civilisation and not giving important events in Australia's history and culture the prominence they deserve, such as Anzac Day.

Today, I am announcing the appointment of Ken Wiltshire AO and Kevin Donnelly to review the Australian Curriculum so we develop and implement a curriculum that is on par with the world's best.
Between them, Professor Wiltshire and Dr Donnelly have enormous experience in education and improving the performance of educational systems.

The time is right to bring this exceptional expertise and insight to bear on examining the robustness, independence and balance of the Australian Curriculum. They will do this by evaluating both the process of its development and the content.

I have asked them to gather the views of parents, state and territory governments and educators to inform their analysis.

I am excited about putting the Australian Curriculum on a robust and sustainable path, but this is just one aspect of how we are putting students first in our education policies.

In his new year message, the Prime Minister reminded us that we are a strong, resilient and smart people, and that the strength of our country lies in the willingness of Australians to improve their own lives by "having a go".

That's why the two principles I always come back to are putting students first and implementing what works.

There's a great deal of research that shows higher school achievement depends on teacher quality, school autonomy, a robust curriculum and parental engagement in their child's education.

Adequate funding for schools is obviously necessary, but increasing funding should never be an end in itself.

Countries that spend a high proportion of their GDP on education do not automatically produce high-performing education systems.

So this year I will be working hard with the states and territories to ensure our children are getting a high-quality, world-class education by focusing on those four key areas of teacher quality, principal autonomy, parental engagement and strengthening the curriculum.

I'll be focusing on these areas because they will make a real difference to students and their education.

Professor Wiltshire and Dr Donnelly have a great responsibility to help the government ensure that what we are teaching our children is true, worthwhile and meaningful.

"And into this deadly crevice they fed their heroic, young obedient populations"


 Personally, and coming from an old Australian family that had more than a few members serve during World War I, I think Paul Keating's 2013 "controversial" Remembrance Day speech was one of the finest ever given on the awful human disaster that robbed Australian of so many young men,  and left us saddled with an Imperial War debt in the hundreds of millions of pounds. And for what?

Paul Keating, November 11, 2013:
Nine months from now, one hundred years ago, the horror of all ages came together to open the curtain on mankind's greatest century of violence the twentieth century.

What distinguished the First World War from all wars before it was the massive power of the antagonists.

Modern weaponry, mass conscription and indefatigable valour produced a cauldron of destruction the likes of which the world had never seen.

The statesmen who had set these forces in motion had never assumed that their conflict might be limited only by the scale of their young populations. They failed to understand how developing industrial organisation, railways, science and rising productive capacity rendered almost inexhaustible the ability of each to deliver the death blow and keep on delivering it.

The generals, especially the Allied ones, knew through military training that not since the Napoleonic Wars had frontal attacks been effective certainly not against the foil of barbed wire fortified by the modern machine gun. Yet, a line of trenches was dug, from the English Channel to the Swiss Alps - a front which denied commanders the opportunity of that classic military manoeuvre - the turning flank and encirclement. This denied, the line was fortified by major cannon and howitzers, while
the generals fell back on the only policy left to them - the policy of exhaustion.

And into this deadly crevice they fed their heroic, young obedient populations.

The First World War was a war devoid of any virtue. It arose from the quagmire of European tribalism. A complex interplay of nation state destinies overlaid by notions of cultural superiority peppered with racism.

The First World War not only destroyed European civilisation and the empires at its heart; its aftermath led to a second conflagration, the Second World War, which divided the continent until the end of the century.

But at the end of the century, from the shadows, a new light emerged. Europe turned its back on the nation state to favour a greater European construct. Individual loyalties are now directed from nationalist obsessions toward an amorphous whole and to institutions unlikely to garner a popular base. It is difficult to imagine these days, young Europeans going into combat for the European Commission, or at a stretch, the European Parliament.

This advent means that European leaders are no longer in a position to ask or demand the sacrifices which once attended their errant foreign policies. A century beyond Armageddon, young men and women are now freed from that kind of tyranny.

The virulent European disease of cultural nationalism and ethnic atavism not only destroyed Europe, it destroyed the equilibrium of the world.

While a century ago Australia was an outreach of European civilisation, here we had set about constructing an image of ourselves, free of the racial hatreds and contempts which characterised European society.

Though White Australia institutionalised a policy of bias to Caucasians; within Australia we were moving through the processes of our federation to new ideas of ourselves. Notions of equality and fairness suffrage for women, a universal living wage, support in old age, a sense of inclusive
patriotism.

And our sense of nation brought new resonances; Australian stories, poetry and ideas of our Australian-ness. We even developed a celebratory decorative style in our architecture and named that Federation. We had crystallised a good idea of ourselves and had begun to break free of the dismal legacy of Europe's ethnic stigmatisation and social stratification.

By 1915 we had no need to re-affirm our European heritage at the price of being dragged to a European holocaust. We had escaped that mire, both sociologically and geographically. But out of loyalty to imperial Britain, we returned to Europe's killing fields to decide the status of
Germany, a question which should earlier have been settled by foresight and statecraft.

Those bloody battles in Flanders, on the Western Front and at Gallipoli nevertheless distinguished us, demonstrating what we were made of. Our embrace of a new sense of human values and relationships through these events, gave substance to what is now the Anzac tradition. For whatever claims Britain and its empire had on those who served and died on the Western Front and at Gallipoli, the primary claim remained Australia's.

Those Australians fought and died not in defence of some old world notion of competing empires and territorial conquests but for the new world the one they belonged to and hoped to return to.

This is why Australia was never in need of any redemption at Gallipoli, any more than it was in need of one at Kokoda thirty years later. There was nothing missing in our young nation or our idea of it that required the martial baptism of a European cataclysm to legitimise us.

What the Anzac legend did do, by the bravery and sacrifice of our troops, was reinforce our own cultural notions of independence, mateship and ingenuity. Of resilience and courage in adversity. We liked the lesson about supposedly ordinary people; we liked finding that they were not ordinary at all. Despite the fact that the military campaigns were shockingly flawed and incompetently executed, those ordinary people distinguished themselves by their latent nobility.

The unknown Australian soldier interred in this memorial reminds us of these lessons as much as he reminds us of the more than 100,000 Australians lost to us by war.

I regard as a singular honour, the decision by the Council of the War Memorial to permanently display an engraving of the oration I gave as Prime Minister at the funeral service of the unknown Australian soldier on 11 November 1993. And to have some words from that oration inscribed
on that hallowed tomb. My time as Prime Minister spanned the period of the Pacific War, 1941 to 1945, fifty years on. It caused me to visit the sites of our military action from Papua New Guinea through to Thailand. It made me think much and write about the various episodes of conflict,
of the bravery and suffering of Australian service men and women during the Second World War.

This context sharpened the memory and essence of the Anzac legend, within which it was decided to inter an unnamed, unknown Australian soldier in the Memorial's Hall of Memory.

Indeed, the War Memorial's then director, Brendan Kelson and his deputy, Michael McKiernan, were instrumental in the process that led to the interment of the soldier.

The words the Memorial enshrines today were written for that occasion.

When Don Watson and I first discussed the writing of it, we both felt the poignancy of the occasion. My uncle, William Keating, had died in 1945 on the death march from Sandakan to Ranau, while Don Watson's grandfather was twice wounded in Flanders after being infected with Spanish flu. He returned to Australia, never recovering from it.

The history of those two theatres of war had haunted each of our lives in differing yet similar ways.

I thought it important that the speech express with clarity, simple notions of understanding and appreciation that went in personal terms, such that we might have been speaking of a relative who had died in some contemporary calamity. Hence the notion that he was all of them yet one of us.

By his interment, I thought it important to say that this unknown Australian soldier would serve his country yet again. That his presence would give us a deeper understanding of what it means to be Australian as well as serving to remind us of the sacrifice of the more than one hundred thousand men and women who never came home.

As Prime Minister, I was particularly pleased to bring these episodes of our history, especially the First and Second World Wars, into sharper relief. To remind us that the deeds of our men and women at war give us an opportunity to renew our belief in the country, while renewing our appreciation of their faith, loyalty and sacrifice.

The soul of a nation is the richer for it having been warmed by its stories and traditions. Yet its stories and traditions should not stifle or constrain its growth as it needs to adapt.

I am greatly heartened that so many young Australians find a sense of identity and purpose from the Anzac legend and from those Australian men and women who have fought in wars over the last hundred years. But the true commemoration of their lives, service and sacrifice is to understand that the essence of their motivation was their belief in all we had created here and our responsibility in continuing to improve it.

Homage to these people has to be homage to them and about them and not to some idealised or jingoist reduction of what their lives really meant.

One thing is certain: young Australians, like the young Europeans I mentioned earlier, can no longer be dragooned en masse into military enterprises of the former imperial variety on the whim of so-called statesmen. They are fortunately too wise to the world to be cannon fodder of the kind their young forebears became: young innocents who had little or no choice.

Commemorating these events should make us even more wary of grand ambitions and grand alliances of the kind that fractured Europe and darkened the twentieth century. In the long shadow of these upheavals, we gather to ponder their meaning and to commemorate the values that shone in their wake: courage under pressure, ingenuity in adversity, bonds of mateship and above all, loyalty to Australia.

There is a lot more to be said about Australia's role, and sacrifice, in World War I, and boy, are we sure going to hear about it this year. All year long.

NINE months from now, one hundred years ago, the horror of all ages came together to open the curtain on mankind's greatest century of violence the twentieth century.
What distinguished the First World War from all wars before it was the massive power of the antagonists.
Modern weaponry, mass conscription and indefatigable valour produced a cauldron of destruction the likes of which the world had never seen.
The statesmen who had set these forces in motion had never assumed that their conflict might be limited only by the scale of their young populations. They failed to understand how developing industrial organisation, railways, science and rising productive capacity rendered almost inexhaustible the ability of each to deliver the death blow and keep on delivering it.
The generals, especially the Allied ones, knew through military training that not since the Napoleonic Wars had frontal attacks been effective certainly not against the foil of barbed wire fortified by the modern machine gun. Yet, a line of trenches was dug, from the English Channel to the Swiss Alps - a front which denied commanders the opportunity of that classic military manoeuvre - the turning flank and encirclement. This denied, the line was fortified by major cannon and howitzers, while the generals fell back on the only policy left to them - the policy of exhaustion.
And into this deadly crevice they fed their heroic, young obedient populations.
The First World War was a war devoid of any virtue. It arose from the quagmire of European tribalism. A complex interplay of nation state destinies overlaid by notions of cultural superiority peppered with racism.
The First World War not only destroyed European civilisation and the empires at its heart; its aftermath led to a second conflagration, the Second World War, which divided the continent until the end of the century.
But at the end of the century, from the shadows, a new light emerged. Europe turned its back on the nation state to favour a greater European construct. Individual loyalties are now directed from nationalist obsessions toward an amorphous whole and to institutions unlikely to garner a popular base. It is difficult to imagine these days, young Europeans going into combat for the European Commission, or at a stretch, the European Parliament.
This advent means that European leaders are no longer in a position to ask or demand the sacrifices which once attended their errant foreign policies. A century beyond Armageddon, young men and women are now freed from that kind of tyranny.
The virulent European disease of cultural nationalism and ethnic atavism not only destroyed Europe, it destroyed the equilibrium of the world.
While a century ago Australia was an outreach of European civilisation, here we had set about constructing an image of ourselves, free of the racial hatreds and contempts which characterised European society. Though White Australia institutionalised a policy of bias to Caucasians; within Australia we were moving through the processes of our federation to new ideas of ourselves. Notions of equality and fairness suffrage for women, a universal living wage, support in old age, a sense of inclusive patriotism.
And our sense of nation brought new resonances; Australian stories, poetry and ideas of our Australian-ness. We even developed a celebratory decorative style in our architecture and named that Federation. We had crystallised a good idea of ourselves and had begun to break free of the dismal legacy of Europe's ethnic stigmatisation and social stratification.
By 1915 we had no need to re-affirm our European heritage at the price of being dragged to a European holocaust. We had escaped that mire, both sociologically and geographically. But out of loyalty to imperial Britain, we returned to Europe's killing fields to decide the status of Germany, a question which should earlier have been settled by foresight and statecraft.
Those bloody battles in Flanders, on the Western Front and at Gallipoli nevertheless distinguished us, demonstrating what we were made of. Our embrace of a new sense of human values and relationships through these events, gave substance to what is now the Anzac tradition. For whatever claims Britain and its empire had on those who served and died on the Western Front and at Gallipoli, the primary claim remained Australia's.
Those Australians fought and died not in defence of some old world notion of competing empires and territorial conquests but for the new world the one they belonged to and hoped to return to.
This is why Australia was never in need of any redemption at Gallipoli, any more than it was in need of one at Kokoda thirty years later. There was nothing missing in our young nation or our idea of it that required the martial baptism of a European cataclysm to legitimise us.
What the Anzac legend did do, by the bravery and sacrifice of our troops, was reinforce our own cultural notions of independence, mateship and ingenuity. Of resilience and courage in adversity. We liked the lesson about supposedly ordinary people; we liked finding that they were not ordinary at all. Despite the fact that the military campaigns were shockingly flawed and incompetently executed, those ordinary people distinguished themselves by their latent nobility.
The unknown Australian soldier interred in this memorial reminds us of these lessons as much as he reminds us of the more than 100,000 Australians lost to us by war.
I regard as a singular honour, the decision by the Council of the War Memorial to permanently display an engraving of the oration I gave as Prime Minister at the funeral service of the unknown Australian soldier on 11 November 1993. And to have some words from that oration inscribed on that hallowed tomb. My time as Prime Minister spanned the period of the Pacific War, 1941 to 1945, fifty years on. It caused me to visit the sites of our military action from Papua New Guinea through to Thailand. It made me think much and write about the various episodes of conflict, of the bravery and suffering of Australian service men and women during the Second World War.
This context sharpened the memory and essence of the Anzac legend, within which it was decided to inter an unnamed, unknown Australian soldier in the Memorial's Hall of Memory.
Indeed, the War Memorial's then director, Brendan Kelson and his deputy, Michael McKiernan, were instrumental in the process that led to the interment of the soldier.
The words the Memorial enshrines today were written for that occasion.
When Don Watson and I first discussed the writing of it, we both felt the poignancy of the occasion. My uncle, William Keating, had died in 1945 on the death march from Sandakan to Ranau, while Don Watson's grandfather was twice wounded in Flanders after being infected with Spanish flu. He returned to Australia, never recovering from it.
The history of those two theatres of war had haunted each of our lives in differing yet similar ways.
I thought it important that the speech express with clarity, simple notions of understanding and appreciation that went in personal terms, such that we might have been speaking of a relative who had died in some contemporary calamity. Hence the notion that he was all of them yet one of us.
By his interment, I thought it important to say that this unknown Australian soldier would serve his country yet again. That his presence would give us a deeper understanding of what it means to be Australian as well as serving to remind us of the sacrifice of the more than one hundred thousand men and women who never came home.
As Prime Minister, I was particularly pleased to bring these episodes of our history, especially the First and Second World Wars, into sharper relief. To remind us that the deeds of our men and women at war give us an opportunity to renew our belief in the country, while renewing our appreciation of their faith, loyalty and sacrifice.
The soul of a nation is the richer for it having been warmed by its stories and traditions. Yet its stories and traditions should not stifle or constrain its growth as it needs to adapt.
I am greatly heartened that so many young Australians find a sense of identity and purpose from the Anzac legend and from those Australian men and women who have fought in wars over the last hundred years. But the true commemoration of their lives, service and sacrifice is to understand that the essence of their motivation was their belief in all we had created here and our responsibility in continuing to improve it.
Homage to these people has to be homage to them and about them and not to some idealised or jingoist reduction of what their lives really meant.
One thing is certain: young Australians, like the young Europeans I mentioned earlier, can no longer be dragooned en masse into military enterprises of the former imperial variety on the whim of so-called statesmen. They are fortunately too wise to the world to be cannon fodder of the kind their young forebears became: young innocents who had little or no choice.
Commemorating these events should make us even more wary of grand ambitions and grand alliances of the kind that fractured Europe and darkened the twentieth century. In the long shadow of these upheavals, we gather to ponder their meaning and to commemorate the values that shone in their wake: courage under pressure, ingenuity in adversity, bonds of mateship and above all, loyalty to Australia.
- See more at: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/policy/paul-keatings-remembrance-day-commemorative-address/story-e6frg8yo-1226757270589#sthash.16vxOzMf.dpuf
NINE months from now, one hundred years ago, the horror of all ages came together to open the curtain on mankind's greatest century of violence the twentieth century.
What distinguished the First World War from all wars before it was the massive power of the antagonists.
Modern weaponry, mass conscription and indefatigable valour produced a cauldron of destruction the likes of which the world had never seen.
The statesmen who had set these forces in motion had never assumed that their conflict might be limited only by the scale of their young populations. They failed to understand how developing industrial organisation, railways, science and rising productive capacity rendered almost inexhaustible the ability of each to deliver the death blow and keep on delivering it.
The generals, especially the Allied ones, knew through military training that not since the Napoleonic Wars had frontal attacks been effective certainly not against the foil of barbed wire fortified by the modern machine gun. Yet, a line of trenches was dug, from the English Channel to the Swiss Alps - a front which denied commanders the opportunity of that classic military manoeuvre - the turning flank and encirclement. This denied, the line was fortified by major cannon and howitzers, while the generals fell back on the only policy left to them - the policy of exhaustion.
And into this deadly crevice they fed their heroic, young obedient populations.
The First World War was a war devoid of any virtue. It arose from the quagmire of European tribalism. A complex interplay of nation state destinies overlaid by notions of cultural superiority peppered with racism.
The First World War not only destroyed European civilisation and the empires at its heart; its aftermath led to a second conflagration, the Second World War, which divided the continent until the end of the century.
But at the end of the century, from the shadows, a new light emerged. Europe turned its back on the nation state to favour a greater European construct. Individual loyalties are now directed from nationalist obsessions toward an amorphous whole and to institutions unlikely to garner a popular base. It is difficult to imagine these days, young Europeans going into combat for the European Commission, or at a stretch, the European Parliament.
This advent means that European leaders are no longer in a position to ask or demand the sacrifices which once attended their errant foreign policies. A century beyond Armageddon, young men and women are now freed from that kind of tyranny.
The virulent European disease of cultural nationalism and ethnic atavism not only destroyed Europe, it destroyed the equilibrium of the world.
While a century ago Australia was an outreach of European civilisation, here we had set about constructing an image of ourselves, free of the racial hatreds and contempts which characterised European society. Though White Australia institutionalised a policy of bias to Caucasians; within Australia we were moving through the processes of our federation to new ideas of ourselves. Notions of equality and fairness suffrage for women, a universal living wage, support in old age, a sense of inclusive patriotism.
And our sense of nation brought new resonances; Australian stories, poetry and ideas of our Australian-ness. We even developed a celebratory decorative style in our architecture and named that Federation. We had crystallised a good idea of ourselves and had begun to break free of the dismal legacy of Europe's ethnic stigmatisation and social stratification.
By 1915 we had no need to re-affirm our European heritage at the price of being dragged to a European holocaust. We had escaped that mire, both sociologically and geographically. But out of loyalty to imperial Britain, we returned to Europe's killing fields to decide the status of Germany, a question which should earlier have been settled by foresight and statecraft.
Those bloody battles in Flanders, on the Western Front and at Gallipoli nevertheless distinguished us, demonstrating what we were made of. Our embrace of a new sense of human values and relationships through these events, gave substance to what is now the Anzac tradition. For whatever claims Britain and its empire had on those who served and died on the Western Front and at Gallipoli, the primary claim remained Australia's.
Those Australians fought and died not in defence of some old world notion of competing empires and territorial conquests but for the new world the one they belonged to and hoped to return to.
This is why Australia was never in need of any redemption at Gallipoli, any more than it was in need of one at Kokoda thirty years later. There was nothing missing in our young nation or our idea of it that required the martial baptism of a European cataclysm to legitimise us.
What the Anzac legend did do, by the bravery and sacrifice of our troops, was reinforce our own cultural notions of independence, mateship and ingenuity. Of resilience and courage in adversity. We liked the lesson about supposedly ordinary people; we liked finding that they were not ordinary at all. Despite the fact that the military campaigns were shockingly flawed and incompetently executed, those ordinary people distinguished themselves by their latent nobility.
The unknown Australian soldier interred in this memorial reminds us of these lessons as much as he reminds us of the more than 100,000 Australians lost to us by war.
I regard as a singular honour, the decision by the Council of the War Memorial to permanently display an engraving of the oration I gave as Prime Minister at the funeral service of the unknown Australian soldier on 11 November 1993. And to have some words from that oration inscribed on that hallowed tomb. My time as Prime Minister spanned the period of the Pacific War, 1941 to 1945, fifty years on. It caused me to visit the sites of our military action from Papua New Guinea through to Thailand. It made me think much and write about the various episodes of conflict, of the bravery and suffering of Australian service men and women during the Second World War.
This context sharpened the memory and essence of the Anzac legend, within which it was decided to inter an unnamed, unknown Australian soldier in the Memorial's Hall of Memory.
Indeed, the War Memorial's then director, Brendan Kelson and his deputy, Michael McKiernan, were instrumental in the process that led to the interment of the soldier.
The words the Memorial enshrines today were written for that occasion.
When Don Watson and I first discussed the writing of it, we both felt the poignancy of the occasion. My uncle, William Keating, had died in 1945 on the death march from Sandakan to Ranau, while Don Watson's grandfather was twice wounded in Flanders after being infected with Spanish flu. He returned to Australia, never recovering from it.
The history of those two theatres of war had haunted each of our lives in differing yet similar ways.
I thought it important that the speech express with clarity, simple notions of understanding and appreciation that went in personal terms, such that we might have been speaking of a relative who had died in some contemporary calamity. Hence the notion that he was all of them yet one of us.
By his interment, I thought it important to say that this unknown Australian soldier would serve his country yet again. That his presence would give us a deeper understanding of what it means to be Australian as well as serving to remind us of the sacrifice of the more than one hundred thousand men and women who never came home.
As Prime Minister, I was particularly pleased to bring these episodes of our history, especially the First and Second World Wars, into sharper relief. To remind us that the deeds of our men and women at war give us an opportunity to renew our belief in the country, while renewing our appreciation of their faith, loyalty and sacrifice.
The soul of a nation is the richer for it having been warmed by its stories and traditions. Yet its stories and traditions should not stifle or constrain its growth as it needs to adapt.
I am greatly heartened that so many young Australians find a sense of identity and purpose from the Anzac legend and from those Australian men and women who have fought in wars over the last hundred years. But the true commemoration of their lives, service and sacrifice is to understand that the essence of their motivation was their belief in all we had created here and our responsibility in continuing to improve it.
Homage to these people has to be homage to them and about them and not to some idealised or jingoist reduction of what their lives really meant.
One thing is certain: young Australians, like the young Europeans I mentioned earlier, can no longer be dragooned en masse into military enterprises of the former imperial variety on the whim of so-called statesmen. They are fortunately too wise to the world to be cannon fodder of the kind their young forebears became: young innocents who had little or no choice.
Commemorating these events should make us even more wary of grand ambitions and grand alliances of the kind that fractured Europe and darkened the twentieth century. In the long shadow of these upheavals, we gather to ponder their meaning and to commemorate the values that shone in their wake: courage under pressure, ingenuity in adversity, bonds of mateship and above all, loyalty to Australia.
- See more at: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/policy/paul-keatings-remembrance-day-commemorative-address/story-e6frg8yo-1226757270589#sthash.16vxOzMf.dpuf

2013 - Too Lazy To Do A Year In Review, So...

Yes, I've neglected the hell out of this blog, and my other blogs, during 2013. I've missed a lot of great stories and untold controversies. But I have been finishing books, writing songs, editing music videos and a few music documentaries, many of which should surface sometime this year and in 2015 (fuck that's weird to actually type that, 2015, such a futuristic year, and now so close...).

So, instead of me attempting to round up all the Orstrahyun-related stories I should have been running, I'm going to cheat and use these excelletn videos by Shaun Micallef instead. If you were paying to read thi blog, you could complain, but you're not, so you can't.

2013 - The Year In Review Part 1



2013 - The Year In Review Part 2



2013 - The Year In Review Part 3



2013 - The Year In Review Part 4



What a year. But 2014 is going to be even crazier. Wait and see!

Oh right, you don't have to wait, 2014 has already begun.