The Orstrahyun
Readership - 2.5 million (April 2014) www.twitter.com/darrylmason
Thursday, October 10, 2024
The AC/DC-Angels Intersection, with John Brewster
Saturday, October 05, 2024
What If Australia's Breakout Band Of 2025 Is Named 'Worst Album Ever'?
Australia's 'Worst Album Ever' band |
'Worst Album Ever' Band has clocked up 10,000s of YouTube views in a few months, with no marketing.
Monday, September 30, 2024
Wild Magpies Singing & Rocking Out
Tuesday, September 17, 2024
Climate Change Exhibition At Sydney Museum, 2009
Australian UFO History: February, 1947: 'White Egg-Shaped Objects Moving At Incredible Speed'
'WHITE EGG FLYING OBJECTS' REPORTED IN AUSTRALIA IN EARLY 1947
What a surprise. There is no mention of UFOs, spacecraft, aliens or flying saucers in this Australian newspaper story from February, 1947 about mysterious 'egg-shaped' objects spotted in the skies.. The term "Flying Saucers" hadn't been invented by newspapers yet.
People saw something strange in the sky at night, in Port Augusta, Australia, shortly after the end of World War II, they reported it, newspapers wrote it up. There was no speculation that "aliens" were involved, or that the objects were from another planet, because people had not yet been trained by news media to think of unusual objects in the sky that way.
The below story is from early February, 1947. The Kenneth Arnold sightings that saw American newspapers popularise the term 'Flying Saucers' didn't happen until June 1947.
Text:
While working in the yard at the Commonwealth Railways work-
shops yesterday morning Mr. Ron Ellis and two workmates claim to
have seen five strange objects in formation pass across the sky from
north to south.
size of the objects, but they were casting shadows, and judging by
his experience with aircraft in the RAAF during the war he considered they were about the size of a locomotive.
6,000 feet they appeared to be quivering, he said. Owing to their great
speed they were out of sight within a few seconds.
Any question of the phenomenon being an optical illusion was dis-
pelled by the fact that a few minutes later both Mr. Ellis and his companion gave an identical description of what they had seen.
staff who said that he had also seen the objects."
Fascinating, isn't it? How such stories were once reported?
Note: I predict a 'UFO Researcher' will take my research and the news clipping I found and reproduce it on a popular YouTube or podcast episode without credit by late October, 2024.
Monday, September 16, 2024
The Whitlam Coup And The CIA In Australia
Rob Cobb's 1972 cartoon on Australia as 'Imperialism's Best Friend.' |
- VICTOR MARCHETTI, ex-CIA officer, 1980
The Federal Government assumed responsibility for Aboriginal health, education and welfare, and the first land rights legislation for Aborigines was drafted. Cultural initiatives for women, Aborigines and immigrants were set up. Imperial honours such as knighthoods and MBEs were scrapped. The "Commonwealth Government" was renamed the Australian Government and an Australian anthem replaced "God Save the Queen."
The Australian Government also pressed for support for the Indian Ocean Zone of Peace, which was opposed by the US, and spoke up in the United Nations for Palestinian rights. The French were condemned for testing nuclear weapons in the South Pacific, and refugees fleeing the CIA-backed coup in Chile were welcomed into Australia (an irony in the light of Washington's retaliation against Whitlam).
Ron Cobb's cartoon on rumours the U.S. was using Australia as a nuclear missile base in the 1970s |
"We were told that the Australians might as well be regarded as North Vietnamese collaborators."
Whitlam also discovered that ASIS agents were working for the CIA in Chile, de-stabilising the government of Salvador Allende, who was supported by the Australian Labor Government. Whitlam promptly ordered the ASIS officers home. However, some remained in Chile under Australian Embassy cover and without Whitlam's knowledge; Allende was subsequently murdered during the CIA-orchestrated military coup led by the dictator General Augusto Pinochet.
Most important of all is Pine Gap, near Alice Springs, officially described as an American- Australian "Joint Defence Space Research Facility", but in actuality it is an entirely American spy-satellite base, run by the CIA and the NSA.
In October 1973, during the Middle East War, President Nixon put U.S. forces on nuclear "Level Three" alert, through the base at North West Cape. Australia had become involved, without the knowledge of its government, in a war on the other side of the world. When Whitlam found out about this, he was furious and told Parliament that although the Australian government would honour agreements with America covering existing spy stations, "there will not be extensions or proliferations."
Green visited the office of Clyde Cameron, a senior minister in the Whitlam government, and made the threat that if the Labor Government honoured one of its key election pledges to reclaim national ownership of oil refineries and other industries which had been mostly sold to American transnational interests, "we would move in."
The CIA set about a programme of discrediting Jim Cairns, leader of the anti-Vietnam War movement. ASIO timed the leak of a defamatory "Cairns file" to the Bulletin magazine to coincide with Cairns' election to Deputy Prime Minister in 1974.
At the same time as U.S. intelligence was targeting the Australian Labor Government, Peter Wright (of Spycatcher infamy) and his colleagues in British intelligence were busy destabilising the British Labour Government of Harold Wilson. Wright conspired with his close friend, James Jesus Angleton, the extreme right-wing head of CIA counter-intelligence, to "target" the three Western leaders they regarded as "Communist agents": Harold Wilson, Willy Brandt in Germany and Gough Whitlam.
The three Americans involved in supporting Bob Hawke's campaign for the Presidency of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) - Emil Lindahl, Gerry O'Keefe and Ed McHale - all worked for the CIA. Gerry O'Keefe was exposed as a major CIA operator in right-wing Chilean unions that helped to overthrow the Allende Government.
In 1977 the American Christopher Boyce disclosed details of CIA activities in Australia, specifically the manipulation of unions.
Boyce and his associate Andrew Daulton Lee were put on trial in 1977 for selling U.S. secrets to the Russians. Lee had flown to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico and sold details of the CIA's covert activities in Australia to the Soviets.
Evidence emerged during the trial that most of TRW's communications came from Pine Gap and that although the United States had signed an Executive Agreement with Australia to share information from Pine Gap, the agreement was not being honoured and "certain information" was regularly concealed from the Australian government.
Five years after the overthrow of Whitlam, in April 1981, senior executives of nineteen Australian corporations met at Melbourne's Noah's Hotel for a "forecasting round table" organised by Business International. Business International is a worldwide American organisation of "consultants" which represents the top multi-national companies in Australia. In December 1977, the New York Times exposed Business International's clandestine links with the CIA.
The nineteen had come to hear Business International's Alan Carroll express his concern about the resurgence of the Labor Party under Bill Hayden, who had held senior posts in the Whitlam Government and described himself as a republican and a democratic socialist.
Hawke's Government repeatedly refused to release some 1,200 documents on the Nugan Hand Bank, the front for international crime and illegal CIA operations in Australia.
End of excerpt.
The Full Story Is Here
Sunday, January 21, 2024
Rupert Murdoch Was Sent To Oxford University In 1950 To Dodge Australian Military Service
Rupert Murdoch Was Sent To Oxford University In 1950 To Dodge Australian Military Service
Sydney Tribune, June, 1950:
Saturday, December 23, 2023
Magpie In Wakki Records Studio
Photo By Darryl Mason |
Magpies hung around Wakki Studios at Wakki Beach, New South Wales, so often they ended up singing on songs.
Never Get Out Of The Boat
Northern Territory, 2008. Still have nightmares about my boot sinking into that mud and the mud not letting go, felt like it was pulling me in, holding me in place for Mr Chompy there.
Friday, July 29, 2022
Angus In The Outback - A.I. Art by Darryl Mason
Friday, February 28, 2020
MARCH 1789 BREAKING NEWS ABOUT 1788: 40 DEAD IN EXPEDITION TO BOTANY BAY
In images below, you will find the first lengthy newspaper report published in London, in March 1789, of the First Fleet arriving in Botany Bay in January, 1788. Scattered across other early 1789 issues of the Times of London are letters, editorials, blasting the sending of "slaves to New Holland." Debate raged on whether it was right or wrong to participate in the "white slave trade" when other countries were beginning to abolish such servitude. The morality of human cargo was quite the dinner table conversation amongst the London establishment.
The account below, and rewrites of it in other London newspapers of the era, was published to spread the 'good news' about what England was doing in a yet another 'new land', on the other side of the world, already inhabited and in use by First Nations people for 'untold centuries'.
This can be a little difficult to read, remembering that some of the letters that look like 'f' are actually 's'. It's worth reading it a few times, your brain will adjust.
While the "natives" are barely mentioned, do note in the above passage the use of convicts as human shields for the officer class in first attempts at communicating with people who clearly wanted to be left alone, and how the deaths of two convicts, and near starvation of the third, were used as Examples to other convicts on what would most definitely happen to all of them if they tried to run away before building the new town.
Some animals on board were smarter. After seeing their fellow cows die "during their passage," the cows that landed in the new land were out of there straight away. They bailed. They didn't know what their futures held out there, but they wanted to be as far away from First Fleeters as possible:
"...after their land, strayed so far in the woods as to be irrecoverably lost."
That was the first major, detailed, newspaper story, such as it is, of how the First Fleet landing and the beginning of the English and European occupation had unfolded. This Times of London story would have been read and absorbed, at the same time, for the first time, by royal family members, bankers, politicians, lawyers, traders, doctors, the sprawl of English establishment, along with 1000s of the literate poor.
The above story was the first and lasting impression of what this newly invaded land had to offer. The Narrative was set, in print, and in patriotic legend.
Source: London Times, March 27, 1789
Saturday, February 22, 2020
A Guide To The Australian Pandemic - The Last One And This One
What To Expect In An Australian Pandemic: Villages, Towns, Cities Quarantined...Churches, Schools, Workplaces Shut Down...Social Chaos...Food And Medical Shortages...Normal Life Ceases...100,000+ Australians Dead...Mobile Healthcheck Teams...Die In Your Homes
By Darryl Mason
Tony Abbott was Australia's Health Minister when Avian Flu threatened to become a global pandemic, in late 2005. The Howard Govt took the threat, and the advice of the World Health Organisation, seriously enough. They prepared. They had plans, and made them public. There was a Influenza Pandemic Worst Case Scenario and Tony Abbott was one of the ministers dispatched to the media to Get The Message Out.
Which he did. In some nighmarish late night TV interviews about "The Biological Tsunami", Tony Abbott stepped his way through the "inevitable" and very deadly influenza pandemic Australians would have to eventually face, and deal with.
If you thought he was rough as guts as Prime Minister, in 2005 Health Minister Tony Abbott was even more raw. He spilled on his knowledge from briefings on what The Worse Case Pandemic Scenario would look like in a kind of shocked awe. The scope of how daily life would be transformed in Australia during the "inevitable" influenza pandemic in the 21st century seemed to overload his mind.
"We don't know when a pandemic might happen, but if one does happen it will be a public health disaster, the magnitude of which this country has not seen at least since 1919 when we had the last flu pandemic."
"(in the scenario) medical facilities couldn't cope and there was widespread social breakdown, as people abandoned their posts concerned about their health.
"Now this is a pretty scary scenario, and just so people don't think it is entirely in the realm of science fiction - back in 1919, Australia had a Spanish flu pandemic outbreak and that killed some 13,000 Australians, in a then population of about 4 million and at different times in the first half of 1919, schools were closed, churches were closed, places of public gathering were off limits. Normal life had pretty much ceased in large parts of Australia. We have little folk memory of this though..."
In 1919, when at least 15,000 Australians died from the virus, the annual death rate of the nation jumped by 25%.
What did "abandoning their posts" actually mean in 1919? It meant police, soldiers, firefighters, ambulance drivers, nurses, medical professionals eventually having to choose between caring for sick family members at home, or those in public care. Or leaving when they themselves became sick.
Abbott raised this the 'abandonment of posts' in 2005 because the American Worst Case Scenario proposed the same would happen in the 21st Century, in the United States and Australia.
More than 300 Australian soldiers who had somehow survived the European slaughter fields of World War I died from the influenza pandemic within weeks or months of finally making it home.
There was little warning before The Great Influenza exploded into reality. Unlike most flu epidemics in the 1800s, this one killed without discrimination. It laid waste to infants, old people, healthy young men.
Here's how The Times of London dealt with the rising panic about the spread of The Great Influenza in early 1919, shortly before the virus rapidly killed 200,000+ across the United Kingdom:
If you caught The Great Influenza H1N1 virus, death could come within a matter of days. Your lungs filled with fluid, as your immune system battled the invader and overdid the defences. Survivors described H1N1-affected lungs as 'like trying to breathe through wet sand.' There was no cure.
Back then, for the first year, they didn't even know what exactly was killing millions of people. Was it a virus? Many experts thought it was a bacterium. A conspiracy theory raged in the the Allied nations of World War I that the Germans had invented a biological bomb in revenge for losing 'The Great War'.
In 1919-1920, doctors, hospitals, morgues and graveyards were overwhelmed by the endless casualties. In the US city of Philadelphia, 5000 people died in one week. Mass rioting broke out, whole streets full of cramped dwellings were torched and corpses were piled in mounds a dozen bodies high. They were tossed into carts and transported to mass burial sites. This was the United States in the age of cinema and radio.
In some European cities, entire towns were burned to the ground, with the dying still in their homes, to try and contain the spread of the virulent flu. Ships at sea were blocked from entering ports and became "floating caskets." Other ships were torched in harbours before passengers could get to land.
The influenza virus mutating, plus a lack of capable medical facilities, unsanitary hospitals, towns and cities, a shortage of doctors and nurses, also helped the 1918-19 death toll to move into the tens of millions, globally.
In Australia in 1918-1920, after hospitals were overwhelmed, as was common around the world, the infected were quarantined in their homes and left to live or die. You were either going to make it, or not.
"A pandemic if it hits Australia and it is of the severity of the 1918 outbreak, will potentially kill many thousands of people and it's hard to imagine any terrorist attack - short of a nuclear bomb in a major city - that would have a comparable impact.
"Back in the time of the Spanish flu there was much less international travel, people coming to Australia had to arrive by ship. Thanks to the then Commonwealth quarantine authorities we were quite effectively protected for many months. Certainly New Zealand, which put a much less stringent system of quarantine in place, was impacted very early and had about double the death rate of the flu outbreak in Australia, which is why in New Zealand they have a stronger folk memory of this than we do.
"We have plans for an escalating health response, including mobile teams, home quarantine, home treatment, so that only the very serious cases have to go to public hospitals. We would certainly be alerting people to the potential dangers of doing certain sorts of things. Whether we needed to close down public institutions would depend upon the virulence of the virus and who was most susceptible to it."
Maybe our Western govts already at 'Flu's Gonna Do What Flu's Gotta Do.' because some of their experts and advisers are telling them that even shutting down cities is an an action that will, ultimately, have only a limited effect on stopping the new influenza strain eventually reaching most people on the planet.