More Australian Towns Running Out Of Water

Town Water Supplies Being Diverted To Farms And Mines To Save Local Jobs

Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney are running out of water. The majority of dam levels for all four cities are falling to lows not seen for three or four decades. But Australian cities are not yet completely dry. The same, however, can't be said for more and more rural and outback towns. From my own research - there aren't any official figures - at least 20 towns with populations of 800 to 2000 people in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria have only one to four weeks worth of locally sourced fresh, drinkable water left. A few days of good rains will help, but months of regular rains are needed now, and no long-term forecasters are expecting such rains in the immediate future.

From the Sun Herald :

A number of outback NSW towns will run out of drinking water within weeks and be forced to truck it in, officials have warned.

Tilpa, on the Darling River, is no longer pumping water from the river for drinking and is relying on the last reserves in domestic rainwater tanks and bottled water.

General manager of Central Darling Shire Council Bill O'Brien said Wilcannia, once the third largest inland port in Australia, would have no water left in its weir in about a month and would have to switch to using salty bore water.

"The alternative was to try to buy water from Menindee, if any was available, and truck it in tankers over 165 kilometres of dirt roads at a cost of about $25,000 a week," Mr O'Brien said.

At Ivanhoe, which normally gets its water from the Lachlan River, bores are being used. Drinking water at White Cliffs is coming from rainwater tanks.

Mr O'Brien said the wellbeing of several thousand people living on the Darling and Lachlan was at risk because of continuing upstream water allocations for agriculture.

Tensions are increasing in these towns as they watch their water supplies being diverted to other "priorities", be they farms, towns facing more dire water shortages, or local industry.

And this is where the harshest choices of all will likely have to made.

Towns need drinking water, but do you shut off water to the local farms, thereby cutting back on crop yields and seeing job losses follow?

A local publican at Tilba reckons they've got only a week of water left. He drains water from the tanks at a local medical clinic, and 'trucks' it back to his pub on his motorcycle to fill the hotel's coffee urn.

Orange is home to thousands of people, and the local goldmine provides jobs for more than 500, as well as helping the local businesses and the community in general to stay alive.

But the Cadia goldmine needs water :

Council staff have endorsed the request for emergency water supplies to prevent the mine's closure, saving at least 500 jobs.

If the recommendation is adopted, water will be provided on a monthly basis and limited to five megalitres a day.

To save the local jobs, and the local economy, water that would go to homes has to go to local industry. It's a massive Catch 22 for all concerned.

If the jobs dry up, as the water supply dries up, how will people be able to stay in these towns, when there is both no jobs and little or no water?

Both the federal government and the opposition government are making big promises about rolling out rebates so that just about every Australian family can install a rainwater tank at home. But unlike the cities, many Australian rural and outback towns never got rid of their rainwater tanks, and they're still just about out of water.

Anyone know any good rain dances?

The "Armageddon Solution" To Mega-Drought - Two Queensland Towns May Have To Evacuated

When Australian Cities Run Out Of Water, Will They Have To Be Evacuated?

Pray For Rain : Melbourne Running Out Of Water, Dam Levels At 40 Year Lows

Drinking Beer Causes Climate Change?

Murdoch Media Wastes No Time In Blaming Working Class For Global Warming


"Drinking beer, driving the car, and mowing the lawn all contribute to climate changes.." claims news.com.au front page

By Darryl Mason

Less than 48 hours after News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch announced that his worldwide media corporation was Going Green, and that he intended to reduce his corporation's "carbon footprint" to zero by 2010, he's lived up to his promise to transform the thinking of News Corp's audience by guilt-tripping the Australian public over the amount of beer they drink and how they cut their grass :

Having just one schooner of beer after each working day costs the planet 120kg in greenhouse emissions each year.

Working fathers doing traditionally male household jobs like mowing the lawn and odd jobs around the home produce almost 3.75 tonnes of emissions each year.

Yesterday it was revealed Australian mothers juggling child-rearing responsibilities and housework pumped out more than four tonnes of emissions a year.

Simon Hunter, a father-of-two and owner of a wood-fired pizza restaurant in Seaforth, usually does two separate trips in his car each day - one to the bank in the morning and one 20-minute drive to work in the afternoon.

He uses a toaster and kettle at breakfast, as well as his computer.

The household's big energy guzzler is the airconditioning system, which he said would be switched on twice a day every second day.

"I make sure that lights are turned off when they're not being used because that's obviously money being wasted and it affects the environment," he said.

As the public debate on climate change heats up, Mr Hunter is thinking more about the latter.

"Everyone has to contribute, not just government but businesses and the individual," he said.

It's beautiful propaganda - inspiring, responsible and guilt-laden. Get used to it, the flow of similar articles and news products from Murdoch's media will only get thicker.

Murdoch was remarkably frank in this speech on May 9, about how he would use News Corp to transform the way the public thinks about climate change, "carbon footprints" and the why we must transform the way we live and work. Naturally, his speech was covered extensively across Murdoch's media spectrum :

Our audience's carbon footprint is 10,000 times bigger than ours...

That's the carbon footprint we want to conquer.

We cannot do it with gimmicks. We need to reach them in a sustained way. To weave this issue into our content-- make it dramatic, make it vivid, even sometimes make it fun. We want to inspire people to change their behavior.

Murdoch made it dramatically clear that he would use his media reach of some one billion people (via his cable, newspaper and online media companies) to change the way his mostly Western audience live their lives.

He intends to use his News Corp media assets to simultaneously inspire, guilt-trip and fear-up his worldwide audience about their impact on climate change and the future faced by their children and grandchildren.

But Rupert knows he has to do it subtly, less Fox News or the Sydney's Daily Telegraph become the embodiment of the environmental and green lobby groups so many of his journalists have long despised, mocked and relentlessly hammered :

We must avoid preaching. And there has to be substance behind the glitz. But if we are genuine, we can change the way the public thinks about these issues.

...the debate is shifting from whether climate change is really happening to how to solve it. And when so many of the solutions make sense for us as a business, it is clear that we should take action, not only as a matter of public responsibility but because we stand to benefit."

Guilt-trip the public and profit handsomely at the same time. It's the News Corp way.

Tasmanian Aboriginals To Bring Home Remains Of 17 Ancestors From British Museum

Aboriginal elders, and representatives, from Tasmanian tribes will return this weekend from the UK with skulls, bones and teeth of their relatives, after the British Museum relented over a long-running battle to have the remains returned to their homelands for proper burial, as Aboriginal custom demands :

After three days of mediation proceedings in London this week, the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC) and the museum agreed on the repatriation of the remains - including teeth, skulls and bones taken from Tasmania in the 19th century and held in the museum's research collections.

Under the decision, all of the remains will be returned and the museum will no longer be able to extract genetic material from them or conduct invasive tests.

TAC delegate Greg Brown said he was pleased with the outcome.

"We're happy with what's been agreed because we've been able to stop any additional testing, which was our ultimate aim when we first came over," Mr Brown said.

"Our belief system is that any remains of the dead need to be kept on the land, in traditional country, and that any separation of the two means that the spirit of that person remains restless.

"We need to bring both back together ... we have a cultural obligation to ensure that happens."

The remains were originally stolen by white settlers.

Aboriginal remains are also currently held by Cambridge University, Oxford University and institutions in Scotland. So far, these institutions have refused to hand over the Aboriginal remains they once displayed like trophies.

The Lord Is My...Stockman?

It's taken 30 years and the work of some 100 linguists and translators, but the Bible has finally been translated into an Aboriginal language, Kriol, a pidgin variation that was used by stockmen, and spread far and wide through the Northern Territory.

Only 200 or so other Aboriginal languages to go.

While the Kriol translation will no doubt be read, and welcomed by some Aborigines, it's not exactly going to be a record breaking print run for this version of the Bible. The Anglican Church, who commissioned and oversaw the translation, are showing great ambition, however, by planning to distribute some 30,000 copies of the Kriol translation through the Northern Territory in the coming months.

One of the reasons why it has taken so long to finish the translation is that numerous Bible stories and tales had to be rewritten so they made more sense to traditional Aborigines.

The Dreamtime tales traditionally passed down through the generations by oral storytelling are usually short on examples of Christian-based morality and concepts of kings and individual ownership. Many such stories don't have beginnings, middles and ends, as Western stories usually do, and for the most part were tales told for the benefit of learning how to hunt, what plants and roots were safe to eat, how to read the wind, the clouds and the landscape to forecast the coming season(s), and generally how to survive.

There was also the problem that Aboriginals tend to worship the Earth, more than some formless, all powerful entity. After all, it was knowing and loving and respecting the Earth that enabled them to survive in some of the harshest climates on the planet for more than 60,000 years.

The stories of the challenges faced by the linguists and translators are fascinating :

Peter Carroll, a linguist who worked on the translation, said the phrase “to love God with all one’s heart” was a special challenge. He said: “The Aboriginal people use a different part of the body to express emotions. They have a word that is, broadly translated, ‘insides’. So to love God with all your heart was to want God with all your insides.”

Margaret Mickan, another linguist who has been working on the translation since 1984, said: “If you want to get to the deep things of life and talk about meaningful things, about your beliefs and those sorts of things, then you need it in your own language. What has meaning is something that really touches and speaks to you in your own language.”

Those working on the project needed to check constantly with far-flung communities that their interpretations of language and Biblical concepts were correct – and they were often surprised to find that their offerings had vastly different meanings from what they had intended.

Here's an example of how the "Lo, tho I walk through the valley of the Shadow of Death" passage from the Bible now reads, after re-translation from the pidgin English Aboriginal language Kriol :

Yaweh, you are the best stockman. You care for me continually, and everything I have comes from you. I can’t want more.

You care for me just like the stockman who takes his sheep to rest in a quiet place with lots of grass and spring water.

Every day you make me strong. You show me the way to go because I trust your name to do what you have promised.

Even if I go through a very dark place where anything could kill me, but I am not frightened because you are always with me. You have your spear and long stick to always protect me.

'Right To Die' Movement Grows, As 'Pro-Death Choice' Seniors Smuggle Illegal Drugs And Establish Backyard Laboratories

Justice Minister Promise To Hunt Down And Prosecute More Than 800 Elderly Drug Makers

They are planning to get together in groups of eight or ten in secret locations in at least four Australian states. They are all over 60, and some are as old as 90. They're setting up backyard laboratories and these elderly Australians are planning to cook up illegal drugs, barbiturates in fact, strong enough to kill.

But these old folks want the drugs to kill them. That's why they are ready to defy the law and make the drugs. So when they decide it's time to die, then they take drink down a mouthful of the drug and expire, within minutes, if not seconds.

The drug is called Nembutal, and it's the drug of choice for those who want to practice "self-deliverance" or auto-euthanasia.

More than 100 elderly people are alleged to have illegally smuggled the drug into Australia from Mexico, where it is legally available in veterinarian supplies stores.

In an extraordinary documentary aired on ABC TV last night, a new hidden world of Australia's elderly was revealed - a 'Right To Die' movement that may number in the tens of thousands.

They don't want to go to nursing homes. They don't want to suffer in pain, or humiliation, as their minds and bodies fade and malfunction. They want to have the choice to die at a time of their own making.

There's little doubt that the drug of choice for these elderly people is effective. That's why it's so illegal in Australia, for human consumption anyway. Veterinarians use the drug, or a very similar kind of drug, to euthanize dogs. If it's acceptable to give respectful, quick deaths to dogs, their argument goes, why aren't they worthy of the same?

The documentary carried some terrible stats : More than 1100 elderly people have hung or shot themselves in Australia between 2000 and 2005. Hanging was not an option ruled out by some of those interviewed, but they dreaded what they would leave their children or neighbours to confront when their bodies were found.

The Australian government, backed by powerful Christian-aligned, "Right To Life" lobbyists, have been fighting a running battle against euthanasia in recent years.

The documentary, and an enormous talk back radio and online comment reaction this morning, revealed the extremely controversial subject of helping the terminally ill and elderly to end their lives may become a powerful issue in the upcoming federal election.

We have the right to vote, the right to drink, the right to exercise free will, but we do not have the right to die. Why? It's a question that has sparked flurries of controversy in Australia in recent years, but the issue looks set to become a national debate, with a promise by the federal justice minister that police will investigate and arrest any and all people, including the terminally ill, who attempt to smuggle the drug into Australia, or cook it up in backyard laboratories.

But many of the people interviewed in the documentary, 'Final Call', said they were prepared to go to jail to stand up for their right to die a quick and dignified death.

Once police start arresting 92 year old World War 2 veterans for making their own euthanasia drugs, it will become a story too big to ignore.

From ABC News :

An investigation by ABC TV's Four Corners program suggests there is a growing number of elderly Australians prepared to flout the law to commit suicide.

The euthanasia group Exit Australia has told the program more than 100 people have imported the prohibited sedative nembutal to Australia from Mexico while 100 more are preparing to do the same.

Exit Australia says 800 are interested in making the powerful sedative themselves.

Ninety-six-year-old Fred Short has told Four Corners he was part of a group that set up a backyard laboratory in the New South Wales Southern Highlands.

"I think there should be a legal means for people to choose their own time and place of death and to die with dignity," he said.

He says he is not worried about going to jail.

"It never has worried me - mind you at my time of life I probably wouldn't be there very long," he said.

It is alleged the backyard laboratory has successfully manufactured the drug.

John Edge has told Four Corners he took part in the exercise.

"It was really the blind leading the blind because what chemistry we learned at school has long been forgotten," he said.

How can a documentary about old people wanting to kill themselves be so inspiring?

Simple. It showed that if you have a bottle of the drug tucked away at home, you never need worry about getting so old and frail that you can't look after yourself anymore. The dread of being locked up in a nursing home disappears. The terror of having to undergo 'life-saving' operations only to face months of gruelling recovery evaporates.

You can beat nature, and God, with a simple twist of a bottlecap, one big swig and then lay down to (presumably) quietly accept your fate. Hopefully, with your family members, or close friends, by your side, or as recent visitors.

One of the most incredible scenes I've watched in either documentaries or fictional films in recent years unfolded the Four Corners report last night : a near-frail old man sits at his dining room table and unpacks a kit he has put together that will, with a flick of a switch, suffocate him.

It appears the man has designed and built the basic machine himself, because there is no legal version of it on the market. He talks about how he has to "test" the machine to make sure it will do what he built it to do. He doesn't want the machine to fail when he decides it's time to go.

Give me a choice, the man said, and I won't have to use the self-suffocation machine. Like every other old, and clearly sane and mentally alert, person in the documentary, this man wanted to get his hands on the drug that would guarantee a far less painful and horrible final exit.


From news.com.au :

Hundreds of elderly Australians planning to end their lives when they can no longer care for themselves, are conspiring to manufacture an illegal euthanasia drug.

The ABC's Four Corners program tonight said about 800 elderly people across Australia are waiting to get involved in making the drug nembutal in backyard laboratories, with at least four to be established soon in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Wollongong.

About 100 other older Australians were engaged in illegally importing the drug to Australia from the Mexican border town of Tijuana, close to the US city of San Diego.

Illegal possession of the prohibited drug carries a maximum penalty of two years' jail.

One of the illegal manufacturers, Bron Norman, said the drug should be available for those who wish to commit suicide when they have outlived their useful life.

"It's outrageous that we've been forced into this position because we can't legally obtain a drug that will give us a peaceful death when we want one," she told the ABC.

"It's not illegal to end your life. Why is it illegal to have the drug that will do it?"

The ABC TV message board discussing the documentary contains hundreds of comments from health professionals and elderly people demanding the laws be changed so those who decide it's time to go can do so, painlessly and effectively.

Some of the stories about the suffering experienced by sick, elderly people in Australian nursing homes are heartbreaking, as are the tales told by hospital staff, who are forced, by law, to subject some terminally ill people to "life-saving" operations they neither want to give, and that their patients do not want to endure.

In the face of hearing directly from those nearing the end of their lives calmly, sanely discussing why they want to die by their own hand, the pro-life lobbyists and activists' arguments of morality sound weak and pointless.

Why should an elderly person who is ready to go, and has no thirst for further life, be forced by lack of an alternative to shoot or hang themselves?

The only reality-based answer is : they shouldn't.

Pathetic arguments about how "Jesus suffered on the Cross" so therefore we must suffer as well, in order to be worthy of eternal life, are an insult to the elderly people of our society, and a fevered distortion of any teachings attributed to Jesus Christ.

As one elderly man in the documentary pointed out, why did his generation fight in World War 2 for the freedoms now enjoyed by all Australians, when he is denied the most important freedom of all : when to decide it's time to live, and when to decide it's time to die?

It's a powerful question, and one that both the Howard federal government, and the Rudd opposition government, are terrified of being forced to answer.

As millions of Baby Boomers move into their senior years, and become one of the most powerful voting blocks, it is a question any future government will no longer be able to avoid answering.


Justice Minister Says Elderly People Who Smuggle Or Make Illegal Death Drug Will Be "Brought Before The Courts"

Full Transcript Of The 'Right To Die A Dignified Death' Documentary "Final Call"

Kath Day's Secret Solo Album?



Chilling.

Could it be true that before finding fame in the documentary series Kath and Kim, Kath Day recorded a solo album of romantic ballads?

The above album cover comes from a collection of the worst album covers of all time. Be prepared, there's some true shockers to be found here.

Aborigines Use Ancient Weather Forecasting Methods To Predict Coming Rains

For more than 60,000 years, Australian Aborigines have been reading the land, the clouds, the stars, the plants and the animals to predict how the cycles of nature would affect their hunting and gathering in the season ahead.

Using that ancient knowledge, some of the world's longest surviving cultured people are seeing a bit of good news in the natural world for some areas of Australia devastated by mega-drought.

So don't start evacuating the cities just yet, drought breaking rains might not be as far away as previously thought :

With wattle trees blooming across southeastern Australia and native birds and cockatoos on the wing, Aboriginal weather watchers say rain is on the way – giving some hope to parts of the country ravaged by drought.

"The cockys are flocking everywhere. That's usually a good sign that rain is coming," said Jeremy Clark, from Victoria.

"The way the flora and plants and shrubs are starting to react, I'd certainly be expecting rain."

For the first time, the forecasts from Clark's Brambuk community, which covers five Aboriginal homelands, are being taken seriously by Australia's Bureau of Meteorology as it looks for different ways to better understand the changing climate.

Bureau climate meteorologist Harvey Stern said the traditional Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring seasons have little relevance in Australia's tropical north – or even in the temperate south, where aborigines have six seasons based on the weather and changes to the natural environment.

The bureau's Indigenous Weather Knowledge programme taps into the Aboriginal philosophy that all of nature is connected, and subtle changes to plants and animals can give clues about the climate and weather.

Mr Clark, chief executive of the Brambuk community which covers most of western Victoria, including the Grampians mountains and national park, said Aborigines have always had different ways of looking at the weather, reading landscape rather than a calendar.

"It's still practised. We won't go fishing for eels, for example, until wattles start flowering and the animals start moving, and the full moon comes. Then you know the eels are running on the migratory journey to the sea," he said.

Australia Accused Of Helping Fund And Arm Tamil Tiger "Terrorists"

If it wasn't enough that the Howard government helped keep Saddam Hussein supplied with enough cash to buy more human shredding machines and testicle shock kits - by repeatedly turning many blind eyes to the flood of memos pouring across the desks of the prime minister and foreign minister all but screaming out "Pay attention morons! Your wheat contractor is bribing Saddam with hundreds of millions of dollars!" - now the very same government is accused of not only allowing the Tamil Tigers to raise funds in Australia to fight their insurgency in Sri Lanka, but also stand accused of helping them to arm up and put together their own air force as well (as minor as it is).

If this keeps up, Australia is going to become a prime target of the 'War on Terror'.

After all, it was John Howard's good mate President Bush who has often said that if you hide, feed, supply weapons to, or help fund, terrorists, then you are as bad as the terrorists.

Just like when dump trucks full of cash were backing up to Saddam's palace gates in the late '90s, and early 2000s, Australia's foreign minister Alexander Downer knew all about how the Tamil Tiger sympathisers were raising cash and buying equipment that could be adapted to fight their insurgency in Sri Lanka :

...Downer admitted yesterday the Government had been aware for some time that money raised in Australia was being siphoned to the Tigers' cause in Sri Lanka.

Singapore-based terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna says the Tigers have been procuring aircraft, arms, explosives and other technological devices from Australia for more than a decade.

Dr Gunaratna says Australia's involvement extends beyond just fundraising.

"The failure of Australia and other countries to act in a timely way enabled the Tamil Tigers to procure aircrafts and other capabilities that have enabled them to develop a successful terrorist air wing."

"For Australia, it was never a priority to curb the non-Islamist terrorist groups operating in Australia," he said.

Wait a minute....non-Islamic terrorism?

Could there really be such a thing?

If the regular propaganda stream pouring from the mouths of the prime minister and foreign minister, and their media droogs, is to be believed, you'd be forgiven for thinking that there wasn't such a thing as non-terrorist Islam, let alone non-Islamic terrorism.

So Australia has been helping to fund and arm Tamil Tiger "terrorists"?

The 'Axis Of Evil' will clearly have to widened to the 'Quadra Of Nasty', so Australia can be included.

If only Australia had major mining or business interests in the disputed Sri Lankan territories that the Tamil Tigers are claiming as their homeland, we would have put these insurgents out of business a decade ago.

Australia Faces World's Most Extreme "Climate Change Challenge"

Two Australian Cities Face Ruin Without Rain

How Long Before The Mass Evacuation Of Cities Begin?

How dry does an Australian city or major town have to get before the state and federal governments consider mass evacuations?

The evacuation of the entire human population, by force, of at least two Queensland towns is now on its way to becoming a reality. It sounds like hype, but it's not, read the truth for yourself here.

But what about the bigger towns? What if an entire city of a million or more Australians ran utterly dry of drinking water supplies?

What then?

Without fresh water, any large town or city becomes uninhabitable. You simply cannot truck in enough water to keep a city of a million or more people alive.

The Queensland town of Killarney currently has its drinking water trucked in, at a cost of some $8000 per week. Eight grand a week for a town of less than 2000 people. What dry city could afford an 'imported' water bill clocking up a few million dollars a week?

If the Australian government was eventually forced to evacuate a city like Adelaide or Brisbane, where would all those people go to? There's not a lot of room in the other Australian cities. They're all experiencing, or facing, water shortages of their own. And once you get out of the city and their suburbs, the vast majority of Australia is already suffering scary to shitscary levels of drought.

If we can't pack off the millions of residents of Adelaide and Brisbane to somewhere else in Australia, we're going to have to look overseas.

How about Canada? They're looking for a few hundred thousand new immigrants in the next few years. But be warned 'exported' Queenslanders, it's mighty cold in Alberta, where all the new jobs in the shale-into-oil industries are waiting to be filled. Pack your woollies.

Of course, all these Australian climate change refugees might find a new home in the rapidly melting lands of the Arctic. The ice-free Arctic coastlines of Canada, the US, Russia and Greenland are going to be the new homelands for tens of millions of climate change refugees in the coming decades.

The bizarre irony of Australians possibly being forced to evacuate their towns and cities due to the severe effects of climate change is that Australians were recently debating whether or not we should welcome the expected human tide of climate change refugees from the islands of the South Pacific, some of which are already being consumed by rising sea levels.

How hardcore climate change effects Australia is likely to only get more weird, from here on in.

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According to this international news story, Australian Of The Year Tim Flannery, the superbly apocalyptic Climate Change Voice Of Doom, is "the country's most recognised scientist".

Well, maybe. He's certainly Australia's most recognised Australian Of The Year.

According to Flannery, who tends to beef up his Voice Of Doom when speaking to journalists on the international beat :

Australia faces the world's most extreme climate change challenge as millions of city dwellers try to cope with water shortages, according to the country's most recognised scientist.

Flannery said the drought meant two of Australia's largest cities, Brisbane and Adelaide -- home to a combined total of almost three million people -- would run out of water by the year's end unless the so-called "Big Dry" ended.

"We could see a catastrophic situation developing here by the end of the year. It's become a huge issue," Flannery told AFP.

"Even a year ago this would have been unthinkable. I think it's the most extreme and the most dangerous situation arising from climate change facing any country in the world right now.

"We have a situation where, if there are no flows in the Murray-Darling (river system), Adelaide, a city of one million people, has only 40 days' worth of water left in storage.

"If we don't get any rain this year Adelaide and Brisbane may be facing diabolical problems."

Catastrophic situation? Diabolical problems? Cut all the soft talk and sugar-spin, Flannery, and tell the bowel-loosening truth : If it doesn't rain in volumes that would have made Noah hire on extra ark builders, Adelaideans are going to be evicted from the city and packed off to the colds of Canada, via cruise ship.

Nobody wants to be the first to say it, but now I've said it. It's done, there you go. So deal with it, Adelaide, or start towing Antarctican icebergs into your ports.

It's always interesting to take a look at the international media stories on how Australia is being hammered by climate change, and the subsequent water shortages, crumbling coast lines, destroyed crops and mega-drought. They don't tend to hold back on the heavy stuff like the local media does.

There was a spectacularly doom-laden feature in the UK Independent a few weeks back, which I sat down to read after I finished liberally hosing off the path, wastefully washing the car, filling the swimming pool, flushing the toilet repeatedly to get rid of a fly that was doing laps in the bowl, and turning on the front and back lawn sprinklers for four or five hours, not because the grass was dying, but just because I love the way the sunlight glistens in all that watery spray.

If it's good enough for key members of the Australian media and the federal government to be deniers of global warming and climate change, then I can be a water-shortage denier.

And so much for all that.

But seeing a point-by-point mini-history of how the mega-drought and water shortages have impacted Australia in the past couple of years can make for some pretty freaky reading, even more so if you live in a city or town where water shortages have already hit hard :

The drought, which has lasted a decade in parts of the country, has slowed Australia's overall economic growth by an estimated 0.75 percent as crops have fallen 62 percent.

The impact on rural communities has been devastating. Many farmers have been forced off the land and counselling services have reported unusually high levels of suicide in rural areas.

Children have water conservation messages drummed into them from an early age at school and householders face hefty fines, or can even have their water disconnected, if they are found to be wasting the precious resource.

The government is also concerned that Australia's tourism industry, which earns billions of dollars a year, will be hit by "jet guilt" -- a reluctance by holidaymakers to take the heavily polluting, long-haul plane flights that are the only practical way to reach Down Under.

Authorities are also considering culling some of the million-plus feral camel population after dromedaries "mad with thirst" rampaged through a remote desert community.

Researchers warn the drought could drive Australia's iconic koalas to extinction within a decade.

The scale of the problem hit home for many Australians in April when Prime Minister John Howard said there would be no water for farms in the Murray-Darling river basin unless the drought broke soon.

Covering more than one million square kilometres (400,000 square miles) in the southeast of Australia, the Murray-Darling basin is the country's largest river system, almost three times bigger than Japan and four times larger than Britain.

It is Australia's rural powerhouse, producing more than 40 percent of the nation's agricultural produce, worth 10 billion dollars (8.3 billion US) a year.

The Murray-Darling supports half the nation's sheep flock, a quarter of the cattle herd and three-quarters of irrigated land.

It's clearly time to evacuate the residents of Brisbane and Adelaide to the wilds of Canada and divert their fresh water river flows to Sydney and Melbourne, where they are needed most.

The Brisbanians and Adelaiders won't be happy, but harsh sacrifices must be made in such times of national emergency. Sydneysiders and Melbournians will appreciate the sacrifices made by their fellow Australians. We might even send these new Canastralians a post card, or two, but only if they ship back an ice berg or two, if there's any left by then.


Prime Minister Says "Pray For Rain", Renowned Priest Says Begging God To Stop The Drought Is "Pointless"

Melbourne Also Running Out Of Water - Vegetable Crops Production To Drop By Two-Thirds

Australia's Mega-Drought To Cripple Local Food Supply

The "Armageddon Solution" To Water Shortages - Start Evacuation Of Queensland Towns

"Patriotic" Movies That "Glorify War" Won't Face Ban Under New Anti-Terror Censorship Laws


This from the Sun Herald :

Patriotic movies or games that glorify war will be specifically excluded from tough new anti-terrorism censorship laws.

So Australia faces a new regime of media censorship that will aim to define what acts of violence and bloodshed constitute acts of terrorism, and which are patriotic and glorify war?

What's the difference between glorifying acts of war that decimate civilian populations and glorifying acts of terrorism that decimate civilian populations?

It may all come down to what is deemed to be "patriotic" by a censorship board.

So what about the peoples' movement of Fretelin in East Timor? They rose up against the Indonesian government - a government backed by Australia and armed by the United States (amongst the many nations that sold them weapons of mass destruction) - in the mid-1970s, and fought back against the depopulation of their nation. They used what would now be called terrorism to fight for their freedom.

Would an Australian made movie about this 'terrorist group', that showed how they waged their insurgency against the Indonesian government, not be deemed to be "unpatriotic" under these new guidelines? After all, Australia was a close ally of Indonesia during the very worse years of East Timor's depopulation, which may have claimed more than 200,000 lives.

Or what about the insurgency waged by the Kooris in New South Wales against the English occupation of their native lands in the late 1700s and early 1800s?

There is no doubt that the Aboriginal warriors terrorised the civilian population of Sydney and Parramatta back then, as the English terrorised and decimated the Aboriginal tribes.

In a movie about the Aboriginal uprising against the English invaders, which side would be deemed "patriotic"?


Go To 'Your New Reality' For The Full Story

Former Prime Minister On John Howard & George W. Bush's "Evil Purpose"

Former prime minister of Australia, Malcolm Fraser, gave a speech at the Australian National University yesterday where he spoke of his disgust at how the Australian and US governments conspired to ignore, and over-ride, the Rule Of Law when it came to the illegal detention of David Hicks for five years in Guantanamo Bay.

Hicks pleaded guilty to supporting terrorism in a plea deal and was sentenced to nine months jail. He is set to be returned to Australia in the coming weeks to serve out the remainder of the sentence in an Australian jail and is expected to be set free on December 31.

Fraser cut loose in his speech, and pointed out that what happened to Hicks is not an isolated incident, in Australia or the US, but the most prominent in a long string of violations of human rights and the right to fair trials and due process :

So David Hicks will be home by the end of the year, partially gagged. The gag order which was undermined by information provided to the British Government and subsequently published in his application to become a British citizen and subject to the same treatment as other British citizens formerly held in Guantanamo Bay.

And so this story comes to an end but at what a price. The main story is not David Hicks. The main story is a willingness of two allegedly democratic governments prepared to throw every legal principle out the window and establish a process that we would expect of tyrannical regimes. That our own democracies should be prepared to so abandon the Rule of Law for an expedient and as I believe, evil purpose should greatly disturb all of us. But how many are concerned? Too many are not concerned because they believe that such a derogation of justice can only apply to people who are different, in some indefinable way.

Only the other day I was speaking with somebody who quite plainly believed that Hicks deserved anything that was metered out to him because he was what he was, the Rule of Law did not need to apply. For somebody who has done terrible things, why does he deserve justice? That denies the whole basis of our system, the necessity of a civilised society which cannot exist unless there is an open, predictable justice system that applies equally to every person.

David Hicks at the best was clearly a very foolish young man. He was terribly misguided and may well have done some terrible things. I do not know. But if our Government says he has had his day in court, he made a plea bargain, therefore he deserved what he got, it only emphasises its lack of commitment to the Rule of Law for all people.

If the Government believes it to be expedient, we now know that it is prepared to push the Rule of Law aside. That is a larger issue than the tragedy of David Hicks.

A number of Liberals have spoken out about these and similar issues in relation to asylum seekers or refugees, or people improperly treated in Department of Immigration detention centres. Too many have remained silent.

In an op-ed piece published in The Jurist, Fraser elaborated on what he determined to be part of an "evil purpose" in how David Hicks was 'prepared' to face the military commission, and that methodology of preparation allowed the military commission to avoid facing the full glare of a supposedly open hearing and trial :

I believe it likely that the United States authorities did not want the weakness of their evidence publicly exposed, even in a fraudulent military tribunal. Even though cross-examination would have been extremely limited, it could still have exposed the secrecy by which evidence had been collected. The defence would have exposed the fact that they were not properly advised of the evidence, of the means by which it was obtained, that it was in fact a very secret process, designed to achieve one verdict. If the process had gone to open court, each hour would have demonstrated that justice was not being served, that this was not a court of law.

The best alternative for governments, with some semblance of their credibility preserved, was to have Hicks under such pressure that he would accept a plea bargain.

This does explain the solitary confinement of over twelve months. It does explain the other pressures placed upon him, pressures which would have included the threat of continuing jail in Guantanamo Bay for twenty years or more. What person amongst us would not have accepted a plea bargain that achieved some element of freedom at the end of nine months?

Good question. But don't expect an answer from those who cry out for democracy and free societies in the Middle East, but are quite happy to see those very same institutions and rights undermined, poisoned and tarnished, in their home countries.


The Cost Of Prosecuting And Jailing David Hicks? $3 Million

Australian Government Has Had Secret Plan For Hicks' Return To Australia Since September, 2006

Attorney General Vows To Change Laws Retrospectively So Hicks Can Never Profit From Telling His Story

From The "Worst Of The Worst" To A Bumbling Wanna-Be And Al Qaeda "Liability" - US Military Prosecutors Now Claim Hicks Was Not Dangerous At All

Publishers Want Hicks Story In His Own Words - At Any Cost


Tomorrow : Why David Hicks Could Earn Up To $4 Million From Media Deals To Tell His Story

John Howard's Shocking Anti-Americanism

Prime Minister Blasts Americans Over Iraq War

Here's the latest attack on the American public from prime minister John Howard :

"The American domestic resolve is weakening..."

He said that because more than 70% of Americans back the US Congress in trying to force the Bush administration into bringing the Iraq War to an end... :

"...it is wrong, and I don't think it is doing anything other than giving great comfort and encouragement to Al-Qaeda and the insurgency in Iraq....They are looking at all this, they read newspapers, they see it on television and they say, 'The American domestic resolve is weakening, therefore we should maintain our resolve.'

"If there is a perception of an America defeat in Iraq, that will leave the whole of the Middle East in great turmoil and will be an enormous victory for terrorism."

Howard is high on NeoCon propaganda if he really believes that garbage. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, and the Iraqi insurgency is concerned, the US is already defeated in Iraq. That is not giving aid and comfort to the enemy, that is facing reality before another 3300 American and half a million Iraqi lives are lost.

How utterly disgusting.

How dare Howard try and present an anti-American front simply because the vast majority of Americans, like Australians, oppose the Iraq War. This is not about the reality of war, or the reality of the world, this is about Howard's ego, and his devotion to President Bush.

This news story featuring Howard's shocking anti-Americanism was featured prominently on the Drudge Report for chrissakes. This means that any of the tens of thousands of American journos who daily access the site will see this story and may choose to use it as a dramatic example of fractures in the Australian-American alliance.

It's clearly time to re-name it : The Howard-Bush alliance.

A very separate and distinct alliance to that between the generations of Australians and Americans who have called each other friends and allies, regardless of who is in government.

Howard clearly has no intention of preserving the alliance when the Democrats take control of the White House in 2009. He knows he is going down and will not win the federal election later this year, and he doesn't care.

The prime minister is damaging the alliance and disgracing the name of Australia in front of a war-shattered, grieving nation.

It's time for John Howard to shut the hell up, and keep his nose out of America's internal affairs.

Towns May Be Evacuated Over Water Shortages

The "Armageddon Solution" To The Australian Mega-Drought

1800 Australians may be forcibly removed from their homes in two Queensland towns as councils and state governments consider increasingly drastic measures to cope with the worst drought in Australia's recorded history.

Disturbingly, Killarney, one of the towns that may be "evacuated", is situated near the source of the Murray-Darling river system : the essential water system that stretches through three Australian states and is now drying up, and has completely stopped flowing in dozens of locations.

Drinking water is being trucked into Killarney at a cost of $8000 a week, but the expense means this measure to keep the town alive may not last for long :

Senior state bureaucrats have discussed the possibility of moving residents from Leyburn, population 200, and Killarney, home to 1500 people.

Water Services Association executive director Ross Young said the Government had the power to move people.

"I'm not sure it has ever been used in Australia...The reality is with no water, you can't live anywhere for long."

Warwick Shire Mayor Ron Bellingham called evacuation an "Armageddon solution", but admitted it was a possibility for Leyburn.

If the drought doesn't break soon, which would require vast stretches of Australia to receive unprecedented and sustained rainfalls, the evacuation of towns that rely on bores and rivers for their fresh water will become a reality for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Australians in the years ahead.

ANZAC Day Draws 100,000 Australians Together To Remember Our 100,000 War Dead



By Darryl Mason

In 110 years of international war fighting, Australia has lost more than 100,000 soldiers, with hundreds of thousands more wounded in battle, many of whom were left permanently, physically or mentally, maimed.

In a haunting coincidence, 100,000 Australians are estimated to have gathered today to remember ANZAC Day, and to pay tribute to the dead from the dozens of wars and conflicts Australians have fought in through the past 11 decades. They gathered in groups by the dozens and the tens of thousands, with the greater percentage of those paying tribute under the age of 30 years old.

While ANZAC Day has, traditionally, focused on the Australian defeat and withdrawal from Gallipoli, in 1915, more media attention this year has rightly turned to the tragic human destruction of the Western Front and the successful battles Australians fought in France, which helped to end World War 1.

There's an excellent collection online here from the Australian War Memorial on 'Australians In France' during that period.

And, finally, the media has woken up to the fact that more than 500 indigenous Australians served in World War 1, and more than 5000 served in World War 2. Hundreds more fought in Korea and Vietnam.

Yet, most Australians are unaware of the enormous sacrifices they made, and the inhuman treatment they received at the hands of governments aligned to the English Crown who refused to recognise their service for decades. They were denied medals, war pensions and the land grants that were made available to almost all Australian veterans of World War 2.

Today, 'Koori' diggers marched in a separate ANZAC Day march in Redfern, though there was no official recognition of the event by the state or federal governments. Perhaps next ANZAC Day the prime minister find the time to visit such an event.


The coverage by ABC Radio & Television of ANZAC Day has been truly superb, particularly features on the 7.30 Report and Lateline over the past few days.

Here's some of the highlights :

Gallipoli Landings Remembered, 92 Years On

Australian War Brides In The US Finally Granted Dual Citizenship, 60 Years Later

Surviving Rats Of Tobruk Get To Keep Their Special Meeting Hall After Benefactor Buys Melbourne Building For Them - Diggers Donate The $1.7 Million They Received To Charity

POW Reunions Help To Heal The Old Wounds - For The Diggers And The Children Of Those Who Didn't Survive


Here's a quick summary from the 7.30 Report of just how monumental the contribution of Australians to the English side of the war in the Middle East and Europe actually was :

From an Australian population then no more than five million, 300,000 men enlisted. Half were wounded. 60,000 died and were buried on the battlefield, most in the green fields of France and Belgium.

...almost 40 per cent of all Australian males aged 18 to 44, enlisted.

From a population less than one quarter of today's, 60,000 of these young Australians would die in battle. More than half would be wounded or gassed, the lucky ones taken prisoner.

The numbers of killed and wounded are breathtaking, all but incomprehensible.

It is stunning to visit small outback Australian towns and villages today and to learn that from local populations of only 200 or 300, more than 40 or 50 men went to World War I, with children as young as 13 and 14 travelling to larger regional towns to sign up under fake birth dates so they could go on 'the great adventure'.

Some small towns lost, literally, most of their young men in the war. World War I devastated Australian society in ways that are rarely discussed, and all but destroyed the Australian economy, leaving the nation hundreds of millions of pounds in debt.

ANZAC Day has been more popular with Australian youth in recent years than at virtually any other time in the past 90 years. But they do not come to celebrate fighting, or war, as the surviving diggers would not want them to. They come to say thank you, and to pay their respects to the men and women who did what they believed they had to do, and what they were told to do, in an Australia of the past that today seems both familiar and remarkably distant.

More than 4000 Australians are currently serving in the Australian Defence Forces today, in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Solomon Islands, East Timor, and more than a dozen other locations around the world.


Youth Swell The Ranks On ANZAC Day

From Byron Bay To Baghdad, The Diggers Were Done Proud

"I've Got To Be The Proudest Blackfella In Australia"

ANZAC Day In Images

Australia Vs New Zealand Dispute Over Origin Of ANZAC Day

Former War Time Enemies Gather As Friends

Two Australians Injured In Iraq Insurgent Attacks On Eve Of ANZAC Day

Excellent Collection Of ANZAC Day Images

An ANZAC Day Special (Photos And Articles)

Tens Of Thousands Gather In Sydney Despite Teeming Rains

Australia's 'Mega-Drought' To Cripple Local Food Supply

"Pray For Rain," Says Desperate Howard

Priest Says Praying For Rain Is Pointless

How bad is the Australian drought? Bad enough for it to be called a mega-drought. And bad enough for the prime minister, John Howard, to urge Australians to, literally, "pray for rain".

The Murray-Darling river system is only weeks away from drying up enough to force the prime minister to take action that will cut off fresh water flows to irrigators in Victoria's farmlands, known as "Australia's food bowl". Farmers and irrigators are claiming such action will result in the loss of more than 40% of Australia's fresh fruit and vegetables supply in the coming years, and will see Australia forced to relax its extremely strict quarantine measures to allow imports of foreign fresh food.

We're already hearing that we may soon be forced to pay four or five times what we currently do for some fruit and vegetables. The fast food chains must be clapping their hands in delight. How many young working families with shocking mortgage payments and crippling credit debts will pay absurd prices for the ingredients to make fresh, homemade salads when a fast food "dinner" will be substantially less?

Basically, if most of the catchment areas for the Murray-Darling Basin do not get virtually unprecedented rainfalls in the next two months, Australia's food bowl crop lands will get most of their water supplies cut off, to ensure urban areas get enough drinking water instead.

And "unprecedented rainfalls" mean months worth of rain, steady and continual. Nobody really believes that is going to happen, except the most optimistic of long-range weather forecasters.

Good thing the Howard government hasn't been ignoring its own chief scientists, and trying to silence them all, on the reality of the mega-drought and climate change for the past ten years, or Australians really might be in some serious trouble :

Zero water allocations in the Murray-Darling Basin would threaten crops such as citrus, stone fruit and grapes, some of which may take years to recover from a year without water.

New Zealand farmers said they were sympathetic to their Australian counterparts' plight and stood ready to help. But they said Australia must stop using its quarantine rules as a trade barrier.

A day after warning that all irrigation allocations could be suspended without heavy rains in the next two months, the Prime Minister said there might be a need to ship more food from overseas.

"Obviously it might be possible in some areas to import the foodstuffs that would otherwise come from Australian sources," Mr Howard said.

"Now we hope that doesn't happen, because we always like to see ourselves as being capable of meeting our own food needs and, in fact, providing for the food needs of others.

"But it's a question of rain and we must all hope and pray that over the next six to eight weeks it rains, it rains heavily, it rains in all the right areas, (and) there's plenty of run-off into the catchments."

Here's another example of how John Howard told Australians to get down on their knees, raise their hands to the heavens, and start praying for rain :

...he encouraged people to seek divine intervention.

"It's very serious, it's unprecedented in my lifetime and I really feel very deeply for the people affected,'' Mr Howard told ABC Television.

"So we should all, literally and without any irony, pray for rain over the next six to eight weeks.''

But Father Bob Maguire, an hilariously honest and straightforward priest from South Melbourne, who exemplifies everything a true Christian should be, said praying for rain was pointless, and a waste of time. He urged, instead, that some real, significant action be taken instead :

Bob Maguire says church leaders across Australia can pray for rain "until they go black in the face" but it won't solve the water crisis.

"Maybe our prayers need a creative spin, like 'O God, please turn this wine into water'," the Catholic priest said.

"Now I know a lot of people won't like it, particularly if people are making their prayers over a nice bottle of Grange, but this water problem is bigger than all of us boys and girls down here on ground level."

"Praying for rain is great and we will be doing it in our services, but we have to be prepared to work on finding solutions to the problem ourselves," he said.

The UK Independent devoted its front page and multiple pages inside a recent edition to spelling out the true scale of the disaster facing Australia, and it pushed the line (or lie) that the mega-drought was the first and most prominent example of a major country facing ruin due to the effects of severe climate change :

...its mighty rivers have shrivelled to sluggish brown streams. With paddocks reduced to dust bowls, graziers have been forced to sell off sheep and cows at rock-bottom prices or buy in feed at great expense. Some have already given up, abandoning pastoral properties that have been in their families for generations. The rural suicide rate has soared.

Mr Howard acknowledged that the measures are drastic. He said the prolonged dry spell was "unprecedentedly dangerous" for farmers, and for the economy as a whole. Releasing a new report on the state of the Murray and Darling, Mr Howard said: "It is a grim situation, and there is no point in pretending to Australia otherwise. We must all hope and pray there is rain."

But prayer may not suffice, and many people are asking why crippling water shortages in the world's driest inhabited continent are only now being addressed with any sense of urgency.

Until a few months ago, Mr Howard and his ministers pooh-poohed the climate-change doomsayers. The Prime Minister refused to meet Al Gore when he visited Australia to promote his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. He was lukewarm about the landmark report by the British economist Sir Nicholas Stern, which warned that large swaths of Australia's farming land would become unproductive if global temperatures rose by an average of four degrees.

Faced with criticism from even conservative sections of the media, Mr Howard realised that he had misread the public mood - grave faux pas in an election year. Last month's report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted more frequent and intense bushfires, tropical cyclones, and catastrophic damage to the Great Barrier Reef. The report also said there would be up to 20 per cent more droughts by 2030. And it said the annual flow in the Murray-Darling basin was likely to fall by 10-25 per cent by 2050. The basin, the size of France and Spain combined, provides 85 per cent of the water used nationally for irrigation.

Mr Howard has softened his rhetoric of late, and says that he now broadly accepts the science behind climate change. He has tried to regain the political initiative, announcing measures including a plan to take over regulatory control of the Murray-Darling river system from state governments.

British Media Hammer Howard For Refusing To Sign Kyoto, Blame Mega-Drought On Climate Change

The 'Mount Olympus' Of The Aboriginal Gods



Deep inside the Wollemi National Park, protected by natural barriers like steep cliffs and virtually impenetrable terrain and bush, lies one of the greatest collections of ancient Aboriginal rock carvings found to date.

Rock art expert, Professor Paul Tacon, likened the find to an Aboriginal Mount Olympus.

From the Melbourne Age :

Last spring archaeologists discovered an enormous slab of sandstone 100 metres long and 50 metres wide in the 500,000-hectare Wollemi National Park, which is north of Lithgow, in western NSW. The sandstone was covered in ancient art.

The discovery was an unprecedented collection of powerful ancestral beings from Aboriginal mythology.

For most of the day the engravings are almost invisible. At dawn and dusk, the images are briefly revealed.

Supreme being Baiame and his son Daramulan were both there. Near this father and son pairing is an evil and powerful club-footed being, infamous for eating children. Several ancestral emu women and perhaps the most visually powerful of the images, an eagle man in various incarnations, are also present.

"The site is the Aboriginal equivalent of the palace on Mount Olympus where the Olympians, the 12 immortals of ancient Greece, were believed to have lived," says Professor Tacon. "This is the most amazing rock engraving site in the whole of south-eastern Australia."

And yet the archaeologists have found hundreds of sites in the past five years. It seems almost certain that engravings are part of a much larger network of songlines and stories.

An aboriginal representative of the local tribe who joined the expedition to study and catalogue the rock art said :

"They reckon we didn't have written language...We didn't have A, B, C, D but we had a written language in these engravings. They would have been able to read from site to site to site."

Aboriginal rock engravings are widely regarded as the oldest art works in the world, some dating back more than 40,000 years.

Australian Aborigines have long been recognised as having the most ancient culture in the history of all mankind. Before Dutch and English explorers reached the continent, more than 500 distinct Aboriginal tribes existed, each with their own oral and dance storytelling traditions and unique languages.

A number of tribes are believed to have used the stars for navigation across the vast stretches of the outback for thousands of generations.

'Blood' Tide At Jervis Bay



It looks like a vision of hell, on one of the most beautiful beaches in Australia, but not to worry, "it's just one of those natural occurences" :

"If there was environmental or probable health issues we'd certainly let people know."

An expected wind change is likely to wash the bloom back out to sea tomorrow and Sunday.

....the algae is a vital part of the ocean ecosystem.

"It's an important source of food," Dr Fortescue said.

The exact species of algae is not known, but it is not like fresh water algae, which can be toxic.

It stinks like hell as it rots, but the algae is expected to wash away in the next few days.

Aussie Circa 2007 : Cynical, Lacking In Empathy, Obsessed With Money And Property

Is This Really Australia Today? Or Just Sydney?

As is traditional, an Australian author has scored an English release for his new novel, so it's time to piss all over the homeland for the amusement of the Brits, many of whom still don't like the idea that "the worst of the worst" of England's prison ships built something close to paradise over the past two centuries in this sun-drenched land so far away.

Well, if not paradise, then something far less grim than most of England on a wet, misty winter's day, when the sun sets at 4pm, and nothing else to do but fuck, dance and drink.

The Australian author in question here is Richard Flanagan, who wrote a fairly interesting novel The Unknown Terrorist. It's one of the few novels to look at the effect of terrorism and the 'War On Terror' in Australia. But the true terror for Flanagan seems to be what he found on the streets and in the hearts of Sydneysiders when he decamped from his tree-crowded Tasmanian home to Sydney to write the novel.

Actually, Flanagan does make some valid, but troubling, points about what occupies the minds of many Sydneysiders today, and, as he explains in the quotes below, the new Australian exemplified by money-obsessed, property-focused Sydneyites, is the antithesis of the creature that once passed as the typical Aussie.

Blame John Howard? No, says Flanagan, we did it to ourselves :

"I wanted to make a mirror to what I felt Australia had become. I think it is a pretty bleak country at the moment. It was a land of such hope and possibility when I was younger, and in the past couple of years, like a lot of Australians, I've ended up feeling ashamed of what it had become. But we can't blame governments or parties or politicians; we have to accept in the end it was we as a people who happily went along with this.

"There was a loss of empathy. I don't know where that comes from. We're a migrant nation made up of people who've been torn out of other worlds, and you'd think we would have some compassion."

On laying blame :

"...in my country, they're blaming Howard, but that's such an absurd and easy option. There is a crisis that is not political - an epidemic of loneliness, of sadness - and we're completely unequal to dealing with it. We're obsessed these days with believing that the answer is always individual, that it lies in ourselves. This takes every form of madness from self-help manuals to step aerobics, and is always about improving yourself. But the reality is, it lies in other people and making connections with them, yet it is a world where it's ever harder to make those connections."

The limits of truth :

"In Australia....we have a whole spectrum of media commentators who consistently argue that things like national security demand that individual freedoms be truncated, and we're also constantly told there are needs and necessities of the nation that mean there are limits on the truth. But there can be no limits on the truth. If there are limits on the truth, you've opened up the road to tyranny."

On David Hicks :

"To train with al-Qaida prior to 2001 is a different thing than to go and train with them now. One can understand how people like him might end up there. You don't have to agree with them, and I don't. I have a friend who died in the Bali bombing. I don't support the murder of innocent people anywhere by anyone, but what really matters is truth and individual freedom, and when those things start coming under such heavy attack as they have in recent times, then people should be very disturbed....there is nothing higher than individual freedom."

On terrorism :

"Terrorism is simply murder. What is it we dislike? We dislike murder and the use of murder to try to impose a repressive regime. But it's murder, that's what it is. The word terrorism has been misused for so long that it clouds our understanding of what happens. After the Bali bombing, you can make a lot of criticisms of the Indonesian authorities, but they treated it as a crime and they tracked down those people. That's what it was - a crime. The Americans saw September 11 as an attack on their national honour, and it led them into a madness that the world is now paying for".

The Full Story Here is a worth a read. As is Flanagan's novel.

Philip Adams : Australia Has Become Another Country....Almost

Australia's Anzac Day Shame

The Forgotten Soldiers Of Our Forgotten War

Most Australians know little about this country's involvement in the Korean War in the 1950s, even though more than 6000 soldiers served there and hundreds died on the battlefields.

Considering some of the most acclaimed Australian soldiers of World War 1 and World War 2 volunteered to fight in Korea, for six long years, and 338 soldiers were killed there, it is an utter mystery as to why the war barely gets a mention in the mainstream media. The United States has a similar memory hole when it comes to Korea, and they lost thousands in the fighting.

In Australia, politicians rarely, if ever, mention the Korean War; historians write dozens of books about Gallipoli and Australia diggers in Europe and the Middle East during World War 2, but they won't touch Korea; you don't see lengthy TV documentaries, or docudramas, on the extremely deadly battles fought against more than a million Chinese and North Korean soldiers, and as for Anzac Day - Australia's national day of digger remembrance - you'd be hard pressed to find the kind of double page spreads afforded WW2, Gallipoli and Vietnam veterans focusing on what Australia's did more than 50 years ago to hold back Communist forces at the height of the Cold War.

But perhaps most shamefully of all, there are sixteen Australian veterans who died in Korea who don't even get a mention on the war memorial in Canberra.

Why?

Bureaucratic bullshit, mostly. And a fear of giving too much attention to what lies hidden beneath the conspiracy of silence shrouding the truth about the Korean War.

Officially, the Korean War ended on July 27, 1953, with the signing of a "truce" between the US-led coalition and North Korea. But the fighting raged on until April, 1956. The last three years of the war are not officially recognised as "war-fighting", even though there were many deadly conflicts fought in that time.

Eighteen Australian servicemen were killed during the "non-war". Two of them have their names listed on the war memorial. The other sixteen? Australian military history doesn't recognise them.

From 'The Australian' :

With Anzac Day less than a week away, a group of Korea veterans has renewed efforts to get official recognition for those forgotten 16 servicemen.

Bob Morris, who served two tours of duty in Korea with the navy, yesterday called on the federal Government to end the discrimination against those killed in the second stage of the war and to recognise all his comrades.

"We started this five years ago and we have been through five defence ministers and all but given up trying to get a hearing from the Prime Minister," Mr Morris, 75, said as he planned Anzac Day celebrations with some other Korea veterans in Nowra, on the NSW south coast.

"When you get a minister who is only 40 years old and who is surrounded by bureaucrats who have no idea about what happened more than 50 years ago, it is bloody hard."

Mr Morris said Defence bureaucrats had argued against his committee because in 1998 it was decided that deaths in Korea would be ruled "warlike or non-warlike".

"These men were all ... war-caused deaths - one was squashed between a tank and a truck, an army captain died of heat stroke and one army private froze to death in his tent.

"Others were killed by mines or by guerilla action - but everything was hushed up by the UN because there was supposed to be a truce."

Mr Morris said that after successive failures to get any response from John Howard's office, he had approached the Prime Minister when he was visiting Nowra last year.

"I got face to face with him and said I wanted to speak to him about this matter - but I got short-sheeted pretty quickly and palmed off to his principal private secretary."

Disgusting. Isn't the Korean War popular enough with middle-class Australia to warrant the prime minister's attention? These unrecognised Australian soldiers fought and died in a war committed to by Howard's hero, prime minister Robert Menzies. Bob Morris hopes that a Liberal government, then, "would fix things up."

They might get a better run from the Rudd Opposition.

"ALP MP Robert McClelland moved a motion in the house (of Representatives) last year to get us recognition but it failed," Mr Morris said. "But since then Kevin Rudd has come on board and promised to address the matter if he wins the next election."

Morris is worried that time is ticking away, and although he manages to get a bit of attention for his cause each year when ANZAC Day comes around, the years are getting on, as are his fellow Korea veterans. They're not asking for much. Just recognition for the mates they lost in the war.

"If something isn't done soon, we'll all be gone and our grandchildren won't know what we went through."