The PR Blog

Without a genuine love for our forbears, how can we truly love -  or even live - our lives today? I asked that question about a year ago, and that question has stayed with me. And it’s what prompted this reflection.

We must return to honouring everything we have earned and learned and teaching our young to learn from the past in order to build a future worth living in.

I began writing this to honour our war dead. I thought I was writing about cemeteries. But somewhere along the way, I realised I wasn’t writing about death at all...I was writing about neglect. Not of the past, but of the present. Not of sacrifice, but of silence.

Because in Australia today, it seems death is the only guarantee of honour. A soldier can serve, suffer, and survive, and be forgotten. A citizen can contribute a lifetime of work, and be priced out of their own home. A community can build and endure, and be buried under red tape.

But die in uniform? We’ll build a monument. We’ll send flowers. We’ll clean the stone every year without fail.

So I ask you: When did honour become posthumous? When did life become less worthy than death? And is the True Blue Australia we once knew -  quietly proud, fiercely fair - already lying in a forgotten grave?

They didn’t storm the gates. They waited.

While revolutionaries burned flags and shouted in the streets, the Fabians took tea in drawing rooms and quietly rewrote the future.

Their strategy was never chaos, but patience -  the slow march through institutions.

Today, as yet another Western leader swears allegiance to their vision, we might ask: how much of our modern world was designed not by accident, nor democracy, but by deliberate, gradual engineering?

And what remains of the civilisation they sought to replace?