On September 3rd, Australia marks National Flag Day -  a day that should fill us with pride, remembering the first time our flag was raised in 1901. 

Yet today, flying it with conviction is branded divisive, while burning it is tolerated. And in some cases celebrated. 

Some dismiss this by saying  “Does it matter? It is just cloth,” but it is not.

It is the spirit of a nation, the sacrifice of generations, the history of freedom hard won.

When we allow our flag to be trampled, we trample our own pride -  and that is a danger no nation can survive.

Australia was never built on timidity. It was carved out by men and women who faced droughts, floods, and wars with grit, courage, and an unshakable belief in the fair go.

Yet today, that fair go is being strangled.

Ordinary Australians are being priced out of their own homes, left to sleep in cars and tents, while politicians in Canberra open the gates to mass migration on a scale our forebears could never have imagined.

We are told to stay quiet, to swallow the line that questioning this is “racist,” while our way of life - our language, our culture, our unity - is chipped away. The same spark that lit Eureka smoulders again, and if ignored, it will roar into flame.

It is hard to believe that twenty-eight years have passed since the world lost Diana, Princess of Wales. Her death on 31st August 1997 shocked nations, silenced newsrooms, and left millions in mourning. To some, she was “the people’s princess”; to others, she was a mother, a campaigner, a truth-teller who dared to show both her courage and her frailties. To me, and to countless others, she was a rare figure who could cross boundaries of class, culture, and circumstance, touching hearts in places where compassion was seldom seen.

For me, it takes me back in time to a day when a group of hardened criminals sat me down and held my hand in united grief. 

Few figures divide Australians as sharply as Ned Kelly. To some, he is a larrikin folk hero, a defiant battler against a corrupt system. To others, he was a murderer and thief who terrorised the countryside. His last stand at Glenrowan in 1880, clad in homemade iron armour, cemented his place in folklore.

Yet this month, echoes of Kelly’s story resound in Victoria’s alpine region. A massive police manhunt is underway for Dezi Freeman, a 56-year-old man accused of shooting dead two officers in Porepunkah. Like Kelly before him, Freeman has fled into the rugged bushland of north-east Victoria, evading hundreds of police in terrain that offers both sanctuary and danger.

The parallels are hard to ignore. Both stories centre on defiance, armed confrontation, and the challenge of pursuing fugitives in the High Country. But the differences – in context, ideology, and community support -  are equally striking.

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