Only minutes before midnight on Christmas Eve, 1953, the engine driver of the Wellington to Auckland express train will notch back to walking pace in a remote area of New Zealand's North Island's 'volcanic plateau. Most passengers will be sleeping.
Read more: The Bridge on the river... Cry. The Tangiwai Railway Disaster. Christmas Eve 1953
Read more: When the Politician Grinches Stole Christmas.... Now We Need a Santa to take it Back
In deference to our New Zealand brothers I thought it would be fair to do an item about them rather than make this series of contributions an exclusively Australian affair and recognise the NZ part of the ANZAC legend.
The River Plate (Rio de la Plata) separates Argentina and Uruguay.
In 1939 it was the scene of one of the most dramatic naval battles of the war and has been the subject of a movie of the same name.
" A relative who lives in Brisbane was telling me about her visit doing Christmas shopping. She wanted to buy for her young children a Nativity Scene so she could put it on the table and explain the meaning of Christmas. Do you know that none of the shop assistants had a clue what she was talking about or even the real meaning of Christmas. This shows how much Australia has lost over the past generation.
So much for politicians enriching our society by bringing in aliens. To me it shows how bad Australia has got"
And that got me thinking about a Christmas a long time ago.
Read more: Does anyone know what a Nativity Scene is these days? We do, but the Young Ones don't....
“The powerful are panicking, and so they should. Their secrets are leaking.” —Miranda Devine, The New York Post
As the Yule log burns down, and the trivialities of the season melt into air, the nation might ask itself how the authorities who run things went to war against the citizens of this land. I will tell you and it will probably make you angry:
It started when the women of the professional and managerial class watched their avatar, Hillary Clinton, lose the 2016 election against a man who seemed the quintessence of everything they hated about Daddydom.
Read more: “The powerful are panicking, and so they should. Their secrets are leaking.”
The EPA has approved Robbins Island Mega Wind Factory in a remote island off Tasmania that will have to stop working for five months of the year so it doesn’t hurt the Orange-bellied Parrot. It will however be able to kill eagles and other birds for the other seven months of the year.
Green electrons are revered, Orange-bellied parrots are sacred but our way of life is up for grabs. It’s a cult.
Read more: Tasmanian mega wind farm approved that can’t operate half the year
The raid on Pearl Harbour failed to catch the US carrier force which was still at sea. It also failed to destroy the oil storage facilities that would have crippled any ability to send a pursuing force. The Japanese strategists knew that the obvious place for an American fight back to be based was Australia. It rapidly consumed the Dutch East Indies and the island of New Britain which was part of the PNG mandated territory awarded to Australia by the League of Nations.
On 10th December, 1941 the tactics conceived by Yamamato and Nagano were again proved correct when Japanese aircraft sank the British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse off the coast of Malaya. At the same time Guam was captured from the Americans.
Read more: The Bombing of Darwin Part 2 - the Australian Connection
When I first wrote this article I kept thinking " what is the image that most encompasses Australia? "
The Sydney Harbour Bridge?: Opera House? The Great Barrier Reef? What is it that makes us Australia?
And I realised that it was not a place. It was not building or a monument or even a flag. It was us.
It is the people and no matter what our government tries to do, we Aussies still love our country. Though many of our recent migrants do not. So I am leading off with something unexpected.
It is a photo that I love. It is of Dame Edna.
Read more: Indigenous or Aboriginal? First Nation? Is Australia about Race or about Australians?
Back in 1920, in the small town of Winton, the airline company QANTAS was born. The Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Ltd was created and would be known as QANTAS from that day forward.
Its co-founders, Sir Hudson Fysh and Paul McGinness, said "[Qantas] was conceived in Cloncurry, born in Winton and grew up in Longreach."
The Adelaide River Stakes is the name given to the mass exodus of people prior to and following the Japanese air-raid in Darwin on 19th February, 1942. Thanks mainly to an ill-informed statement by a former Governor General, Paul Hasluck, that it is a story full of shame for our national persona, but it is a myth.
The truth is that with much closer examination it was anything but a shameful episode in our most serious year of peril. The propaganda disseminated by the government of the day was based on inadequate information, over-the-top censorship and a failure to take the population into its confidence. The faults lie with a succession of failed civilian and military administrations which, like the behaviour of most politicians, was a deliberate trail of cover-ups and refusal to admit fault.
Read more: The Bombing of Darwin Part 1 - it all started 40 years before
American elections have had a wacky, wild, and wooly history with all kinds of corruption from stuffed ballot boxes to buying votes to voting multiple times, to dead people voting (almost always for Democrats) and miscounting of ballots. Joe Stalin is credited with saying, “The people who cast the votes don’t decide an election, the people who count the votes do.” Stalin was a Communist in Russia not a Democrat in Georgia.
Some cynics would say, “A rose by any other name is still a rose.” Or a skunk called a wobbet still stinks to high Heaven.
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