A Life Well Lived - He Crossed Oceans. He Found Love. He Found Home.

Today would have been my father's 100th birthday.

He was born on 5 June 1926 in Douglas on the Isle of Man and passed away in Queensland Australia on 4 August 2015, aged 89.

His voyage through life was one that many children today would struggle to imagine. He grew up during the Depression. He wore wooden clogs. He scrumped apples. He followed coal trains to collect fallen coal. He knew what it was to go without and what it was to work.

He was part of a generation that could wield a shovel, get dirty, work hard all day and still find something to smile about when evening came.

Like all of you reading this, I have a special place in my heart for my parents. If you did not, you would probably be elsewhere, shouting about the end of civilisation, the end of the planet or the latest fashionable cause. Instead, you are here.

That makes you what I call "One of Us."

People who still honour the privilege of life. People who treasure family. People who understand that a childhood gifted to us by loving parents is one of the greatest blessings we ever receive.

This is my tribute to my Dad.

The same, but different, to yours.

THE DUSTY GULCH GAZETTE

Special Sister City Edition

Reprinted by Permission from the Dry Creek Clarion, Wyoming

THE GREAT BIN SUPPRESSION

How I Discovered the Boston Tea Party Never Happened

By Jeremiah "Sniffs-the-Truth" Coyote - Senior Investigative Correspondent

Dry Creek Clarion, Wyoming

For more than two hundred and fifty years, Americans have been told a simple story.

A group of angry colonists boarded ships in Boston Harbor and dumped tea into the water. Read on ... you will be shocked. 

Part 2 of the Cane Series

I’ll admit, before diving into this series, I hadn’t given much thought to how the sugar industry shaped our Constitution. Like many Australians, I knew the name Sir Samuel Griffith from maybe from a university crest or a street sign..but not much more. Yet, as I followed cane’s tangled path through Queensland’s past, it led me to a moment in time when sugar, race, labour, and law collided. And at the heart of it stood Griffith: barrister, Premier, and constitutional architect.

What struck me wasn’t just what he said, but why he said it....and what he hoped Australia might become.

On 31 March 1891, during the charged debates that would shape the nation's Constitution, Griffith rose to speak on a subject that had long troubled him.... the importation of black labour into Queensland's cane fields. He warned:

“...the introduction of an alien race in considerable numbers into any part of the Commonwealth is a danger to the whole of the Commonwealth... upon that matter the Commonwealth should speak, and the Commonwealth alone.”

It was a defining moment. Not just in law, but in the struggle to decide what kind of country this fledgling Australia would be.

Australia's White Australia Policy was a set of laws designed to restrict immigration by people who were not of European origin, especially targeting Asians - mainly Chinese - and Pacific Islanders. Those laws aimed to maintain Australia as a predominantly white, British-style society.

The roots of the policy trace back to the gold rush era of the 1850s, when thousands of Chinese immigrants came to Australia seeking prosperity. Their success in the goldfields primarily resulted from them taking all available ground, leading to tension with European miners and culminating in violent protests such as the Buckland and Lambing Flat Riots.

In response, the Colonies (now States) imposed taxes and other restrictions targeting Chinese arrivals. By the late 19th century, labor unions opposed low-wage competition from Chinese workers in industries including furnituremaking and market gardening, further fueling support for restrictive immigration laws.

They say Australia rode in on the sheep’s back.

But if you’d been standing in the cane fields of north Queensland, sweat in your eyes and the hum of harvesters in your ears, you might’ve thought otherwise. While the outback echoed with the bleat of woolly sheep and the click of shears, another Australia was rising... sweet, smoky, and sharp-edged.

This one rode not on the back of a sheep, but on the swing of a machete.

The machete: tool of the land - now the weapon of headlines and a handy distraction from what’s really going on.

Our country, which owes so much to the machete, is now very worried about them. And rightfully so.

So it got me thinking about sugar... its history and its contribution, good and bad, to our great nation of Australia.

It all began on a quiet afternoon in our neighbourhood park.

Cricket season had ended, leaving a vast, grassy oval entirely to ourselves.

My big brother picked up a sheet of writing paper, folded it with care, and launched it into the breeze.

That simple paper glider soared for a few glorious seconds before landing softly -  and just like that, I was hooked.

The paper glider quickly evolved.