Patriot Realm

I have lived on the Sunshine Coast for over 35 years and during that time have had several carpet snakes visit when we kept birds in an aviary.     Very occasionally caught a glimpse of a red bellied black  in the garden.   Sometimes seen a big brown  on one of the paths to the beach  , but this year  I have seen more snakes than in all the 35 years put together.

I don't know quite why it was that this poem sprang in to my head this morning. But spring it did and I found myself reciting it from memory, though I have not heard it in decades. 

Back in the 80's ( the good old days ) my eldest daughter, then aged about 10, owned a copy of the book that beautifully captured the spirit of Banjo Patterson's wonderful bush poem. We gave it to her for Christmas one year and it quickly became her most treasured reading material.  So much so that it would be read before she went to sleep and she was known to take it to the toilet to read and recite as she sat there on the throne in her private space.

At 9.41am on Monday 15 December 2014, Man Monis directed Tori Johnson (the manager of the Lindt Cafe in Martin Place, Sydney) to call 000 and say that all those in the cafe had been taken hostage by an Islamic State operative armed with a gun and explosives.

Eighteen hostages were held in the cafe for 16.5 hours. Over that period, 12 of the 18 hostages were able to escape in four separate episodes.

At around 2.13am on Tuesday 16th December, the cafe manager Tori Johnson was executed by Man Moris. Following the execution, police stormed the cafe and another hostage, Katrina Dawson, was struck by fragments of one or more deflected police bullets and died at the scene. The hostage-taker, Man Monis, was also killed in the firefight that followed the police storming the cafe.