The PR Blog

I would venture to say that the two most famous and well known phrases of our military history are “Gallipoli” and “The Rats of Tobruk”. One was a magnificent defeat. The other was a magnificent triumph.

Field Marshall Sir William Slim, 13^th Governor General of Australia and at the time, General commanding the 14^th Army said after the triumph over the Japanese at Milne Bay that “…..Some of us may forget that, of all the Allies, it was the Australians who first broke the invincibility of the Japanese army and it was the Australians who first broke the invincibility of the German army.”

In speaking of the defeat of the German Army he was speaking about Tobruk.

I have just watched the funeral of Prince Philip. There was something so different, so sad and so moving that I felt the need to put it into words. To witness the passing of this great Naval Officer and servant of the People was and will become one of those moments in history where, as Shaydee wrote some time ago, we record our snapshots of momentous occasions and our brains realise that something momentous just occurred. 

Today, we watched the passing of the old guard. The handing over of our future to a group of people who have never learned that, without respect for the past,  we will be given a future that none of us could ever have imagined or ever wanted.

It is a future that fills me with dread.

Of all the legends and stories about ANZAC the most enduring one is that of Simpson and his donkey.

I clearly remember being told this story as a very young child when I was in grade 2 in 1941. In those days we were repeatedly told stories about the “last” war; last meaning previous, not end or final.

Recently, one of my commenters said that we had become a society of sex, drugs, mock and troll.  How profound was that? Everything was either lewd, spaced out, or subject to ridicule and abuse.

Doesn't that just about sum up today's world in a nutshell?

It is no longer sex drugs, rock and roll. Our modern society has taken things to a new level.

The Last Post would be familiar to all Australians from an early age. It is played at every ANZAC Day ceremony by a bugler in an army uniform and frequently at funerals of soldiers and veterans.

Does the average civilian attendee understand the significance of this quasi musical interlude? Is it an entertainment piece that everyone expects to hear because it is always part of the programme like the hymn “Oh God our Help in Ages Past”?

The Last Post is one of the most ancient tools used by modern British founded armies and has its roots in the days of the Roman Empire when horns were used to play the hymn of the Goddess Diana and as signals to command troops on the battlefield. Even to this day, the French term for what we call e reveille is La Diana.

All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it’s one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him… One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.”

~ H. L. Mencken, “Prejudices: Third Series (Le Contrat Social)“. Book by H. L. Mencken, 1922.