The PR Blog

It was about 30 years ago when I was living in a tiny town in the Channel Country. I was married to the local copper. We had only arrived in the town of 30 residents a few weeks before..... we still didn't have a handle on how to " fit in " with this isolated and unusual community of people.

We were coasties: people who came from a far distant place that never knew about things like kangaroo shooters, feral pigs and opal mining.

In fact, in those days, I knew nothing about life in the Australian Outback. All I knew was that my husband was a policeman and he had applied to become an officer serving a remote community in one of the most extreme places in Australia. Where walking across the road could make you collapse from heatstroke.

I was in for a rude awakening. A baptism of fire. Literally. It was high summer and the heat was extraordinary. 

Many years ago, about half a century in fact, I played netball with my friend Mary.

She was my best friend and a nicer, sweeter girl you would never meet. We played netball in our primary school team.

In spite of her goodness, she was a lousy netball player. It would not have mattered if she was nice, or not nice. The fact that she was pretty hopeless at netball was indisputable. 

So you may well be asking: why is Shaydee writing about a game of netball in these troubled times? Surely we have more important things to consider right now? 

And yes, you would be right. So here is the story about a game of netball and how it still resonates all these decades later. 

Some time ago, I watched a fascinating documentary about the history of tanks.

I did not know that they were originally to be called landships, because they were modeled on the early warships used by naval forces around the world. But allies felt that the name would give an hostile WWI Germany a hint of what was being planned, so the name tank was coined. 

Because it looked somewhat like an old water tank.

From their humble beginnings in the early 20th century to the sophisticated armored behemoths of today, tanks have evolved significantly, shaping military strategies and battles along the way.

The concept of armoured vehicles dates back to ancient times, but it wasn't until World War I that the modern tank was born. In 1916, the British unveiled the Mark I tank, a tracked, armoured vehicle designed to break through enemy lines and traverse difficult terrain. These early tanks were primitive by today's standards, with rudimentary armour and limited mobility, but they represented a revolutionary leap in military technology.

Certain battles stand out not just for their strategic significance, but also for the profound human cost they exacted. 

The Battle of Fromelles, fought during World War I, is one such chapter. 

It took place on July 19–20, 1916, in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region of France. It was part of the wider Somme Offensive, a British and French joint operation aimed at breaking the stalemate of trench warfare on the Western Front. 

It was planned to stop the Germans from reinforcing their unit on the Somme, where the Allies had launched a major offensive earlier that month. The feint was unsuccessful. The attack was a disaster for the British and among the worst 24 hours in Australian military history.

When I was young (many decades ago) we lived on a small family farm at Wheatvale near Warwick on the Darling Downs in Queensland, Australia.

Our lifestyle was close to the organic self-sufficient nirvana that today's green zealots babble on about - we produced much of what we needed and needed most of what we produced, using mainly solar power plus a bit of hydrocarbon and wind energy.

But life was no picnic.

Our farm supported our family of four, 30 dairy cows, one bull, eight draught horses, two stock horses, a cattle dog, two cats, two ponies, plus a few pigs, calves and chooks and, at times, a returned service Uncle recovering from the malaria he caught during the war in Papua New Guinea.

One thousand and twenty-one submissions to the Covid-19 Response Enquiry, out of the two thousand and ninety, declined to permit the author’s name to be published.

That’s 49%. Overall, 49% of those people moved enough to make a submission felt disinclined to put their name to their submission.

What a sorry state of affairs. When only half the submitters are confident enough to sign their name for all to see, something is rotten in the states and territories of Australia. Why don’t people put their name to their opinions? 

Fear of being cancelled? Fear of losing your job? Fear of retribution? Fear of an awkward conversation over the back fence?

More worrying is that of 26 million, give or take a daily planeload more, only 2,000 bothered to write about the catastrophe of the last 4 years. 

That’s 0.008%. Or in technical mathematical language, bugger all.