Brickbats for Albo for not giving the 47 used Taipan helicopters to Ukraine. The Ukrainians would make good use of them. Ukraine’s fight is our fight, and they need all the help they can get.
Closer to home, the usual virtue signalling suspects are bleating about changing the date of Australia Day again.
Australia Day in the Park (Commonwealth Park) and Australia Day generally bring back fond memories for me of the late, great Marjorie Turbayne, formerly doyenne and manageress of the Press Club, and a lady who in her sixties chased two would-be burglars from her home. She had also served with Britain’s Special Operations Executive during the war as an undercover agent in France.
Marjorie would get all kinds of eclectic people to help celebrate Australia Day. In the early 1990s, my job was to help the late Fred Daly, famous number one Raiders fan and Labor hero, run Speakers’ Corner. Fred had some great stories to tell of the federal parliament in the 1940s through to the Whitlam era.
Now I’m a dreadful cricketer, and I was also honoured to be asked by Marjorie on Australia Day 2001 to join my old ALP Assembly colleague Ted Quinlan and play in the PM’s team coached by Allan Border. I got out for a duck but bowled a credible one wicket for seven runs. Border actually sent me in to bowl again. I was rapt! We all then adjourned to the Lodge for a few quiet ones after the game.
Australia Day is a day of celebration of being Australian, no matter where you were born. In recent years, ceremonies have given due recognition to our unique Indigenous history. The day marks the beginning of modern Australia. If the Poms had not got here first and occupied the place, it is most likely a much more vicious colonial power would have. If it had been the Russians, Spaniards, Germans, or practically anyone else but the French, the Indigenous inhabitants would probably have all been slaughtered or killed off through disease. Jacinta Price, during the Voice debate, recently pointed out how happy and proud she was that Australia was occupied by the British.
The poor old Poms are pretty pathetic today, but apart from doing some pretty nasty things to our Indigenous brothers and sisters (as well as to the convicts), they brought us the rule of law, free speech, roads, railways, hospitals, schools, and the makings of a true democratic society that went on, especially after WW2, to welcome new citizens from over 160 different countries, most of whom were naturalised on Australia Day.
We came of age on 25 April 1915 (Anzac Day), but the true start day for the modern Australia most of us love (87 per cent in the latest opinion poll) was, like it or not, 26 January 1788. Further – on that day in Sydney Cove, no Indigenous people were hurt or killed. That, folks, is hardly an invasion. Occupation, maybe; invasion, no.
