In which only prattling Polonius and Blainers survive some brutal reptile culling ...

 

Many reptiles have fallen by the wayside this weekend.

During the week the pond indulged in some late arvo retrospectives, but come on, it's the weekend, even the most devoted herpetology swot has to take a break ... and yesterday was about as tough as the pond, or any bold and brave correspondent, has had to endure ...

The best the pond can do is make a brief note on some of the fallen, it being the season for that sort of celebration ...

Amongst the fallen, aka the ignored but briefly noted, was the Angelic one. 

In any other time, her Frank effort would have been judged top notch ...

Pope Francis had his flaws, but did not deserve derision
For six months, I observed the Pope going about his daily business. He would give us a friendly wave and thumbs up as he walked out of the dining room. So why is this friendly Pope so controversial?

All the pond could do was offer a sample...

...Criticism of a pope can be justified because the pope is an ordinary man who has flaws. Francis was reputed to have had a volatile temper. He was not popular with some clerics. He lost his media advisers. It is no secret that Cardinal George Pell did not like him much, although both were authoritarians. Francis withdrew support for Pell’s oversight of the finance portfolio; nevertheless, he supported Pell during his trials in Australia. Francis knew Pell was not guilty of the charges against him.
Whether a pope is popular or well-liked is not the point. The point is whether his pronouncements were as contradictory as critics claim. Four things keep coming up in relation to Francis: the Latin mass, communion for divorced Catholics, gay marriage and the China agreement.
Banning the Latin Tridentine mass was a move against people who were severe critics of the Pope – and they became worse critics. Not a good move. As for marriage, as cardinal in Argentina, Francis called gay marriage “the work of the devil”. That was pretty clear. He did not support it but he encouraged blessings for individuals within those relationships and encouraged them to stay in the church. Like divorce, it kept coming up from some European clerics and secular media. The church will not and cannot change its teachings on these issues because they go to the heart of teaching about what sacramental marriage is, for the procreation of children and sacramentally indissoluble.
The China problem is more serious. In an attempt to bring persecuted Chinese Catholics in from the cold the church seems to have compromised with a ruthless secular authority to appoint the church’s teachers.

But the boundaries of the church are not national nor is its timeline finite, whether the pope be Argentinian, Brazilian or Congolese. Reno’s last remark about Francis’s “moralising criticism” is nonsense. What is the Pope if not a moraliser? Faith and morals are his business. He didn’t see the immigration crisis in Europe and the US in the strict paradigm of maintaining national borders and cultural cohesion because the scope of the church’s teaching goes beyond those limits to the paradigm of good and evil, which is universal.
The secular media, captured by ideologies of left and right, is reluctant to grasp that morality encompasses everything. As Reno said, our political lives are “in the service of moral truths”. No one understands that better than the successor of St Peter.

Good old homophobic Frank, good old Angelic, one lover of homophobic onesd ...

Dame Slap was another of the fallen, doing her usual rant about pesky, difficult, uppity blacks, in... 

Medically sanctioned ‘cultural safety’ pedestal elevates Indigenous activism above child safety
Why are professional groups aiding Indigenous activism as part of medical school training?

Dame Slap is agin all that cultural stuff, but alas the pond could only note a little of her rant ...

...The Medical Board of Australia controls continuing profes­sional development require­ments for all doctors to remain registered in Australia. Its policy on cultural safety education says its definition of cultural safety is informed by “provision of a rights-based approach to healthcare supported by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples”.
Given that every Australian has the same right to high-quality healthcare, it’s not obvious why the medical board is referencing a UN declaration that Australia refused to sign for good reason.
The UN declaration demands separatism and co-sovereignty. Article three says “Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination” and by “virtue of that right they freely determine their political status”. Article four gives Indigenous peoples “in exercising their right to self-determination” the “right to autonomy or self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs” – as well as the “ways and means for financing their autonomous functions”. Article 14 gives Indigenous peoples the “right to establish and control their education systems and institutions”.
Why is the medical board foisting on doctors a political project that would, on the evidence of the voice result, also be resoundingly rejected by Australians?
It’s one thing to play feel-good politics by citing radical UN declarations and inserting cultural re-education camps into the accreditation and ongoing registration of Australian doctors.
But even this tokenistic embrace of cultural safety by medical professional bodies will embolden activists to keep treating cultural safety as a weapon to achieve ideologically driven ends.
When ideology clashes with the best interests of children in need of a loving and stable home, and the former wins out, we enter truly dangerous territory.

Splendid stuff, and the pond was sorry to see her ideologically driven ranting end up once again in her fundament, and in too short a form of excremental discharge.

The dog botherer was another of the fallen. Many will remember his tremendous time in uniform - what a warrior he was - and so the righteous anger was deep and rich in ...

One of these men has put his life on the line for his country. The other is a desktop warrior
According to Labor, Andrew Hastie – who fought Islamist extremists – should be disqualified from leading the nation’s defence. If Richard Marles’ attack wasn’t so shameful, it would be hilarious.

Funny how a desktop warrior should abuse other desktop warriors for being desktop warriors, yet here we are and how sadly brief was the pond noting of the rant:

...Here was a politician who took something as precious as an Indigenous consensus on the route to constitutional recognition, threw it into his election victory speech, investing it with partisan triumphalism, then failed to negotiate a bipartisan compromise and proceeded with a referendum regardless. Albanese’s sabotage of the voice process set back Indigenous reconciliation a generation. A leading light of Labor’s Socialist Left faction, Albanese astutely moderated his public face when he became opposition leader. His 2022 election manifesto was deliberately small target and mainstream: he would retain secure borders, support AUKUS, stand up to China and deliver responsible economic management while cutting electricity bills by $275 a year and pushing down mortgage rates and the cost of living.
Albanese has comprehensively failed on this score, becoming the biggest spending first-term government since Gough Whitlam, and baking in so much recurrent expenditure that budget deficits are forecast for decades to come. This has kept inflation and interest rates higher for longer and passed on an unavoidable burden of fiscal consequences to future governments and younger generations.
Labor’s ideological commitment to an impossible renewables-plus-storage model exacerbates our economic challenges. Without reliable and affordable energy, we lose industries, jobs and opportunities, imposing an internal tariff on all consumers and industries.
So long as global commitments to net zero continue, there is nothing more certain than the emergence of a domestic nuclear energy industry in Australia. There is no other reliable emissions-free alternative and the folly of trying to reverse centuries of evolution from diffuse to dense forms of energy will be revealed – every day we delay this leap into the 21st century the costs of our indolence mount.
Early on there were encouraging signs from the Albanese government on foreign affairs and national security. But while, thankfully, it has maintained a commitment to AUKUS, Labor has kowtowed to China and shown alarming incompetence on border and immigration security.
Albanese has gone from keeping quiet on Chinese transgressions such as a sonar attack on our navy divers to prevent embarrassing Beijing interlocutors to openly making excuses for the PLA Navy after it began live-firing exercises in the Tasman Sea without alerting us. Despite repeated provocations and intimidation, he has yet to offer a stern word against China.
Yet all these failings pale into insignificance for me compared with Albanese’s reckless abrogation of his responsibilities when it comes to social cohesion and anti-Semitism.
While the abandonment of Israel at the UN by Albanese and Wong is shameful, it is the domestic ramifications where the weakness has been damaging and unforgivable. On October 8, 2023, Sheik Ibrahim Dadoun led a Muslim crowd in Sydney’s Lakemba celebrating with “pride” the Hamas atrocities against Israel the previous day as acts of “courage” and “victory”. The following morning on breakfast TV Albanese reacted by saying, “Well, there’s nothing to celebrate by the murder of innocent civilians, going about their day.” That was it. That was as strong as he spoke about perhaps the most disturbing public gathering in this nation in living memory.
With synagogues firebombed, threatening protests commonplace and Jewish Australians living in fear for more than 18 months now, this is the issue on which Albanese completely lost me. When we have needed real national leadership, we have received only false equivalence and weasel words.
And now Albanese and his Jewish Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus are preferencing the viciously anti-Israel Greens at this election. Political differences and policy debates are one thing, but this dereliction of moral duty should disqualify this Prime Minister from re-election.
Yet according to Labor it is Hastie, a man who has risked his life in mortal combat against Islamist extremists, who should be disqualified from leading the nation’s defence. And it is Dutton, who has spoken up bravely and strongly against the extremists and in support of Israel, who is not fit to be prime minister.
There is plenty the Coalition could do better in this campaign, and there will be time to discuss all of that. But this denigration of their personnel and character by a closed-shop union collective of appeasers is grotesque.
It is beyond belief that we do not see more people calling out these mutations in our public debate. It is so detached from reality that soon they will be telling us Albanese did not fall off that stage.
At the dawn service at North Bondi, two days after Dutton and Hastie announced an extra $21 billion for defence over five years, former Labor defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon, honouring all service personnel, living and dead, including his son Lance Corporal Jack Fitzgibbon killed in training just last year, called for bipartisanship on defence policy, partly because of the enormous expenditure required. Now those are fighting words.

Wonderful fighting words, and what a tragedy that for some mysterious reason, the pastie Hastie mysteriously stayed hidden in the cupboard , or sheltering in the trenches, for so long in the campaign ... but now he's gone over the top and the dog botherer is with him all the way, as any keyboard reptile warrior would ...

But why this clearing of the decks? 

What about the Ughmann? Perhaps the pond might just once break its late arvo weekend rule, but the burning decks had to be cleared because meditative Sunday time is always reserved for prattling Polonius, and he was in brave war monger warrior mode.

The header: Anzac spirit remains vibrant in the young, despite march of the Left, If precedent is any guide, it is likely that the overwhelming majority of most Australians, of all cohorts from Gen Z to boomers, would support Australia if it became necessary to go to war to protect the nation.

The caption: Participants in the Adelaide Anzac Day parade in South Australia. Clearly, many Gen Z Australians have not succumbed to indoctrination. Picture: Emma Brasier

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Forget the smiling croweaters. They'd be far too young toremember Polonius for his extraordinary service in the 'Nam cause, and for his generally distinguished career in war mongering, and he was in top form this day ...

Last Wednesday, the front page of The Daily Telegraph carried the heading “Legend Lost on Gen Z” with the subheading declaring “only 23 per cent of young feel strongly about Anzac Day”.
Turn to page 4 and the news was even more depressing. David Mills wrote that only one in six members of Gen Z (aged between 13 and 28) “would sign up to defend Australia in the event that we were attacked, exclusive new polling has found”.
The findings were in a survey of 1118 Australians conducted by News Corp’s Growth Intelligence Centre. Here Mills reported that “42 per cent of all respondents said that they felt strongly connected to Anzac Day, but the figure dropped to 23 per cent for Gen Z”.
However, there was some good news. Respondents were given the option of saying that “maybe” they would consider fighting, depending on the situation. Here 68 per cent of Gen Z declared they would definitely serve or consider doing so. As Mills pointed out, this was higher than for boomers (born between 1946 and 1964).

Hang on, hang on, when was Polonius born? 

Is he a boomer? 

Phew, according to his wiki, he was born in 1945 and so wasn't a boomer, and that explains his splendid service record ... no discontented, slacker boomer he, salt of the earth digger him ...

For some reasonm at this moment, the reptiles decided to bring back "Noddy", proving that old warriors never just fade away, they infest AF distractions featuring a different Price is Wrong ... Former premier Campbell Newman discusses the representation of younger people at Friday’s Anzac Day events. “You certainly have got young being inculcated with the whole Anzac legend,” Mr Newman told Sky News host Steve Price. “Today at the service, the local schools were well represented and the kids had, from primary school age up to high schoolers were participants in the service. “It was fantastic."

He's not going to go the Muggers is he? He's not going to pay tribute to that shrivelled, eternally ancient prune? He is, he is ...

All this reminded me of learning of the Oxford Union Society’s King and Country debate in February 1933 when I read English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge’s irreverent history The Thirties: 1930-1940 in Great Britain.
Muggeridge wrote: “The Oxford Union carried a motion favouring a refusal to fight for King and Country if requested to do, and some taking literally a remark of Professor (Albert) Einstein to the effect that if only 4 per cent of humanity were resolute in refusing to go to war, peace would be assured, decided to constitute themselves that 4 per cent, and wore badges indicating the same.” The debate carried the motion “that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country” by 275 to 153 votes. There were three student and two guest speakers. Philosopher CEM Joad and lawyer Quintin Hogg (later a Conservative minister) were the non-students.
When news broke in the London Telegraph, the motion fed into what came to be called appeasement. The Oxford Union Library records that “Joad’s articulate presentation of an absolute pacifist stance was widely acknowledged as crucial in influencing the result”.
That was in 1933. In September 1939, Britain declared war on Nazi Germany following its invasion of Poland. And Joad’s pacifism seemed irrelevant to most British citizens – young and old alike.
There is no evidence that many, if any, of those who voted for or supported the Oxford Union motion declined to do their duty when it became necessary for Britain to stand up to Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime.
As for pacifists such as Joad, writer George Orwell summed up their predicament when reviewing Hitler’s Mein Kampf on March 21, 1940, in The New English Weekly: “The socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do.”

Muggers and Orwell in one all-embracing gobbet, but didn't Orwell fight on the wrong side? Didn't he help pierce the heart of Christ the king?

There you go, B.A., the onion muncher, the Pellists and Polonius all in one serve. Time then to honour vibrant future warriors, ready to get into a scrap, Friday’s commemorations indicate, however, that the Anzac spirit remains vibrant despite the fact many young Australians have been told by teachers and lecturers Australia is an illegitimate country. Picture: Emma Brasier

Those brave lads inspired Polonius to hit full warrior stride ...

If precedent is any guide, it is likely that the overwhelming majority of most Australians, of all cohorts from Gen Z to boomers, would support Australia if it became necessary to go to war to protect the nation. Moreover, it would seem that support for the Australian Defence Force and the Anzac legend is stronger now than it was more than a half-century ago – when Alan Seymour’s play The One Day of The Year was fashionable among the intelligentsia.
As those who have seen the work or read the script, Seymour mocked the returned servicemen (at the time there was little focus on returned servicewomen). This has changed in recent times; witness the decision to name the new federal seat in Western Australia after heroic nurse Vivian Bullwinkel, the sole survivor of the 1942 Bangka Island massacre during the Pacific War.
It seems support for Australia’s military combatants has increased in recent years due to a growing interest in genealogy, facilitated by new technology that has made it possible for Australians to trace the war service of grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and more besides. This has put the personal back into Anzac Day and other commemorations in a way that was missing some decades earlier.
The left, most notably John Pilger who was favoured by the ABC, invariably has asserted that Australia fought “other people’s wars”. This was never the case. Physically isolated, Australia had a vested interest in participating in the world wars, Korea, the Malayan Emergency, the Indonesian Confrontation, Vietnam and the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts in recent times. Along with peacekeeping operations. It is appropriate that all involvements be remembered in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, which is being refurbished to make this possible.
This was the subject of a Four Corners program titled Sacrifice and presented by Mark Willacy that aired on March 10. The program was yet another example of the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster’s lack of viewpoint diversity. Willacy interviewed three people responsible for the AWM, namely chairman Kim Beazley, managing director Matt Anderson and a council member. Willacy then rolled out 10 critics of the AWM – particularly covering its redevelopment to create new exhibitions and the fact it receives some funds from the armaments industry.
Historian Peter Stanley ran the familiar left-wing line that the AWM “should not be accepting money from the merchants of death”, overlooking the fact, without an armaments industry, Western democracies would not be able to defend themselves. Beazley made this point to Willacy, but he did not seem to be impressed.
Friday’s commemorations indicate, however, that the Anzac spirit remains vibrant despite the fact many young Australians have been told by teachers and lecturers Australia is an illegitimate country. Clearly, many Gen Z Australians have not succumbed to indoctrination.

Yep, much better to die for the doctrine that dying to save Polonius and make the billionaire class even richer in the process is the way to go. That way you can use your profits to placate the missus, help her to build a nice collection of Van Goghs and then build the Museum Kröller-Müller to house them.

Phew, all that deserves a cartoon, and this is a portion of an old Kudelka, found in full here ...

Yep, we generally agree that war is a bad idea, but Polonius keeps urging us to do it.

It's curious how those who fought in assorted wars never much liked to talk about the experience. The pond's assorted uncles, grandfather, etc., gave only rare hints that it was frightening, and that they hoped no one had to experience it again ...

Not so Blainers, in an eight minute read - so the reptiles timed it - and speaking of urging, he was raring to go for another round ...

The header: Australia was ill-prepared for war in 1941. In 2025, we’re making the same grave mistake, Anthony Albanese admits there is an international crisis in nearby Asia and the South China Sea. But he then shuts his eyes.

The caption: Surely we can learn – and Anthony Albanese can learn – from the crisis Australia faced in World War II. Artwork: Geordie Gray (oh Geordie, Geordie if that's an artwork, the pond has a 'dogs playing billiards' print to sell you)

The magical prescription: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there.

Blainers was on a war footing from the get go:

Australia is not prepared for a war or a half-war near its shores. Anthony Albanese has no wish to discuss this matter seriously: here is a failure of leadership. He admits there is an international crisis in nearby Asia and the South China Sea. But he then shuts his eyes.
Surely we can learn – and he can learn – from the crisis Australia faced in World War II. That crisis, at its depth, was not only alarming for the government in Canberra but must have created fear around the typical dinner table and workplace smoko.
Events early in World War II seemed far away from Australia, especially in 1939. In the following year Adolf Hitler and his forces captured Belgium and Holland, Denmark and Norway. In France the Maginot Line, perhaps the strongest single fortification so far built in the history of Europe, was believed to be the answer to Hitler. But Hitler’s armed forces bypassed it. Within weeks they conquered France. The Battle for Britain, now fought in the air, was seen by many as the prelude to an effective German invasion of that island.
In Australia daily life and leisure went on as normal. In Melbourne in September 1940, at the age of 10, I and my oldest brother were taken to our first football grand final, and there we were a tiny part of a huge crowd seemingly unaffected by the momentous fact that France – our own second most important ally – had recently been trounced. France’s vast global empire was already flung open to invaders. The French colony of New Caledonia, so vulnerable, was only a short voyage east of Brisbane.
In some activities Australia was adventurous in preparing for a war that might approach its unguarded coastline. Essington Lewis, the head of BHP, after touring Japan in 1934, decided its industries were quietly preparing for a major war. Eventually he set up the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation at Port Melbourne where a simple flying machine called the Wirraway was mass-produced. A training aircraft of Californian design, it was the first step in plans to build a faster plane, but the next step was taken only after the Japanese had entered the war.
In January 1941, Australia’s war cabinet learnt that Japan had made its first Mitsubishi Zero, a fighter capable of reaching 300 miles an hour: that was at least 100 miles faster than the Wirraway. The cabinet, however, was privately assured by Britain that Japan would own few such aircraft. Therefore the Wirraway would “put up quite a good show” against the typical Japanese flying-rattletrap, for the Japanese were dismissed as not “air-minded”. Such advice proved to be suicidal for many of our young wartime pilots who had to confront a Zero in aerial combat.

For a proud warrior determined to fight the next world war, Blainers spent a curiously long amount of time looking back, to the days of A Mitsubishi A6M Zero. Picture: Australian War Memorial

The pond had half-hoped for Blainers explaining drones and AI and nuking the planet and killer robots, but he was preoccupied with rehashing ancient conflicts, like the generals who imagined the first world war would just be glorious cavalry charges, or the ones that got Singapore's guns pointing the wrong way.

Would Singapore, the British naval base, be equal to the task if war erupted? General Thomas Blamey, the experienced head of our army, decided that Singapore was not in danger of a major attack. A month before the devastating Japanese naval raid on Pearl Harbor, Blamey thought so poorly of the Japanese army that he recommended that all Australian soldiers then training in Singapore’s hinterland should join their comrades in North Africa and the Middle East. There, under the same commander, they could fight the powerful German forces. Fortunately his advice was not taken. Returning to Australia he so advised the government.

Those who look at the past know one of the results, Japanese prisoners of war at Sandakan in Borneo. Picture: Australian War Memorial.

Complacency haunts Blainers...

The general also noticed people on the home front were incredibly complacent. After attending a crowded racecourse in Melbourne and presenting the cup, he intimated that the throng of spectators resembled a herd of gazelles grazing on the edge of a danger-filled jungle. He knew, however, that intense effort was now directed to the production of munitions in the industrial suburbs.
RG Menzies, the prime minister from 1939 to 1941, had spent weeks in London in the hope of persuading Winston Churchill to reinforce Singapore. Churchill, understandably, believed the key theatre of the war was Europe where Britain, alone of the great powers, stood up to Hitler. For crucial months Churchill’s only allies were Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Looking to the far sides of the world he did not predict Japan’s eagerness to acquire new sources of oil. In the Dutch East Indies and British Burma, valuable oilfields were just waiting to be seized by the Japanese.

But people had a reason to be complacent. Hadn't Ming the merciless himself labelled Adolf as one of the really great men of the century.

Enough of that kind of heresy, quick, a snap of Winnie, Winston Churchill pictured in London in 1941. Picture: Getty

Then it was back to ancient fears ...

Japan, possessing so many aircraft carriers – in short, the world’s largest fleet of swimming islands – first had to cripple America’s great naval base close to Honolulu. Its devastating attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, opened up the Pacific Ocean to a timetable of invasions. On December 8, Japanese forces began to invade British Malaya. British reinforcements almost miraculously had just reached Singapore. The warships Repulse and Prince of Wales had not long arrived – loud was the cheering on December 2. A few days later, without the protection of aircraft, they steamed north. Suddenly, Japanese dive bombers appeared: they flew from the present Vietnam, being the former French Indo-China, and sank the two warships.
Many Australians, on hearing the news, displayed shock and a sense of desperation. According to the American consul in Adelaide, the public mood was “the closest to actual panic that I have ever seen”. The fear was contagious that Australia’s northern ports might soon be crippled by Japanese submarines or bombers.
During December 1941 the Japanese invaded The Philippines, Hong Kong (it surrendered on Christmas Day), Malaya, Burma, the Dutch East Indies, Portuguese Timor and a scattering of strategic islands in the western Pacific. The port of Rabaul in the present PNG even fell to the Japanese before Darwin was bombed. The speed of this chain of invasions had almost no parallel in military history.
Meanwhile, a Japanese army fought its way south towards Singapore. British, Indian and Australian soldiers defending Malaya were in retreat. They lacked the protective armour provided by tanks. They lacked support from the air. Though they far outnumbered the Japanese their morale was not impressive: sometimes they were outwitted by Japanese soldiers riding bicycles. On February 15, 1942, Singapore surrendered. To Churchill it was “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history”.
Today Donald Trump is daily reviled by many critics because he is seen as making mistaken decisions. The strain on a leader in a time of national peril was just as visible in Churchill. He failed to predict the Japanese invasions and their stunning success, though in the end he was rightly enthroned as one of the three or four main creators of the decisive Allied victory in World War II. Moreover – wisely it now seems – he resolved that he must support his newish ally, the embattled Soviet Union, and he presented it with more than 300 fast aircraft when such a gift might have helped to save Singapore, though only temporarily
Four days after Singapore was conquered, Darwin was bombed by the Japanese. The most important harbour on the whole northern coast, and busy with the largest number of American and Australian naval vessels so far assembled there, it was bombed twice on February 19, 1942, and again and again in later weeks. There lingered a fear that Australia’s main sea routes might be blocked by Japan. But in the same year the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway Island effectively destroyed the ascendancy of Japan’s navy. Three years later, World War II was finally ended by the two atomic bombs delivered on Japanese cities.

The bombing of Darwin turned up, The impact of the first air raid on ships in Darwin Harbour in 1942.

Then it was time for a frontal assault on Albo ...

We can now examine the hazardous version of history that tends to shape Albanese’s thinking. He believes he can weaken our nation’s defences but confidently summon the US to mend the defensive fence he himself has broken. In short, does he hope to walk in the footsteps of John Curtin, the new Labor PM who, it is widely believed, persuaded the US to rescue Australia from the Japanese at the end of 1941? This was seen as perhaps his finest achievement, though then he was less than four months in office.
Just after Christmas 1941, when Australia seemed increasingly in peril, Curtin wrote an article for the Melbourne Herald. The nation’s main afternoon newspaper, it was then controlled by Sir Keith Murdoch. In strong language Curtin called on the US to save Australia: “Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.”

Cue relevant snaps, Prime Minister John Curtin's article in the Melbourne Herald, John Curtin.

Actually if the pond might state the bleeding obvious, Curtin's decision to turn to the United States was one of the most talked about turning points in Australia in the second world war, and his text in the Herald can be found preserved at Trove.

Almost forgotten is that Curtin’s article also called for help from Russia, which for the previous six months had been resisting Hitler’s almost bloodthirsty invasion and now was winning the long battle at the city of Stalingrad. Curtin showed brave determination: “We know, too, that Australia can go and Britain can still hold on. We are, therefore, determined that Australia shall not go.”

Actually Curtin wanted Russian aid in relation to Japan, reasonable enough given Russia's proximity to Japan and Japan's alliance with Adolf...but do go on ...

It is still believed Curtin deserves credit for thus inaugurating the vital US alliance that still survives. Unfortunately, this seems to be a myth. Curtin and his eloquent appeal for military help was not our deliverer from peril. The first American aid had already arrived. On orders from Washington a convoy on its way to The Philippines faced the risk of fierce air attacks and was diverted far south to the safety of Brisbane where it arrived on December 18, 1941. Curtin must have known of its arrival more than a week before he publicly appealed for US help: there is no evidence he tried to deceive the public and claim undue credit for himself. He was honourable: in print he simply blessed what had already happened.
This week I read again his patriotic article, for it formed one of the most influential but misunderstood appeals in our history. He was not clamouring for attention. He started with a verse written by his old Labor comrade, the poet reared on the Victorian goldfields, Bernard O’Dowd:

Time for that fragment, in Trove, link above ...

That reddish veil which o’er the face
Of night-hag East is drawn …
Flames new disaster for the race
Or can it be the dawn?

Actually, if we're going to do poetry, how about a familiar few from Wilfred Owen? It might help cure the pond's indigestion ...

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
      — Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
      Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; 
      Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
      And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
      Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
      The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Back to the old lie ... and yet not a word about what a future world war III might look like, as if we weren't already doing enough to make the planet uninhabitable ...

Curtin was pointing to Japan, which for long had been the nation most Australians, especially politicians, feared the most. Japan was also feared or watched by most Californians. Also known to Curtin was that America came to our aid not primarily because he sought it but because America needed a launching pad and an industrial base from which it could begin the arduous task of recapturing the lands, sea straits and harbours conquered so quickly by the Japanese. Nonetheless, the legend grew that Australia began the tradition of calling for help from America and promptly receiving it. In fact, we have no real entitlement unless we pull our weight.
Albanese should realise that the lesson learnt and taught by Curtin was to defend and rely on ourselves as much as possible. Thousands of Australians died as Japanese prisoners of war or “on active service at sea” because their own nation was not adequately prepared for war. Many are among our war heroes. The Prime Minister has yet to learn that vital truth.
The first American troopships reached Australia in about the middle of February 1942. As children, playing on the sandy beach at Point Lonsdale one afternoon, we saw troopships enter Port Phillip Bay and begin their approach to Melbourne; we could even glimpse the faces of the soldiers who crowded the decks to set eyes on this strange land. Of course we had no idea how lucky was our nation.
When the war finally ended in 1945, Australians knew the nation must populate or perish. Only with a larger population could we provide more airmen, sailors, soldiers and nurses.
For the next third of a century the massive immigration program, initiated by the Chifley Labor government and its enthusiastic minister, Arthur Calwell, was conducted with success. It emphasised social cohesion and loyalty to Australia. Then it gave way to a new ideology that jumped too far in exalting diversity and ethnic loyalties. Eventually we imported considerable numbers of migrants who had no loyalty or scant loyalty to their new nation and sometimes a fierceness towards ancient enemies. They sour the spirit of today’s election campaign.
Geoffrey Blainey is preparing an updated edition of his widely read book The Causes of War, first published in 1973.

Roll that one around on your tongue again. Still the same old bigot, still lauding Artie "two wongs don't make a white" Calwell, of gravel voice and gravel mind ...

Eventually we imported considerable numbers of migrants who had no loyalty or scant loyalty to their new nation and sometimes a fierceness towards ancient enemies. They sour the spirit of today’s election campaign.

That managed to sour the pond's day, bile always does ...

Perhaps in the updated edition, Blainers might note that the world is now topsy turvy and that the sides have been switched, and it's hard to tell who to fight for, or what form of salute to use ...

You know ...

You know ...

And so to a few more in the pond's slide show night of its recent travels, this time heading past the hamlet of Woolamin to the hamlet of Nundle, where the pond didn't enjoy a night at the Peel inn, still carrying the batwings first built for an ancient Japanese noodle western (the thought of it still has Blainers waking in a night sweat).

There were many curious artefacts and signs at the pub ...

Part of the hamlet's main drag, beginning with the post office that's no longer the PO...

The way to Hanging Rock and the Sheba dams ...

On the corner was a coffee van with comical sign ...