In which the pond is shamed by an onion muncher appearance, and Homeric Henry fails to deliver the referential goods ...

 

What's the greater shame? That the reptiles should feature the onion muncher or that the pond should waste time on him?

The pond suspects the latter. The reptiles are gunna do what reptiles do, but the pond has no excuse for its wretched, sordid behaviour.

The header: By Tony Abbott
The ‘frontier wars’ don’t belong in the Australian War Memorial

The invitation: Listen to this article
7 min

Listen to an automated voice for 7 minutes? 

The pond will stop its ears against the AI song...

The caption? Proof that a war did exist: ST Gill’s Attack on Store Dray, 1865, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

It's just another form of black bashing, but it's the logic that gets to the pond:

Because it commemorates the service and sacrifice of the men and women who have fought for our country, the Australian War Memorial is our greatest national monument and shrine. It was originally conceived by Charles Bean, to honour the men whose exploits he’d described in the official history of the Great War.

Ergo, the noble white warriors that defeated the primitive black hordes (cf Pauline), the Australian War Memorial is the perfect place to celebrate the "service and sacrifice of the men and women who have fought for our country", producing the great and successful invasion which brought the country into being, which introduced the wondrous Anglo-Celtic, Judaeo-Xian tradition to the land, and which wiped out vast numbers of the original occupiers...

Sorry, not sorry ...

What these men did, he wrote, nothing now can alter: “The good, the bad, the greatness and smallness of their story will stand … It rises, as it will always rise, above the mists of ages, a monument to great-hearted men, and for their nation a possession forever.”
That’s been the role of the War Memorial ever since: to chronicle, to mourn, occasionally to admit and to explain, but above all to honour the deeds of the Australian armed forces, of the nation-in-uniform. It’s been intended as a place of unity and pride, rather than division and shame; a place to record and to remember what Australians have done together to defend our commonwealth, to support our allies, and to uphold our values. It’s never been intended as a place to note, other than perhaps in passing, the fights of some Australians against other Australians; and even then, say with the conscription debates, only in the context of our military campaigns.

But were they Australians? Weren't they just primitive blacks of no distinction whatsoever, singularly incapable of mounting a decent campaign up against dinkum military invaders bringing great joy to the land? (cf Pauline).

Didn't they deserve to be vanquished from the land with vigorous military actions and supporting settler guerrilla colonial campaigns so that the Anglo-Celtics might seize the country? (cf Pauline, cf Gaza)

A distracting snap: Charles Bean, official war historian, 1921. Picture: Australian War Memorial

It says something about the current management of the Australian War Memorial that they invited this charlatan to deliver this claptrap, but they did.

Perhaps it was an attempt to exorcise the deep shame of the behaviour of the invaders, but don't expect any shame from the shameless onion muncher, deploying "scare" "quotes" like that was a hands down way of winning an argument ...

That’s why the current campaign to make the so-called “frontier wars” a key element of the expanded and revamped Memorial is so misconceived. If the undoubted bloodshed between settlers and tribespeople is to be included, because the critics of colonialism now choose to characterise much of our history as a “war” between the British Empire and “First Nations”, what about the fights between “First Nations”, which were frequent and often deadly? How could events such as the Eureka Stockade or even the apprehension of the Kelly Gang be excluded, as at least they involved official direction, in a “war memorial” that would then have evolved from honouring our soldiers to eroding our conception of the nation for which they fought?
Recent claims that the “Australian wars” of the 19th century could have killed up to 100,000 Aboriginal people, largely based on projections and assumptions about the bloody work of the Queensland native mounted police, are entirely speculative.
Even the Newcastle University Massacre Map puts the Aboriginal death toll at about 11,000, from some 400 massacres around the country. And because this figure is often derived from subsequent oral history, it’s best described as a guesstimate – although that’s not to minimise the bloodshed that took place, such as around Bathurst, in Gippsland, western Victoria, the Kimberleys, outback Queensland, and particularly in Tasmania.
In the 1820s, Tasmania endured what were described, even then, as the “Black Wars”, with frequent attacks on isolated shepherds and homesteads, culminating in a declaration of martial law and the “black line”, where some 2000 soldiers and settlers attempted to corral the resistance.
Historian Henry Reynolds says that the martial law declaration plus the scale of settler casualties (almost 200 dead in a population of scarcely 20,000; with perhaps three times as many Aboriginal deaths) justifies it being called a war. On the other hand, benign interactions continued, with widow Sarah Birch intervening on at least two occasions to save the warrior Kickerterpoller from prison or execution. And governor George Arthur, along with most of the citizens of Hobart, received the remaining warriors with honour after the eventual truce.

Numbers? Numbers is the way to deny the black wars and black resistance?

At this very moment, the mad King is conducting a war with Iran, in which just there have been a mere confirmed US military forces deaths of 18, and perhaps 750 wounded. It's possibly all lies, and it's possible that thousands of Iranian civilians have died, but you don't have to do a body count to arrive at a war, cf the phoney war of 1939-40

Another distraction: Fish catch and Dawes Point, Sydney Harbour c.1813. Painting: John William Lewin

Marvel at the ways of an apologist for the killing fields:

If the undoubted violence of those much harsher times really constituted a war between two peoples, it’s hard to explain the eagerness of Aboriginal men to join their fellow Australians in the First AIF. At least a thousand Aboriginal men talked their way past racial bans on recruitment, with up to 30 of them decorated for valour. Hundreds were killed in action, including a son of 1930s activist William Cooper, who cited these deaths for king and country in his bid for Aboriginal people’s full civic rights.
It’s this Aboriginal contribution to Australia’s military campaigns, well before official discrimination ended, that has long been remembered and justly celebrated at the Australian War Memorial.
Of course, it has to be accepted that we let ourselves down as a country, and betray our best ideals, when we fail to confront the whole story of our past.
For instance, even though the subject matter of the Brereton Report is far from the whole story of our Afghanistan campaign, however contested, it is a part of it. So that’s a possible blot on our honour as a nation that can’t be ignored, even in a place dedicated to the ideals of duty, service and sacrifice.
And yes, for too long, the bloodstained frontier was amnesed from our history, in what WEH Stanner called the “great Australian silence”. Yet official goodwill dated from the very start of settlement, with governor Arthur Phillip enjoined by the British government to “live in amity” with the native peoples. When speared at Manly Cove while searching for Bennelong, he put it down to a misunderstanding and refrained from the show of punitive force that might have been expected at that time.
Then there were the explorers who could not have traversed territory unseen by British eyes without Aboriginal guides, the settlers who could not have farmed without Aboriginal help, and all the Australians from mission times to these who’ve dedicated their lives to Aboriginal advancement, that make any modern re-characterisation of our history as one of invasion and near genocide a wild pendulum swing too far.

Another visual distraction: Historian Henry Reynolds in his office at his home in Richmond, Tasmania.

For a moment the onion muncher argued against himself:

Of course, Tasmanian resistance leader Tongerlongeter is no less a part of our national story than Simpson with his donkey, and we should admire the spirit with which he defended a doomed way of life. No less than the Anzacs, he belongs to all Australians, whether their ancestors have been here for tens of thousands of years, or whether they’ve just emerged from their citizenship ceremony. The only question is: Where should it be enshrined?

Ah, a cunning deflection, an attempt to erase the guilt.

The solution: move it somewhere else, anywhere else.

What a noble tradition that is. Move the blacks to encampments, move them to remote areas, move them to a portable across the oval so other students wouldn't know they existed (oh Tamworth).

You can't keep the stupid down ...

Given that none of the participants in any “frontier war” had Australian uniforms or the authorisation of an Australian government, the place to recall and to regret might be at the Australian National Museum, or perhaps at a new wing of the National Centre for Indigenous Studies at the ANU as Reynolds suggested recently, but it’s not here at the Australian War Memorial
Tony Abbott served as Australia’s 28th prime minister. He is the author of Australia: A History (HarperCollins, 2025) This is a condensed version of a speech he delivered at the Australian War Memorial on Friday.

In Tasmania alone, the black wars had the authorisation of the British government, and its specious to propose that simply because the commonwealth didn't come into being until January 1901 that prior governments weren't "Australian" ...nor should it be discounted because  some of the military campaigns were a glorious failure ...

In November 1828 Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur declared martial law across the settled districts. It stayed in force until 1832. In practice it meant a settler could shoot an Aboriginal person without answering for it.
In October 1830, Arthur put roughly 2,200 soldiers, settlers and convicts into a human chain across the settled districts and marched it south east, intending to drive the remaining Oyster Bay and Big River people onto the Tasman Peninsula and hold them there.
It ran for seven weeks. It captured two people, a man and a boy. Everyone else walked through the line at night. (here)

It's to the eternal disgrace of the AWM that they should have pandered to this deeply stupid man, and the pond shares their disgrace ...

Meanwhile, the black wars continued atop the lizard Oz...

EXCLUSIVE
Agency delivers boy from kindy to meth den, via text
WA child protection officials removed a four-year-old Indigenous boy from his grandparents – his only carers since birth – via a text message and placed him with his meth-addicted mother.
By Ros Thomas

At this point the pond should note that the reptiles have introduced a mildly different format, part of which seems aimed at spoofing the intermittent archive.

So the pond can only note the current reptile jihads, offering the url in the hope that the archive will come good, as it often does ...

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation%2Findigenous%2Findigenous-boy-taken-from-grandparent-carers-with-while-at-kindy-by-text%2Fnews-story%2Fb526b3bd2feb6885ceabcc61118ec9bd

There were other familiar jihads ...

Migration policy is ripe for reform; all we got were tweaks
A quiet, managerial response to one of the defining political issues of the era is likely to do little to win hearts and minds.
By Lachlan Vass

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Fmigration-policy-is-ripe-for-reform-all-we-got-were-tweaks%2Fnews-story%2Fb9883bd097acd9e8ac0bedd97bfc2109

Maintain the bigotry ...

...A review of regional migration settings has also been under way since June 2024. Regional visa holders tend to live in capital cities and earn less than other skilled migrants. This is another area that appears ripe for reform, though two years later we’re still waiting.
Migration policy isn’t easy. There are difficult trade-offs to be made, and vested interests to be overcome. We should beware those who sell easy solutions. However, the government’s policies announced on Thursday are closer to procedural tweaks than systemic reform.
Lachlan Vass is research manager at e61 Institute.

The pond only inserts that closing note so it could pay tribute to the immortal Rowe (and assure correspondents they weren't missing much)...

And for a site now showing it's littered with AI, this came as an irony ...

How Iran recruited AI for surveillance and propaganda
Iran’s propaganda operators have invoked an ‘explanatory jihad’, treating propaganda as a religious and strategic duty.
By Rana Dadpour

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Fhow-iran-recruited-ai-for-surveillance-and-propaganda%2Fnews-story%2F4f85722d459de46b71e41e9fb4e8673e

...This gives Australia’s AI debate a concrete question: How do we protect people when a foreign state can use these tools to identify its critics, map their relationships and reach into the lives they built here?
Anthropic acknowledges that its safeguards allowed some surveillance-related software development. Australia’s AI Safety Institute should therefore work with providers to test whether safeguards can recognise a wider purpose across related requests, without making intrusive monitoring of ordinary users a condition of safety. According to Anthropic, one state organisation in Iran claimed to have surveilled and profiled 6388 Iranians in a year. The company then banned 16 accounts linked to the operation.
But closing accounts does not erase collected information or disable tools already developed. People entered in security databases may never know what information has been collected about them, who can access it or how it will be used. Providers and democratic governments should measure their response partly by the protection those exposed to AI-assisted surveillance receive, including confidential reporting and practical specialist support.
For people facing repression, AI safety is bound up with whether they can speak, organise and trust one another without exposing themselves or their families to danger. Keeping AI under human control is therefore an incomplete ambition unless we also ask whose control it strengthens, and what protection people have when that power is used against them.
Rana Dadpour is a research fellow at James Cook University. She came to Australia from Iran in 2012.

Never mind, Skynet will kill us all within the decade.

As noted above, it seems that the reptiles are so alarmed by illiteracy that they now must insist on providing the hive mind with the opportunity to listen rather than to read:

The header: By Henry Ergas
Don’t blame the curriculum for classroom mediocrity

Just as with the Onion Muncher, Our Henry came with a new automated voice offer:

Listen to this article
8 min

That bloody automated voice is everywhere, Skynet preparing to swoop ...

"Why cannot the ear be closed to its own destruction? Or the glistening eye to the poison of a reptile smile?"

The caption for the pathetic generic AI slop: “One Australian 15-year-old in two lacks at least one core skill needed to be a productive member of society,” writes Henry Ergas.

It was a great relief to discover that Our Henry wasn't delivering another Zionist diatribe.

But the pond should have been wary at having its wish granted, because there was no chance of being caught in a vortex of Homeric Henry this day (to borrow a phrase).

Instead it was just a bog standard outing on failing education standards (in the pond's recollection they've been failing for sixty years or more, ever since the pond left school), imbued with a deep fear of Asian competition:

In 2012, the Gillard government’s white paper on Australia in the Asian Century declared, as National Objective 9, that “By 2025, Australia will be ranked as a top five country in the world for the performance of our students in reading, science and mathematics literacy”.
Together with the Gonski report, that objective helped justify a spending splurge that, in inflation-adjusted terms, increased public expenditure per student by 24 per cent – 2½ times the increase in per capita GDP.
That the splurge benefited teachers, the teachers unions and our sprawling education bureaucracies is beyond doubt. But the results of PISA 2025 show that it failed miserably to boost Australian students into the uppermost ranks of the education ladder.
Not only did Australia miss the “top five” target in all three subjects; the distance between its scores in mathematics and science and those of the top five more than doubled. But it is not our absence from the medal podium that is truly worrying: it is the catastrophic deterioration in our performance over time.
Since 2015, the declines in our maths and reading scores are, on the OECD’s calculations, each equivalent to losing a year of learning – as if one previously worthwhile year of school were now being entirely wasted. Compared to 2003, the loss is larger still: some two previously worthwhile years of schooling now produce no measurable gain in skills.
We are, moreover, equal opportunity education vandals: just as the performance of our best students fell by more than that of their counterparts across the OECD panel, so did that of our worst. Kneecapping the best students is bad enough; but what has happened to the laggards is surely unconscionable.
The OECD defines a baseline score corresponding to the minimum needed to take part meaningfully in a technologically advanced society. Only half of Australian 15-year-olds clear that very low bar in all three subjects – science, reading and mathematics – compared to nearly 80 per cent in Singapore. Put slightly differently, one Australian 15-year-old in two lacks at least one core skill needed to be a productive member of society.
Predictably, the reaction to those results has been loud calls to reform the curriculum. That there is scope to do so is undeniable, but it is important to be realistic.
For Australia to reach fifth place in the rankings, the scores of Australia’s 15-year-olds would need to improve by about 48 points. However, very few studies of educational reforms find improvements exceeding 20 points, with gains of that magnitude depending on the reforms reaching every child and their effects lasting through to age 15. But even were those gains achievable, most would be spent standing still: the 20 points would merely offset our trend decline of about 16 points a decade in mathematics.
Nor should we assume that the curriculum explains the difference between Australian students and their better-performing counterparts. Japanese secondary students, for example, greatly outperformed Australian students in every international test administered in the late 1960s and early 1970s – a time when rote learning was still a central part of the Japanese curriculum.
The contrast in parental expectations is a crucial part of the explanation. Japanese parents, research conducted in that period showed, were far more demanding than parents in the Anglosphere. Thus, one study found that 40 per cent of American parents thought their children were performing satisfactorily, compared to only 5 per cent of parents in Japan. And unlike American parents, Japanese parents placed twice as much weight on effort as on ability, insisting that their children could and should do better by trying harder.

And yet Japan isn't exactly in a picture perfect state: Japan’s economic comeback faces hardest BOJ test in a generation

At this point the reptiles introduced damning evidence that Our Henry was right ...

Next video thumbnail
‘Kids are not learning’: TV host slams latest classroom dataNews24 host Danica De Giorgio discusses the PISA data on chaos in the classroom. “Chaotic classrooms, digital distraction, truancy … and bullying are now rife,” Ms De Giorgio said. “41 per cent report noise and disorder during lessons, one in three say classmates don’t listen to teachers, and four in 10 are distracted by phones and devices during lessons. “Kids are not learning; they are completely distracted.”

No, not that data. 

That Danica and this wild-eyed loon were talking about education was a damning indictment of the reptiles and the education system ...

 

If they're the best the reptiles can offer, no wonder vulgar youff are off the educational rails.

Then it was back to more paranoia about Asia, and at this point the pond can hear correspondents yowling. 

Where's Homeric Henry, what is this talk of Confucianism? What about the noble traditions of the Anglosphere?

Say what? Confucius was on to the Golden Rule long before Christ?

Was Christ just a disciple, cunning enough to flip that negative into a positive?

The Ancient Greeks, Romans and Persians were in to it too?

Sorry, there's no room for any of that in this deplorably degraded Homeric Henry outing ...

Still today, those differences in the emphasis on achievement are reflected in the investment East Asian parents make in after-hours tutoring. Participation in tutoring is close to universal, covering somewhere between 80 and 90 per cent of students in Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
What participation buys is, in effect, a second school system: by the age at which Korean students sit PISA, they will have spent the equivalent of about 4½ school years being tutored. Moreover, because there is intense competition between tutoring schools, the quality of that instruction is likely to be high.
It is conventional to claim that the greater focus on education in East Asia reflects the legacy of Confucianism. But while that has an element of truth, the far more important factor is that so much is at stake.
To take just one example, in Singapore, an employee in the top 15 per cent of the skill distribution earns 2.6 times as much over a working life as one in the bottom 15 per cent; and that takes no account of better working conditions, greater job security and much higher social standing. In Australia, by contrast, those in the skill ranking’s top 15 per cent earn just 1.5 times as much over a working life as those in the bottom 15 per cent.
Differences in growth rates compound the effects of those differences in the skill premium. Ultimately, an earnings premium is a percentage: its value depends on the earnings to which it applies. Faster growth makes a given percentage premium worth more in dollars; and because acquiring skills requires an outlay now, faster growth lifts the future income stream without altering the upfront cost – which means the investment becomes markedly more attractive.
The effect is anything but trivial: had earnings in Australia kept rising at reform-era rates, the extra lifetime earnings from moving to the top sixth in the skill distribution from the middle of the pack would be about 50 per cent greater than they are today.
That is not to suggest future earnings are all that matters. Rather, the point is that we have done everything we possibly can to reduce the stakes: failure rates are low; just about any school leaving score qualifies for university entrance; and only a minute share of the assistance tertiary students receive depends on academic performance. Meanwhile, the merit principle plays little role in hiring, promotion and dismissal decisions, while high marginal tax rates erode the gains from having superior skills. As if that were not enough, every government policy seems designed to entrench economic stagnation, reducing the return on acquiring skills.
Little wonder, then, that PISA shows astonishingly low levels of aspiration among Australian 15-year-olds. The motivation score of Australian students from non-immigrant backgrounds is less than half that of their US counterparts; and while the scores of students who are first-generation immigrants are significantly higher, they too remain well below the US benchmark.
We are, in short, firmly back at what Keith Hancock, in his masterpiece, Australia (1930), called the worship of the “middling standard”. “Australian democracy,” he famously wrote, “is properly anxious that everybody should run a fair race. It is improperly resentful if anybody runs a fast race. Indeed, it dislikes altogether the idea of a race, for in a race victory is to the strong. Its solicitude is for the weak, and its instinct is to make merit take a place in the queue.”
No amount of spending on schools or tinkering with the curriculum can cure that malady. It is not an unfortunate error; it is mediocrity by design.

Just a single reference to a 1930 text, and that one by Keith Hancock! An author who bored the pond way back when. At least Manning Clark offered an apocalyptic vision.

And that proves the pond's point.

Where are all the pompous, portentous references of yore? 

All the more urgently needed in a diatribe about the the failings of the education system and vulgar youff. They could have all done with some dinkum ancient Greek and Roman larnin' ...

The pond regrets that this Homeric Henry outing only deserves a D-.

Not so the infallible Pope and the immortal Rowe, who always wins top marks ...

And now, as there are more signs every day of AI infesting the hive mind, this ...