HMAS Sydney - courtesy Wikipedia

HMAS Sydney was a modified Leander-class light cruiser of the Royal Australian Navy. The ship had great success in the first years of World War II, but controversy and mystery surrounds the loss of Sydney and its crew in November 1941. Its sinking with all hands represents the greatest ever loss of life in an Australian warship; Sydney was also the largest vessel of any country to be lost with no survivors during the war.

Queensland Nationals Senators, Ron Boswell and Barnaby Joyce, will today take advantage of Parliamentary Privilege to table - or make public - the 3,000 word Rofe Report into the 1989 'Heiner Affair'.

A really well written and pertinent analysis from Peter McMahon on Online Opinion.
Have a read.

News Radio is chock-a-block with the death of Sir Edmund Hillary at his home in New Zealand. He'll live on the minds of many, especially the Nepalese Sherpa people for whom he worked so hard in fund raising and infrastructure provision making their lives just a little easier. He'll live on in the memories of many 'boomer' like myself, as the man who first climbed Everest. Like Neil Armstrong's Moon landing, climbing Everest in 1953 was just as great a feat.

As an aside, I notice Jeremy Sear spiking Tim Blair for belittling the occasion yet again. According to Blair, Hillary said about the climb;

"Well, we knocked the bastard off"

Now......I wonder if my Mum still has that autograph of Sir Edmund's she managed to get when he visited Brisbane in the sixties?

Consider this report from colleagues Jamie Walker and Jeremy Roberts last week which indicates, again, that Hicks was no innocent abroad.

Despite all the pontification over what David Hicks was or wasn't doing in Afghanistan, what he or his family are in denial about, what defines a 'terrorist' and what doesn't, the simple fact remains that his incarceration both in Guantanamo Bay and Yatala jail were politically oriented. The only irony, if indeed any exists, lies in the fact that despite the political manouvering, nothing has been proven one way or another regarding 'guilt' and a government has been thrown out, if not as a direct result, at least partially.

Personally, I don't see Geoff Elliott's point.

Watching the ANZAC Day services from Gallipoli and Viller-Bretonneux, I couldn't help but be struck by the similarities, and differences between the two.

Interesting revelation from Andrew Bolt at the end of this morning's Insiders program on the ABC. The all too common reiteration that global warming/climate change is a non-event was there, but thrown into his irrational approach to realities everyone else accepts was a claim that the 'stolen generations' have never existed. Rudd's apology to these indigenous Australians earlier this year, which apparently helped to raise our PM into the ranks of the world's top 100 most influential persons - thanks to Cate Blanchett, according to the Dolt - comes about as a direct result of an apology for events which never happened, to a generation of indigenous Australians which have never existed.

I'd be interested to know just how many indigenous Australians were watching, and what their reactions might be to hearing that the PM is riding to fame & glory on the back of an issue which even John Howard accepted, but Andrew Bolt thinks is a complete fabrication.

I've just completed the Sunday morning ritual. Breakfast in front of 'Insiders'

I get bugger all time to browse the 'newspapers' these days, so when I spotted this brief article, I was determined to find out more.

Today is the 92nd birthday of Edward Gough Whitlam.

I heard of this on the way home this evening. I find Keating's view to be very narrow and dismissive of how those who go to Gallipoli actually treat the experience, and why they go. To be blunt, I believe Keating to be wrong, and wrong in the worst possible manner because he ignores individual rationale. If he chooses not to go there, because of some historically revisionist sense of nationalism, then so be it, but to openly decry the sentiments of those who do go, to remember those who went to Gallipoli out of senses which we, today, cannot hope to understand, I believe is unforgivable.

Anzac Cove is sacred, and whilst I have never been and likely will never get there, I applaud those who do. Lest We Forget are the words. So should be the sentiments, historically, nationally and culturally.

... but didn't want to admit to ignorance?

When your country has arseholed you at the polls, your party has emphatically told you it's past time you were gone and when your approval rating is sub-30% and heading south with a bullet, there would seem to be little else you can do but form a  pud-pullers collective as the only way to remember better times. There's always your friends to call on. All two of them.

...in the same manner as Andrew Roberts, then yes....history will judge George W. Bush kindly. Much less critically than he and his administration deserves.

We've seen it and we've heard all about it. Those of us living far away have no idea of what it must be like to have escaped a firestorm, and lost everything in the process. Some have lost those they loved and that must be tragic. My thoughts are with each and every person who has suffered or fears the suffering, fears the potential loss because they live in a bushfire-prone area.

I'm drawn to wonder though, why satellite towns - locales, call them what you will - like Kinglake and Marysville are constructed such that dwellings and businesses are deliberately established cheek-by-jowl with the forest surrounding them? Surely, it's lovely to live close to nature, but when nature has the terrible potential to snuff you out, doesn't commonsense decree that one not have the bush at one's back door?

Have a look at any number of photos of the fires over the weekend, and doubtless in days to come, and take note of just how close paved roads, kerbing and channeling, and all the services of modern suburbia have been created for those wanting to live in the peace and serenity of the bush. How many local authorities have likely been coerced, brow-beaten or otherwise influenced into approving subdivisions for idyllic settlement by developers looking to develop the mountain forests of Victoria as the perfect compromise of work-life balance?

I love the country life, and I love the bush, but there's absolutely no way under the Sun that I would buy or build a home where the bush is at the back door. The dangers are far too great. Yet others will and good luck to them. My belief is that those people deserve to be better protected by the local authorities where they choose to live, in demanding of developers greater clearances between suburban development and the virgin bush councils demand be retained. Who is to blame? I'll point the finger at property developers because past experience assures me of the greed which drives the animal. I point equally at local authorities for not demanding stricter controls of what is developed and how. Those who live in the bush buy a product which is well sold and extolled. To my mind it's those doing the selling who have much to answer for.

Fascinating Op-Ed in today's Australian, centred on the event of the day, the week in fact. The 40th anniversary of the first manned Moon landing and the first footprint on the lunar surface.

We in Queensland, who are older enough, all know who Tony Fitzgerald is and what he did in the 1980’s.

I often find Op-Ed pieces in the daily rags to be either ideologically biased, un-necessarily critical or fawningly ridiculous. Let's face it, when expressing our own opinions, which is what an Op-Ed is, we're expressing our own personal biases, critiques, likes, dislikes or fondest wishes.