The PR Blog

The EPA has approved Robbins Island Mega Wind Factory in a remote island off Tasmania that will have to stop working for five months of the year so it doesn’t hurt the Orange-bellied Parrot. It will however be able to kill eagles and other birds for the other seven months of the year.

Green electrons are revered, Orange-bellied parrots are sacred but our way of life is up for grabs. It’s a cult.

The raid on Pearl Harbour failed to catch the US carrier force which was still at sea. It also failed to destroy the oil storage facilities that would have crippled any ability to send a pursuing force. The Japanese strategists knew that the obvious place for an American fight back to be based was Australia. It rapidly consumed the Dutch East Indies and the island of New Britain which was part of the PNG mandated territory awarded to Australia by the League of Nations.

On 10^th December, 1941 the tactics conceived by Yamamato and Nagano were again proved correct when Japanese aircraft sank the British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse off the coast of Malaya. At the same time Guam was captured from the Americans.

When I first wrote this article I kept thinking " what is the image that most encompasses Australia? "

The Sydney Harbour Bridge?: Opera House? The Great Barrier Reef? What is it that makes us Australia?

And I realised that it was not a place. It was not building or a monument or even a flag. It was us. 

It is the people and no matter what our government tries to do, we Aussies still love our country. Though many of our recent migrants do not. So I am leading off with something unexpected. 

It is a photo that I love. It is of Dame Edna. 

Back in 1920, in the small town of Winton, the airline company QANTAS was born.  The Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Ltd was created and would be known as QANTAS from that day forward.

Its co-founders, Sir Hudson Fysh and Paul McGinness, said "[Qantas] was conceived in Cloncurry, born in Winton and grew up in Longreach."

The Adelaide River Stakes is the name given to the mass exodus of people prior to and following the Japanese air-raid in Darwin on 19^th February, 1942. Thanks mainly to an ill-informed statement by a former Governor General, Paul Hasluck, that it is a story full of shame for our national persona, but it is a myth.

The truth is that with much closer examination it was anything but a shameful episode in our most serious year of peril. The propaganda disseminated by the government of the day was based on inadequate information, over-the-top censorship and a failure to take the population into its confidence. The faults lie with a succession of failed civilian and military administrations which, like the behaviour of most politicians, was a deliberate trail of cover-ups and refusal to admit fault.