Invaders!

Ha! Made the team!

An unfortunate fellow.
Have to say, there were just too many of his kind of men to remember them all unless you are a scholar specialising in outback history.
I am not, just read about them when I get a tip.

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Unsung Hero 000209 at Australian Stockman’s Hall of Fame and Outback Heritage Centre
Thomas Gibson HAMILTON, b. 10th May 1844, d. 2nd April 1875

From the age of 10, following his father’s death in 1850 and his uncle’s in 1854, Thomas Hamilton worked on the properties in the Western District of Victoria that his mother owned and ran.

In 1872 Thomas, accompanied by five men, one boy (his nephew) and over 120 horses, travelled north to explore pastoral lands in Central Australia. Leaving in October 1872, the group passed through the Tatiara country into the 90-mile desert, along the Coorong and into Adelaide.

Supplies were purchased here, including an American covered wagon, six-pack saddles and six months’ food. On their journey, they met with the men who were constructing the Overland Telegraph line, and they travelled along its route as much as possible.

“The season was a dry one, and soon the heat, dust and flies became separate torments. Men, horses and dogs were equally afflicted. The dust and flies affected my eyes to such an extent that after one particularly severe dust storm I developed sandy blight, and for ten days was completely blind.

Daily I had to be led to and from my horse. At the Finke River … we had the misfortune to lose our wagon. For a long time it had been falling to pieces, but somehow still miraculously held together. Crossing one sandy bed of the river, however, it collapsed entirely, and had to be abandoned…

Summer in the desert was to prove almost unendurable; pitiless blue skies, blazing sun, barren country, water scarce, often non-existent, food gradually giving out, illness, and always heat, dust and flies. Slowly, however, we made our way further and further northwards.”

Eventually, the party arrived in Darwin, with its stock of over 120 horses diminished by less than twelve. They received the outstanding price of fifty pounds a head for the horses.

Their journey across the heart of Australia, from south to north, had taken just over twelve months.

Hamilton never fully recovered from his ordeal, succumbing to a severe attack of fever, which proved fatal less than a year after his return home. He was thirty years old.

Real men true blue Aussies.
A good looking fellow!

The “celebrated breakthrough” hostage release deal is looking like a cruel farce as the few abused victims are swapped for hordes of murderous scum.
The lethally naive in the west are now having the brutal reality of a negotiating with Hamas put in front of them and they don’t seem to be liking what they see.
Doesn’t seem to be any cheering or tears of joy from the Democrats anymore.

Coral Sea to become interesting in next couple of weeks.

Unusually low humidity atm. SST’s at 31-32 deg C. Plenty of energy in CS atm.

Your read with morning coffee. Too long to post it all. Selected excerpts follow.

A very Happy and Proud Australia Day one and all!

Australia wasn’t utopia before British arrival, but it has gone close since

Geoffrey Blainey

We should celebrate Australia Day. By various definitions this has been one of the most successful nations in the world. During the past two centuries our nation has had far more successes than failures, though the failures can’t be overlooked: they offer lessons.

Most Australians have pride in the nation, present and past. Today, in contrast, the most vocal opponents of Australia Day offer a gloomy version of our history and many even believe Aboriginal people were, in a variety of ways, better off before 1788 than they are today. Especially in Victoria, they are officially rewriting history and adding a strong racial emphasis. A view is widespread – even though still a minority view – that Australia will lack legitimacy until it makes continuing reparations to Aboriginal people for the land and way of life taken away from them.

It is also argued that our nation will be redeemed only if Aboriginal people are permanently and undemocratically given more political power than other Australians. The nation has recorded a strong No to that argument in the 2023 voice referendum.

Many who dislike or resent Australia Day glamorise Australia’s first people. They see the hunter’s and gatherer’s life as a utopia: they think war was a rarity, that the male elders were praiseworthy without exception, that the old people belonged to a caring society and that most tribes or mini-nations continuously held their own land for 50,000 or more unbroken years. It is fair to suggest that these are all dubious claims.

Australia is one of the oldest continuing democracies. That is worth remembering. Admittedly, ancient Athens was a path-finding democracy, but few of its people had the right to participate in vital state decisions and even then they had to be present in person at the place of debate. Naturally, its slaves had no say. In modern history the US was a wonder, emerging as a brave new democracy before the First Fleet reached Sydney. Yet later it still possessed a minority of slave states when most Australian colonies were displaying democratic innovations. 

In 1856 South Australia and Victoria were the first places in the world to use the secret ballot on election day. When seven years later Abraham Lincoln, on the battlefield at Gettysburg, made his eloquent affirmation that democracy was “government of the people, by the people, for the people”, he must have known a favourable version of government was already in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney. 

In the world today, democracies are in a minority. The typical member nation of the UN is not a real democracy and shows no signs of becoming one. The Economist Intelligence Unit compiles a democracy index that lists 167 nations and assigns to each a definite place on a ladder of democracies. Only 8 per cent of the world’s population live in true democracies and Australians share that privilege. The public is not aware of that legitimate source of pride. 

Melbourne is abandoning its street march this Australia Day. Here is a city, the nation’s first federal capital, spectacularly ignorant of its own history.

Do politicians know how important Australia is in the history of democracy? Our welcome to country was perhaps a useful experiment but can be challenged. Those authoritarian personages, the Indigenous elders who presided during tens of thousands of years, are paraded before us as being virtually free from faults. A ceremony so undemocratic should be rewritten or abandoned. 

This could be the first Australia Day since 1917 – the wartime year of the tense conscription debate – when religion is an explosive topic. In recent months, more attacks – by graffiti or explosives or incendiary devices – have been made on Australia’s synagogues and other Jewish possessions than in any previous year. Yet in proportion to population, the Jews have contributed to Australian scholarship, politics, the law and big business more than has any other ethnic group or religion.

One lesson of our history, to be remembered on Australia Day, is that social cohesion should normally be prized. 

Professor Walter Murdoch was a West Australian who in old age offered us many words of wisdom. On March 7, 1964, he wrote in the afternoon Melbourne Herald: “Quickly the night wind sweeps us away, and the traces of us. We serve the purposes of the day, and if we have served that purpose faithfully, we must be content to be forgotten tomorrow.” 

Clearly he understood that a nation should remember those – the low and the high – who learned from its failures as well as those who brought it success. The creation of a nation and its generations of worthwhile people should not be forgotten. That is another major reason in favour of celebrating Australia Day.