Australia: News and Views

Australia’s National colors are green and gold - you may have noticed I have just added the colors to this blog - just so you know!

The colors were only adopted in 1984 and do not at all reflect the Australian flag  - which is  red, white and blue.  Instead  the colors of the wattle were adopted as reflecting the land. Actually the land is more red than green - the wattle is a common plant in the Australian bush.

Australia’s national sporting teams normally wear the green and gold in their sporting teams including the Australia cricket team (one day cricket), test teams wear white as is required, the Kangaroos (rugby league), the Socceroos (football (soccer)).

South Africa also wear green and gold for Rugby Union too so the Wallabies where a gold jumper with green lettering.

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Danish architect Joern Utzon died this week at age 90 - without ever having seen his completed masterpiece. The controversial architect was fired, or was in dispute over unpaid bills,  from the job in 1966 7 years into a project which was supposed to take three and ten times over the already outrageous budget of £7 million.

Although the famous sillouette of the sails on Sydney Harbour are his design the interior were completed by NSW architects.

I guess neither side knew what they were getting into - Utzon was  a dreamer who struggled with the mathematics to make the sails of the Sydney Opera House a reality which wouldn’t collapse under their own weight.  He was never a great project manager. The government had no experience of dealing with a visionary and a genius.

The Opera House is surely one of the most photographed buildings in the world, not just  Australia - in fact there are no less than 4,2777 photos on flickr - here are some of the more interesting.

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The fact that Darwin was bombed not once but many times appears to be a little known fact to Australian’s never mind the rest of the world. Fortunately Baz Luhrmann’s new movie Australia is raising the curtain on this little known moment of Australian history.

The movie Australia features the first raid on Darwin by the Japanese which happened on 19 February 1942 around 9am.  More bombs were dropped in that raid than were on Pearl Harbour.  Around 600 people were killed or injured out of a population which was only around 2000 at the time.  Raids continued into 1943 with over 60 raids on Darwin and 30 raids on other northern Australia targets.

Australian authorities quietly decided that Darwin was indefensible - in fact most of northern and western Australia was considered forfeit and the last line of defence would have been 5000km further south near Brisbane. The reality is that the Japanese force which had rolled down the Malaysian peninsular, living off the land, would have found the Australian outback desert as impossible to cross as most other people had.

One of the consequences of the abandonment of Darwin was that the government suppressed the extent of damage and causalities from the air raids in Darwin.

Today there is little left of 1940’s Darwin: except for the original wharf which features in the movie. Little Bowen in Queensland stands in for Darwin for most of the Australia movie scenes set in 1940’s Darwin . What parts of Darwin which survived the wartime bombardment were destroyed during the 1972 Cyclone Tracey which flattened the town.

Holden is celebrating the 60th anniversary of their first Australian car: the 48 215, better know as the FX rolled off the assembly line back in 1948. The FX was an immediate success with a backlog of eager customers. The car was manufactured for a number of years until it was replaced by the FJ model in 1953.

I snapped these restored Holdens when they were touring Albany in Western Australia. The FX is the green one on the left: a ute version so probably dating from around 1951. The FX’s were built to post-war austerity standards but had the suspension to deal with Australia’s rough roads of the time: in fact they would probably deal with most of outback Australia’s dirt roads better than their modern counterparts: the Commodore.

In 1953 the FJ was introduced: they are the cream sedan and the metallic (not original) blue Holden FJ at the back, another ute version. The FJ was withdrawn in 1956 - so you these are impressive old cars still be driven for fun!

These days Holden is owned by GM and is looking at a decidedly shaky future. GM wants a huge bailout by the US government and Holden is trying for the same. In some ways Holden has made the same mistakes as its American owner: it builds big cars including the ever popular Commodore models and is facing increasing competition from smaller and more economical Toyotas and Hyundais. Also like GM, Holden is still a protected industry in Australia with prohibitive import duties on used and new cars being brought in from overseas. Australians pay a lot more for cars than their New Zealand neighbours.
For more information on Holden’s early models

The 11th hour of the 11 day of the 11th month, was the end of the World War 1. In fact the day was delayed to get the significant 11:00 11/11/1918 date. Imagine - people may have died so that we could have a nice round date to end the War to End All Wars. The war that was pretty much repeated at an even worse level 31 years later.

There is some interesting debate about around the proliferation of War memorials to Australians across the Western Front. The government and some elements of Australian society seem to need to keep building monuments to the fallen on other people’s land.

The politics of memorials seem to have as much today with Australia’s current politics and self-perception as it as to do with history. It seems in the last 20 years or so has seen more memorials on the Western Front and more and more tour groups from the “colonies”. It seems that we need to glorify war again and make the men who, in most cases, either had no idea what they were getting in or were in some cases running away from relationships and criminal acts at home.

“Have I Died in Vain” is one of the more moving inscriptions on the tens of thousands tombstones. What seems to be forgotten is that all of the Australian troops were volunteers. They were there for all sorts of reasons, but at the end of the day they chose to go to war.

Memorial Day in Australia isn’t an official holiday. Instead, Australia rather oddly commemorates ANZAC Day the 25th April : when the Australian and New Zealand Corp was defeated at Gallipoli in modern day Turkey. Yes Australian’s memorial day remembers a defeat.

Poiters is the place of another huge loss for the Australian life: in fact far more died in France than ever did Gallipoli. In fact the Australian Expeditionary Force had huge victories at the end of the war, but those aren’t remembered in the same way as one of the most bungled military expeditions in modern warfare’s history - Gallipoli.

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