The second battle of the lone pine

Last weekend I hiked up to the North Head of Sydney Harbor and took a tour of the coastal defenses, run by the Royal Australian Artillery association -- costing about US$8. The tour group descended into the underground magazines and tunnels of a British designed 9.2 inch coastal battery, which used to sit on armored gunhouse above a concrete barbette before it was cut up and sold for scrap. The Vietnam vet who served as guide described the almost pitiful attempts of the artillery association to keep the artillery museum going. The environmentalists want the old coastal fortifications turned into their version of a park and the day the artillery association fails to turn things over is the day when the greenies foreclose, cut up everything and "restore" things to the state of nature.

One display of particular significance to the artillerymen was the Lone Pine seedling, which grows along a path running behind the crest of the North Head. It was grown from an pinecone gathered from the original tree around which the Australians fought the Turks for several days in Gallipoli. Here's a picture of the plaque and the seedling, which isn't much to look at but has an interesting modern story behind it. For those who can't click on the picture below to read the words on a larger image, I've reproduced what the plaque says:

"The Lone Pine ridge was the scene of a major diversionary attack launched by the 1st Australian Division on the 6th August, 1915. The Turks had cut down all but one of the trees that covered the feature for use in constructing their trenches. The ridge, with the remaining and predominant single Aleppo Pine (Pinus halepensis), became known as the Lone Pine. In four days of savage hand-to-hand fighting the Australians lost almost 2300 men while the Turkish losses were estimated at 5,000. Seven Victoria Crosses were awarded in the action.

This tree was raised from seedlings grown from a pine cone sent home from Gallipoli by Lance Corporal Benjamin Smith of the 3rd Battalion, AIF. It was planted on the 6th August 2006 to commemorate the 91st Anniversary of the Battle for Lone Pine and is a constant reminder of the sacrifice made by fellow Australians in World War I.

So for the Australian Army, Lone Pine was a significant engagement, along the lines of Iwo Jima or Bastogne. Wikipedia has long entry on the Battle of Lone Pine, but the casualty numbers alone convey the magnitude of the sacrifice. In an era where the loss of 3,000 men over several years in Iraq is considered unacceptable, it is practically unimaginable for modern Westerners to conceive of how a nation numbering only 5 million in 1915 could expend 2,300 men in four days to take a Turkish position -- in the Middle East -- for God, King and Country.

But the environmentalists prohibited the artillerymen from planting the Lone Tree seedling. No pleas, appeals to patriotism or arguments from significance would move them to withdraw their objections. The reason the environmentalists gave was that the Lone Pine seedling would disturb the local habitat. It represented the intrusion of an exogenous or foreign species into an are reserved for indigenous plant life. But more likely it represented an intrusion into their vision of the world. The artillery museum on the North Head is now the refuge of an increasing number of old artillery pieces which were once displayed in town parks, but which have been banished by pacifist campaigns. But at any rate, here's the offending tree, descended from the original.



Pictures were presented to show that present vegetation covering the North Head was entirely post war. But nothing would move the environmentalists. The struggle was in some ways a metaphor for the political divisions in the modern world between those whose concept of a nation is its people and traditions and those who conceive of it as an ecosystem delineated by a United Nations-approved boundary. For one the nation lives in memory, and for the other it lives in a non-sentient land. In this case, the artillerymen succeeded in finding a loophole in the environmental regulations. They surrounded the tree with a very large wooden tub sunk beneath the ground which was then covered over with wood chips to disguise the fact. The second Battle of the Lone Pine was won by technically converting the tree into a potted plant.

Source





Australia's great Leftist fraud



A much acclaimed but very strange far-Left historian -- Leninist in looks and Leninist in sympathies. Towards the end of his life he was a great Australian Labor Party hero. The article below scrambles to put an acceptable face on his demonstrable dishonesty. No conservative would be treated so indulgently. But truth has never concerned Leftists much, of course. Reality-denial is an essential part of being a Leftist. They even admit openly that for them "There is no such thing as truth". More background on Clarke here

As an old man looking back on his life, Manning Clark claimed to have seen with his own eyes the horrors of Kristallnacht. Witnessing this notorious Nazi pogrom changed his life, said Clark, and made him the historian he was. It became the most famous story of a great storyteller. "I happened to arrive at the railway station at Bonn am Rhein on the morning of Kristallnacht," he told the poet John Tranter in 1987. "That was the morning after the storm-troopers had destroyed Jewish shops, Jewish businesses and the synagogues. Burned them and so on . I saw the fruits of evil, of human evil, before me there on the streets of Bonn."

But Clark was not there that day. The historian's biographer, Mark McKenna, reveals this week in The Monthly that Clark did not reach Nazi Germany for another fortnight. The person who saw the broken glass and smoking synagogues on that morning in November 1938 was the woman Clark was to marry. "It was Dymphna Lodewyckx, not Manning Clark, who witnessed the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht."

It's not a small point. In the last dozen years of his life, Clark told the story on radio, on television and in newspapers. He wrote a most moving version in his memoirs: "Dymphna was there on the platform at the Bonn railway station when I stepped off the train early in the morning of 8 November, 1938. We walked in ecstasy up the stairs of the Bonn railway station, out of the darkness below into the light. We were in for a rude shock. It was the morning after Kristallnacht."

McKenna was shaken by the discovery that Clark could not have been there that morning to see the wreckage that foretold the Holocaust. But there was no doubt about it. Working on the Clark family papers last year, McKenna found a letter Dymphna Lodewyckx had written from Bonn to Manning Clark in Oxford a couple of days after these events describing the smashed shops, the ruined synagogue and a rabbi's house in flames: "The violence was over when I came - but the crowds were everywhere - following the smiling SS men, children shouting in excitement, grown-ups silent ."

At first McKenna thought he had made a mistake. "Like many others, I had taken Clark at his word. I had even quoted the Kristallnacht story in my published work. I reread Dymphna's letter carefully, checked Clark's diary entries, and saw that it was impossible for Clark to have been in Bonn on the morning of 10 November. As his own diary confirms, he did not arrive in Bonn until 26 November."

This revelation is bound to reignite the controversies that have blazed around Australia's most famous historian since Clark emerged in the late 1970s as a public defender of the Whitlam government. These attacks culminated in 1999 in an eight-page "investigation" in Brisbane's The Courier-Mail condemning the historian as a communist, an agent of influence and perhaps a Soviet spy. That attack collapsed in derision [according to whom? The facts reported were not challeged, only their interpretation], but the 16 years since Clark's death have seen continuing questioning - both academic and political - of his sweeping six-volume narrative of Australian history, and of the quirky persona he created for himself of the Old Testament prophet in a battered Akubra.

Even so, Clark remains the nation's most influential historian. McKenna's biography, due for publication next year by Melbourne University Press, is one of at least two under way. Presenting his Kristallnacht discovery for the first time to an academic conference last year, McKenna had no doubt the historian set out to deceive. "I am convinced that Clark chose deliberately to place himself on the streets of Bonn, knowing full well that he was not there. This was Clark's inner lie. But he had also told the story in public, and traded on his audience's trust in him as a historian."

McKenna asked: "Does this make Clark a fraud?" His answer then was yes and no: while inventing the details of that morning said a great deal about Clark's self-dramatising character, McKenna didn't doubt for a moment that what Clark learnt of the pogrom and what he saw of its aftermath a few weeks later had the profound impact he always claimed. McKenna writes: "In this sense, there is no fabrication."

But in a chunk of the biography published this week in The Monthly, McKenna has taken a big step back from his original allegation of deliberate deceit. "I believe that the older Manning Clark did possess some awareness of the fact that he was not present on the morning after Kristallnacht," he writes. "But to claim to know the extent to which he was conscious of it is to claim to know the inner depths of his mind." [Can conservatives use that defence too?] The fallible memory of an old man must not be ruled out, argues McKenna. "I know I can never recover what he truly remembered, the memory of his inner voice, the voice only he heard."

But McKenna, a fellow in history at Sydney University, acknowledges the big problem for Clark is the retelling of the Kristallnacht story in the 1990 autobiography A Quest for Grace. Here Clark quotes other letters of his and other diary entries from those months in 1938. "It seems highly unlikely," McKenna told the Herald, "that Manning did not see the letter that showed quite clearly that Dymphna was there the morning after Kristallnacht and not him."

The historian's son, The Australian Financial Review journalist Andrew Clark, has told the Herald, "Mr McKenna has discovered what he believes is a discrepancy in the dates of my father's visit to Bonn . He is not contesting that my father visited my mother in Bonn after Kristallnacht, just the precise date of his arrival." He argued that the fact his father was recalling events 40 or 50 years in the past "goes some way in explaining any alleged discrepancy in dates".

Clark faults McKenna for not providing readers with a full context of those events. "If he had done so, readers would have known that at the alleged time of my father's arrival in Bonn, the Nazis' murderous acts against Jews was still in evidence." He regrets McKenna did not speak to him: "Not because I am my father's son, but because I had extensive conversations with my late mother about this period, conversations which vividly confirmed the enormous impact this evil act . had on my father."

If another round of the so-called Culture Wars is to be fought over Manning Clark's reputation, this piece of operatic scene setting - "both romantic and tragic", writes McKenna, "like Verdi doing Shakespeare" - will be the focus of renewed and perhaps savage controversy. Had Clark forgotten he was not there? Had his wife's memories become his own in a 50-year marriage? Was he mischievously pulling our legs? Or was he setting out to deceive? McKenna is hoping for a nuanced discussion of his discoveries, not one that simply slams Clark's credibility. "He created himself as a myth, cultivating a theatrical persona of the people's priest and sage, telling history as parable. And as the Kristallnacht epiphany reveals, the moral of the parable always mattered more than the facts." [An historian for whom facts do not matter??]

Source




Now we know: The human headline has cirrhosis

Previous post about this on April, 10, 2006



Radio presenter Derryn Hinch has advanced cirrhosis and will undergo surgery to remove a suspected cancerous tumour. The "Human Headline" told 60 Minutes last night he had kept his illness secret for fear of being labelled an alcoholic. "I saw it as the drunk's disease," he said. "I saw it as a weakness in my character. I was embarrassed about it, I was ashamed of it. In my mind it showed a flaw that I didn't like."

The cirrhosis formed on Hinch's liver after years of heavy drinking. Hinch's doctor, Howard Tang, said a transplant might be his only option.

Renowned for his love of wine, Hinch said he used to drink up to four bottles of white wine a day. "We'd have lunch every Friday from 1 to 2. It was 1pm to 2am," he said. Rumours about the 63-year-old's illness have circulated since pictures of him looking gaunt started appearing in the papers and on television. Theories on his condition ranged from Alzheimer's to AIDS. Hinch said he had practically drank himself to death.

Source





Three charged over Melbourne race attack

Why did it take so long? I doubt that any action would have been taken at all without all the media attention



Three country footballers have been charged over an attack on a Jewish man in Caulfield last year. The Ocean Grove footballers, part of a group of 20, allegedly also yelled racist abuse including "f--- off Jews" and "Go the Nazis" at Menachem Vorchheimer as he walked near Caulfield racecourse with his two children last October. An off-duty police officer driving the mini-bus carrying the footballers home from a trip to the races is now the subject of an Office of Police Integrity probe after an investigation by the ethical standards department.

Mr Vorchheimer said the men stole his skull cap and punched him after he approached the bus to ask them to apologise. A man, 23, was charged yesterday with intentionally causing serious injury, recklessly causing injury and assault using insulting words. A man, 28, was charged with theft, while a 21-year-old faces a charge of assault using insulting words. The three Ocean Grove men are expected to face court in about six weeks.

Deputy police commissioner Kieran Walshe declined to comment on the investigation into the senior constable who was driving the bus, saying the matter was in the hands of the OPI. "There could be a disciplinary charge, an admonishment notice or management intervention," he said yesterday. "But no decision will be reached until we receive advice from the OPI."

Mr Walshe defended the the 5 1/2 month delay in laying charges. "This was a very lengthy investigation. There were a lot of people in the vicinity, and we wanted the investigation to be thorough," he said.

Mr Vorchheimer has also launched civil action through the Equal Opportunity Commission against Victoria Police and the officer involved. He said yesterday he was happy criminal charges had been laid, but he felt he had to pursue civil action in order to get true justice. "All the way it's been a long battle, and there's still a long way to go," Mr Vorchheimer said.

Ocean Grove Football Club president Michael Vines said the long investigation had taken a heavy toll on the club. "It has created a fair bit of difficulty. If the air could have been cleared earlier, it would have been a lot better," he said.

Source