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On the eve of Australia Day [26^th January] the award ceremonies for the annual; Australian of the Year take place. This is a program of the National Australia Day Council, where each year our nation celebrates the achievements and contributions of eminent   Australians throughout the previous year, by profiling leading citizens who are role models for us all.  The Council is a not-for-profit Australian Government owned social enterprise. The award offers an insight into Australian identity, reflecting the nation’s evolving relationship with world, the role of sport in Australian culture, the impact of multiculturalisn, and the special status of Indigenous Australians.. It has also provoked spirited debate about the fields of endeavour that are most worthy of public recognition. Three companion awards have been introduced, recognising both Young and Senior Australians, and proclaiming the efforts of those who work at a grass roots level through the ‘Australia’s Local Hero’ award.

As noted on the ABC website:   “In a year when the nation was tested by devastating bushfires, a global pandemic and economic hardship, Australians rose to these unprecedented challenges with determination and resilience.  Whether it was during a bushfire emergency, at the forefront of a national coronavirus response or from a remote region, the 2021 Australian of the Year Award finalists strove to better the lives of their countrymen and women.  They gave a voice to the survivors of sexual assault, improved the health outcomes for vulnerable and First Nation’s people, broke new ground for people with a disability and brought greater inclusivity to a national sporting body.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the Australian of the Year Award recipients, all of whom are women, at a ceremony at the National Arboretum in Canberra on Monday evening.

Tonight’s  ‘Australian of the Year Award’ [which proved to be a rather humbling affair rather humbling experience] – she was up against more powerful & nationally known candidates, but the Judges, certainly got it right this year [they normally do, though sometimes equally deserving recipients miss out]  –  A 26-year-old who advocates for survivors of sexual assault has been named 2021 Australian of the Year.  Grace Tame, from Hobart, became the first woman in Tasmania to be granted a legal exemption to speak about her experience as a victim.  She has since become a passionate advocate for education on and prevention of child abuse. .  From age 15, Grace was groomed and raped by her 58-year-old maths teacher, who was found guilty and jailed for his crimes. However, under Tasmania’s sexual-assault victim gag laws, Grace couldn’t legally speak out about her experience – despite the perpetrator and media being free to do so.

Assisted by the #LetHerSpeak campaign, which applied to the Supreme Court on Grace’s behalf, Grace won the right to publicly self-identify as a rape survivor. and won.  She has since used her voice to push for legal reform and raise public awareness about the impacts of sexual violence.  She is also a regular guest speaker for high-profile events and television programs and uses her media profile to advocate for other vulnerable groups in the community.

It’s the first time a Tasmanian has been named Australian of the Year in its 61-year history.

The other nominations for Australian of the Year [and they included three Indigenous women, and a fourth working in Aboriginal health] were as follows. All in their own fields were deserving of recognition of their efforts over the past 12 months, although I feel it would have a shame for the actual winner, if those among the others who roles were essentially part of their paid jobs, had been given the nod ahead of Grace Tame

Northern Territory:  Dr Wendy Page [global expert in Aboriginal Health]

 For more than 30 years, Dr Wendy Page has been dedicated to improving Aboriginal health outcomes, working tirelessly at the grassroots level for the communities in North East Arnhem Land. In 1993, Wendy took up a position at the newly established Miwatj Health Aboriginal Corporation in Nhulunbuy, where she is now medical director.  Wendy has worked to highlight and eliminate a parasitic roundworm prevalent in Aboriginal communities across Northern Australia. She set up the first national workshop for strongyloidiasis, a disease caused by the Strongyloides worm. Wendy’s efforts have been instrumental in reducing the prevalence of strongyloidiasis in local East Arnhem Land communities – from 60 per cent to below 10 per cent. Her many published papers on the Strongyloides worm have made her a world-recognised expert and are used to inform all medical practitioners.  Wendy is passionate about mentoring young doctors. She has taken on roles as a lead supervisor in Nhulunbuy and as an examiner in Darwin to help registrars become qualified GPs.

Australian Capital Territory: Professor Brendan Murphy [Former Chief Medical Officer to the Federal Government and current Secretary of the Dept of Health]

Brendan provided expert advice to the Federal Government to close the international borders before the spread of COVID-19 – a decision which saved tens of thousands of Australian lives. Thanks to his calm leadership, Australia was able to prevent the COVID-19 virus taking hold in the community during the first wave of the global pandemic.  In his role as CMO, Brendan, as Chair of the Australian Health Principal Protection Committee (AHPPC)  provided clear consensus guidance to all Australian Governments around shutting down Australian business and community activities. AHPPC, under his leadership, was responsible for introducing physical distancing measures – and overseeing their implementation in Australia before WHO advice and in advance of other developed countries.  A respected medical expert, Brendan chairs many national committees, and represents Australia at the World Health Assembly.

New South Wales: Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons AFSM [Ex-NSW Fire Commissioner: Leader of Resilience, NSW]

During the terrifying 2019/20 bushfire season, Australians were reassured by the exemplary leadership and empathetic presence of then NSW Fire Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons.

Shane began as a volunteer with NSW RFS in 1985, in the footsteps of his father George – a full-time firefighter who was tragically killed in an out-of-control hazard reduction burn in 2000. In 1994, Shane joined the NSW RFS full-time, working in a range of leadership positions before being endorsed as the organisation’s commissioner in 2007 – a role he held for 12 years. In 2019/20, Shane guided a state-wide response including a 74,000-strong crew of mostly volunteers through one of Australia’s worst fire seasons. Working long hours, he informed and calmed the public in daily press conferences, liaised with government leaders and provided comfort to colleagues and family members of firefighters who lost their lives in service to others.  In April 2020, Shane was appointed leader of the new disaster management and recovery agency, Resilience NSW.

Queensland: Dr Dinesh Palipana OAM  [Advocate for Doctors with Disabilities]

Dr Dinesh Palipana OAM is a senior resident doctor at Gold Coast University Hospital. Despite facing numerous barriers, he became the first quadriplegic medical graduate and medical intern in Queensland. He was recently admitted as a lawyer.  As co-founder of Doctors With Disabilities Australia, Dinesh has worked with the Australian Medical Association to create first-of-kind national policies for inclusivity in medical education and employment. Dinesh is a doctor for the Gold Coast Titans physical disability rugby league team. He is also a member of multiple committees for disability advocacy and has spoken in world-renowned forums such as TEDx. Through COVID-19, he advocated for equitable treatment for people with disabilities, including as a witness to the Disability Royal Commission. Dinesh has also contributed significantly to scientific advances in treating spinal cord injury and restoring function to people with paralysis. His national and global impact has been recognised with numerous awards, including Junior Doctor of the Year and the Order of Australia.

Wester Australia:  Professor Helen Milroy [Australia’s First Indigenous Doctor]

Prof Helen Milroy was Australia’s first Indigenous doctor and is now a highly regarded expert in child and adolescent psychiatry.For more than 25 years, Helen has been a pioneer in research, education and training in Aboriginal and child mental health, and recovery from grief and trauma. She has supported the Aboriginal and medical workforce in applying Indigenous knowledge and cultural models of care.

Helen has played a key role on numerous mental health advisory committees and boards,  including the National Mental Health Commission.  She was appointed as commissioner for the Australian Government’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse from 2013-2017. Helen was also the first Indigenous commissioner to the Australian Football League.

A talented artist and published author, Helen’s books have been shortlisted for several major awards. In 2018, she received the Australian Indigenous Doctor of the Year Award, recognising her many achievements.

South Australia:  Tanya Hosch [Leader; Changemaker and Visionary]

Tanya Hosch is the first Indigenous person and second woman appointed to the AFL executive. She has held leadership roles in sport, the arts, culture, social justice and public policy.  One of the pre-eminent Indigenous leaders pursuing constitutional recognition of Australia’s First Nations people, Tanya’s principled leadership is transforming the AFL – advancing women, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, gender-diverse Australians and the entire community.

Tanya championed the first Indigenous player statue of Nicky Winmar and instigated a review of anti-vilification policy within the code. She helped secure an apology for Adam Goodes from the AFL and delivered a new industry framework to help prevent racist treatment of players.  Tanya also helped found advocacy organisation The Indigenous Players Alliance. She drove a new respect and responsibility policy enabling women to seek redress for unacceptable behaviour, and a world-first gender diversity policy for a contact sport. In 2020, she drove a hugely successful social media campaign aimed at informing and protecting Indigenous communities from COVID-19.

Victoria:  Donna Stolzenberg  [Founder and CEO, the National Homeless Collective].

Proud Indigenous woman Donna Stolzenberg is a CEO, keynote speaker and trainer. In 2014, she had the simple idea of handing out 50 donated sleeping bags to homeless people. That idea has evolved into a nationwide charity.

The National Homeless Collective (NHC) is a grassroots Australian organisation that helps people affected by homelessness, domestic violence and social disadvantage.

A mother of five boys and a grandmother of two, Donna has lived experience of overcoming homelessness and hardship. Under Donna’s direction, NHC has created six sub-charities targeting different issues – Period Project, School Project, Plate Up Project, Sleeping Bags for Homelessness, and Secret Women’s Business. It also runs Kala Space, an op shop employing women affected by domestic abuse or homelessness.

Donna’s generosity and resourcefulness have provided practical solutions in Australia’s most recent crises. This includes helping women to safely escape homelessness, people affected by bushfires, or those locked down in the Melbourne towers during COVID-19.

The other three awards from the night were decided as follows.

Senior Australian of the Year

Northern Territory:  Dr. Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr Baumann AM

The Northern Territory’s [and Australia’s] Senior Australian of 2021 Dr. Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr Baumann AM  has been recognised for her work as an Aboriginal activist, educator and artist.  In 1975, she became the NT’s first fully qualified Aboriginal teacher.  She went on to become a principal in her community of Nauiyu, 143 kilometres south-west of Darwin.  “Training our local people to be educators in our communities is important, because they know best,” she said.  “They know the families and the children.

“We can do the western education and we can also teach our way of educating our kids in a cultural sense, and our languages, dances, ceremonies, you name it.  “It makes us a better person in being able to do that.”

Dr Ungunmerr-Baumann, 69, is also a renowned writer and public speaker.  She has served on the National Indigenous Council and founded the Miriam Rose Foundation to drive reconciliation at a grassroots level.  It’s the third time Dr Ungunmerr-Baumann has been nominated for an Australian of the Year award, but she was still nervous at the announcement.  “I was saying, ‘Please God, not me’. And then my name was announced, I nearly fell off the chair in shock,” she said.  “If I am Senior Australian of the Year, what am I supposed to be doing? Will I be traveling around Australia? I’m just about in my wheelchair! How am I going to manage?”

Young Australian of the Year

South Australia:  Isobel Marshall  The 2021 Young Australian of the Year is 22-year-old social entrepreneur Isobel Marshall of Adelaide, South Australia.  At just 18 years of age, Isobel co-founded TABOO with school friend Eloise Hall, to help women around the world by breaking down the stigma around menstruation and providing greater access to hygiene products.  Isobel and business partner Eloise crowdfunded $56,000 to launch their range of products in August 2019.  TABOO sells ethically sourced organic cotton pads and tampons to the Australian market.

One hundred per cent of net profits goes to One Girls, a charity which provides education programs for girls and women in Sierra Leone and Uganda.

In Australia, TABOO partners with Vinnies Women’s Crisis centre, providing free access to pads and tampons for women who require emergency accommodation in South Australia.

On country, TABOO also supports the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council, which is based in Alice Springs.

Local Australian Hero

New South Wales:  Rosemary Kariuki

The 2021 Australia’s Local Hero is 60-year-old advocate for migrant and refugee women, Rosemary Kariuki of Oran Park, NSW.  Rosemary is the multicultural community liaison officer for the Parramatta Police.  She specialises in helping migrants who are facing domestic violence, language barriers and financial distress.  Her experience of fleeing Kenya alone in 1999 to escape family abuse and tribal clashes – and her initial loneliness upon arriving in Australia – helped Rosemary recognise that isolation is a huge issue for many migrant women.  In partnership with the African Women’s Group, she helped start the African Women’s Dinner Dance to help migrant women meet others like themselves and form social networks.  Now in its 14th year, more than 400 women attend the annual event.

She also started the African Village Market, a program to help migrants and refugees start their own businesses, which ran for four years.

After the Awards, the Chair of the National Australia Day Council, Danielle Roche OAM, congratulated the 2021 Australian of the Year Award recipients.

“Grace, Miriam-Rose, Isobel and Rosemary are all committed to changing attitudes in our society and changing lives,” she said.

“They are strong, determined women who are dedicated to breaking down barriers and advocating for people’s rights – particularly the rights of women and children.

“They epitomise the Australian values of respect, tolerance, equality of opportunity and compassion.

“Because of them, others get a fair go.

It was reported in this week’s edition of the Weekly Times [a rural newspaper in Victoria] under the headline “It’s Hop, Skip and Rump” that Victorian kangaroo meat is set to be tossed on to barbeques in the New Year as the Andrews Government approves the Aussie icon being processed for human consumption.  I assume that the kangaroo meat that can presently be purchased in Victoria comes from those states which already have such an approval.

Now I imagine this could be a very emotive subject for many people, despite the fact that most people already happily eat, without any thought for the animals involved, the meat from livestock such as cows, sheep, pigs, fowls, ducks, geese, and so on. I assume that the  reason for the emotion [apart from the non- meat eaters and in the main, their general distaste to kill any animal for food], is most likely based on the fact that the kangaroo is a ‘national icon’, and that makes presumably that form of meat all the difference!!

Not that the ‘culling’ of kangaroos for food is new! Already in 2020, more than 40,000 Victorian kangaroos have been harvested by professional shooters and processed into ‘pet food’!! [As of the 1st December, the actual number was 39,484 During this COVID year, pet food processors claim that there has already been a big lift in demand for roo and deer meat in the face of beef shortages. Those organisations will insist that ‘Kangaroo meat is the way of the future’.

Surveys of the Victorian kangaroo population are conducted regularly, the most recent in November. The report noted that ‘Harvesting is tightly controlled by Victoria’s Game Management Authority, which issues tags that professional shooters must attach to each kangaroo carcass’.

I guess the writer is standing on the fence a little here –  I generally dislike the idea of raising animals for the purpose of killing them for a human food source, yet I do eat some meat. Animal husbandry has been a part of ‘man’s’ existence since the beginning of time. We regularly read reports of kangaroo populations getting out of control in Australia, and the problems this causes for our farming communities, especially in times of drought; similarly, with the build-up of urban areas around the cities and towns, the subsequent encroachment  into the animals’ environment, and their ‘forced’ movement into urban areas in search of food, causes numerous other problems of conflict.

So it would seem, that despite the protests and concerns, of some aspects of society, the processing of kangaroo meat in Victoria for human consumption in inevitable. The Editorial that follows outlines the environmental advantages –  it could have also made reference to the advantages gained through the regulation and control of animal numbers and over-population  –  arguments for some form of culling have being used to justify the practice, not just with kangaroos, but other wild species such as deer, brumbies & wild horses, feral pigs and buffalo, etc. Personally, I’d like to see more attention given to the culling of wild dogs and feral [and domestic] cats of the sort which devastate much of our Australian wildlife.

In any case, we read from the Weekly Times editorial,  of the 30^th December 2020 [and this is admittedly, essentially a  not unexpected rural view]

“What better way to celebrate being Australian than throwing a strip of kangaroo loin, fillet or rump on the barbeque.

It is one of the healthiest, leanest and arguably most sustainable meats in the world..

NSW, Queensland,  and South Australia have been regulating the harvest and processing of the Aussie icon for decades.

So why has it taken the Victorian government so long to approve the processing of kangaroo  for consumption?

The Weekly Times readership need look no further than the lobbying of animal welfare and environmental groups, who have urged Victorian Labor MPS to ban kangaroo culling and processing.

Animal Justice Party MP Andy Meddick wants to ‘rapidly phase out the commercial killing of kangaroo and wallabies and close down processing industries’ with more funding to encourage ‘kangaroo friendly   wildlife-based tourism’.

The Greens have also called  for the ‘banning of the commercial killing of kangaroos’.

Yet such policies fail to recognise  kangaroos are the most efficient source of meat found in  Australia.

While people such as Mr. Meddick want to ‘save’ every animal, surely the Greens realise the environmental value of a species that has such a low carbon footprint.

They need to accept roos are an ideal source of high-quality protein, which when properly managed, can supplement the supply of agricultural meats.

While it has taken a while, Premier Daniel Andrews and his team should be congratulated on standing up to Meddick and the Greens.

The next step is to tap into another rich source of protein in the forests – wild deer”………………………………………….

One final word on a subject that does leave the writer with no difference or conflict of opinion   – a letter to the editor in the same publication, whose thoughts I thoroughly support.

“Victoria’s native wildlife is in decline due to many mounting pressures, including climate change, bush-fires, drought and habitat loss. It is unconscionable to add to this decline by continuing the barbaric sport of killing waterbirds for pleasure.  It is 2021, not 1821. It is time the Victorian Government banned duck shooting to bring our state up to date with social expectations”.

[rather than allow a small minority of powerful interests to continue to run the agenda on this question].

Indigenous burn-offs are helping make Australia more fire-safe.

Writing in the Victorian ‘Weekly Times’ newspaper of 16 December, 2020, journalist Brett Ellis wrote that ‘Indigenous fire management will improve the health and safety of the land’.

This is a topic that has been referred on in various forums over recent years. In the same edition of the ‘Weekly Times’. Peter Hunt reported that “Landcare groups and the Victorian Opposition are embracing Aboriginal cultural burning as a means of reviving bushland and curbing fuel loads on private and public land………………a key part [of cultural burning] is making sure there’s enough moisture in the soil to keep the fire cool, so it just burns the leaf litter and grass thatch. The flame is no more than 30cm high. These burns will knock out the smaller shrubs and push them back into the gullies, where they belong. Lack of fire means they keep spreading ……ultimately…cultural burns boosted grass growth, while protecting the tree canopy…………The devastating impact of last summer’s bushfire highlighted the need to better manage our landscape and undertake more targeted fuel reduction burns,,”

In view of that type of comment, I believe it’s worthwhile to take note of the views of people like Brett Ellis, who himself is a fire & emergency management consultant and director at Firestick Alliance Indigenous Corporation. Admittedly, he is really only using one principal example to demonstrate his arguments, and to my reading, leaves the question a little ‘up in the air’, and he is certainly speaking from an Indigenous viewpoint – though in recent years, his voice has not been a sole call from that area. Bruce Pascoe’s book ‘Dark Emu’ [which I have previously covered in this column] – a book much maligned in some quarters  –  devotes a chapter to the use of ‘fire’ and it’s use by Indigenous communities. He makes the point, noted by Ellis below that “within years of Aboriginal people being prevented from operating their traditional fire regimes, the countryside was overwhelmed by understorey species” [p. 164].

So, from the article by Brett Ellis,  we read the following considerations about the topic..

“Australian scientific earth core sampling suggests that the mega fire ceased  about 8,000 years ago signifying that fire lore, customs and practices had established a balance  between man, flora and fauna.

Using the ‘right fire’, Aborigines maintained the balance of country and as such enabled themselves  and all living things to survive and thrive.

More than 200 years ago that balance was interrupted. Aboriginal fire lore was broken, fire practices were ceased and the landscape changed due to vegetation clearance and uncontrolled hot bushfires.

Unfortunately, Aboriginal fire lore is still being broken. Our country is sick.. Current land and fire management practices are compounding this issue with increasing larger and more frequent devastating and costly mega fires the future for Australia.

Western fire and land management practices are continuing to destroy  the sacred canopy and dry out the environment. With climate change, the need for healthy canopy and under-storey will be essential to assist the environment to remain cool and resilient with increasing temperatures.

Aboriginals have dealt with climate change before and ensuring fire lore and practices are reinstated will provide the needed protection and management to allow the environment to be prepared and protected.

Unfortunately, much of the ancient knowledge of fire methodologies, lore and practices have been lost, especially in southeast Australia.

We are still fortunate that pockets of intact knowledge remain in other parts of the continent from which to rebuild important knowledge.

Having worked in strategic fire and emergency management roles at local and state government levels, I have been challenged in the past trying to balance the competing views of burning and protection of the bush. I now know Indigenous fire knowledge and methodology is the key to balancing that tension and improving the health and safety of our landscapes.

Over the past five years I have had the good fortune of working with Aboriginal elders and knowledge holders who have spent many days at our property as part of an Indigenous fire and land management trial site. The Yarra Valley property was severely affected by Black Saturday bushfires and has a 40/40 split of pasture and recovering native vegetation.

Under the guidance of one of Australia’s best known leading Indigenous fire practitioners, Victor Stefferson, and alongside Wurundjeri elder Uncle David Wandin, we have applied the right fire on the right country at the right time. And the landscape is showing the benefits.

The addition of Indigenous fire into the system is producing an increased presence of native vegetation, stronger presence of kangaroo grass, wallaby grass and many native herbs, foods, medicines and orchids. This has been seen in the paddocks as well as under the tree canopy as strengthened native plants outcompete introduced grasses. Every area where we have applied the right fire, we have seen improvement in diversity of vegetation and wildlife.  The locations are staying greener, healthier and stronger through summer”.

Over the past few weeks, the writer has been deep into a couple of more serious books, including a written version of a television series about the history of Ireland – ‘Story of Ireland: In search of a new national memory’ by Neil Hegarty.  Needing a bit of a break from the likes of that, I chose a couple of recently released novels by two Australian authors – Craig Silvey, and Jane Harper – both novels are briefly commented upon with the aid of a couple of professional reviews written after publication.

We begin with   ‘Honeybee’ by Craig Silvey: published 2020; 424 pages  –  a very emotional and eye-opening novel about, what for me, was generally, the more seedy sides of life [at least, on the surface anyway]  –  the book’s message  ‘Find out who you are, and live that life’.

In many ways, a ‘heart-breaking story taking myself as the reader, into a world I was not familiar or particularly comfortable with – of family violence; extortion plots, botched bank robberies, drag shows, and so on. There are also stories of redemption, perseverance, mercy and hope in this scenario – of two lives changed forever by a chance encounter, and of the friendship offered from unexpected sources along the way  –  as one reviewer put it  –   “At the heart of Honeybee is Sam: a solitary, resilient young person battling to navigate the world as their true self; ensnared by loyalty to a troubled mother, scarred by the volatility of a domineering stepfather, and confounded by the kindness of new alliances”.

From the book cover and subsequent comments.

Late in the night, fourteen-year-old Sam Watson steps onto a quiet overpass, climbs over the rail and looks down at the road far below. At the other end of the same bridge, an old man, Vic, smokes his last cigarette.  The two see each other across the void. A fateful connection is made, and an unlikely friendship blooms. Slowly, we learn what led Sam and Vic to the bridge that night. Bonded by their suffering, each privately commits to the impossible task of saving the other.

Guardian Australia writes:

Sam Watson, the narrator and protagonist of Silvey’s much-anticipated new novel, Honeybee, is another such adolescent. The reader is first introduced to Sam on the railing of an overpass, where, filled with despair and unendurable hurt, Sam has come to die.

It’s a dramatic beginning, and much of the first act of the novel is structured around unfolding the actions and history that have brought Sam to this point. Sam’s particular context, that is, is treated as something of a mystery, the discovery of which is the main narrative impetus of the first part of the book.

[As the Guardian writes] :There’s no way to write about this without a spoiler. Reader, you have been warned.

Honeybee’s opening mystery, the reason why Sam is different from Silvey’s other characters – and the reason why Sam’s particularly gentle nature is a problem in her family and life (and, arguably, in the novel) – is the fact that Sam is transgender. Sam is 14 years old, at the point where the body she was born in is beginning to develop the adult characteristics that are so different from those that match her gender; at the point, that is, that dysphoria so often becomes intolerable for trans people. For Sam, too, this is also the point where her family’s desire for her to act “like a man” has intensified, and she can see no way out of her discomfort and her shame.

None of this is inaccurate, as far as portrayals go – and it’s clear, especially from the book’s acknowledgements, that Silvey has done a great deal of research in writing Honeybee, and spoken to many people with lived experience of gender dysphoria and transition. Even still, there’s something about the way that Sam’s gender identity is treated as a reveal, as something startling or surprising, that sits uncomfortably with me. It feels othering, or almost exploitative, even as Sam is always portrayed with great compassion.

I’m not trans. I am queer – which means that transfolk are a part of my community – and the woman who I love just happens to be transgender, too. She’s an activist, and a mentor to young transfolk, and one of the reasons why she does such things is because, as a child and adolescent, she was never able to tell her own story, and because, as an adult, so many of the stories that exist about people like her centre on their pain and trauma and their struggle – and this is, she sometimes says, exhausting.

There’s a whole article that could be written about the rights and responsibilities of representation, the importance of “own voices” telling their own stories. There are smarter and better-placed people to do that. But even after Sam’s gender identity was revealed in Honeybee, I kept thinking there’s so much else to her, and to the novel, that her transness sometimes feels like just one more trauma without which the book would have worked equally well.

Sam’s life is difficult and it is traumatic – she is the only child of a mother who fell pregnant when she was still a child herself, and who has raised Sam without support, dealing with her frustration and sadness by turning to alcohol and then to much harder drugs. Sam has grown up in a series of dilapidated flats, often leaving suddenly when the rental arrears grow too high, and being continually bullied at school for her differences.

Most recently, Sam’s stepfather has joined in on this terrorising, because Sam’s sensitivity is anathematic to the rough and violent kind of masculinity by which he lives his life – and which manifests frequently in his treatment of Sam’s mother. Sam’s stepfather is also a con artist who ends up working as a debt collector and enforcer for a dangerous drug dealer, and storing fentanyl and guns in the family home. There’s a lot going on for Sam already, a lot of reasons why she might feel damaged and “wrong” (the term she uses often across the book) – plenty that could have brought her to that overpass, even before her gender is added to the mix.

At its core, though, Honeybeeis a novel about unconventional kinds of love: standing on that overpass, Sam meets an old man, Vic, who has come to the same place with the same intention, but for each of them, the presence of the other person makes this act suddenly impossible.

Thrown together by these extreme circumstances, Sam and Vic become friends, and then a kind of family. Sam moves into Vic’s house, living in the bedroom that he used to share with his late wife, and the pair learn to support, accept and enliven each other. Here, Sam also befriends one of Vic’s neighbours, the ballsy and vivacious Aggie, a teenage girl who is so fully herself that Sam can’t help but be drawn in.

What Sam finds in Honeybeeis a different kind of family, and a different kind of love – one that is based on choice, rather than just on chance – and it is with this support and encouragement that she is also able to start to find herself. This is a book as much about these kinds of relationships as it is about self-discovery, self-acceptance and coming-of-age, themes that are common in Silvey’s work, and that he always handles with tenderness and compassion. Honeybee is no exception – but it’s still difficult to reconcile this with the discomfort that is caused by Silvey treating Sam’s gender as a dramatic reveal, or as just one other trauma in her already-difficult life.

[Craig Silvey is an author and screenwriter from Fremantle, Western Australia.  His critically acclaimed debut novel, Rhubarb, was published in 2004. His bestselling second novel, Jasper Jones, was released in 2009 and is considered a modern Australian classic. Published in over a dozen territories, Jasper Jones has won plaudits in three continents, including an International Dublin Literary Award shortlisting, a Michael J. Printz Award Honor, and a Miles Franklin Literary Award shortlisting. Jasper Jones was the Australian Book Industry Awards Book of the Year for 2010.  Honeybee is his third novel].

Our second novel is  ‘The Survivors’ by Jane Harper [published 2020; 378 pages]  –  a relatively quick read, as good as ‘The Dry’ ]her previous novel I’d read], although I felt the story could have continued a little further –  it left a few outcomes either assumed, to be guessed at, or just neglected in the writing [I doubt the latter, obviously intended as it was]  –  I guess my problem is, that I like a clean ending, but it was an intriguing little mystery, the solution to which kept you reading. I’m currently ‘ploughing’ through a history of Ireland, so this was a bit of welcome piece of light reading for a couple of days!!!  Among many other aspects of the story, there is the tragic but realistic portrayal of a dementia sufferer, a little close to home these days!!

From the jacket cover:

Jane Harper’s highly anticipated fourth novel The Survivors has been released in Australia and New Zealand. ‘The Survivors’, a standalone mystery, is set on the Tasmanian coast. Released in Australia on September 22, The Survivors went straight to No.1 on the Australian bestseller list (Nielsen BookScan) after a massive debut week.

Kieran Elliott’s life changed forever on a single day when a reckless mistake led to devastating consequences. The guilt that still haunts him resurfaces during a visit with his young family to the small coastal community he once called home.  Kieran’s parents are struggling in a town where fortunes are forged by the sea. Between them all is his absent brother, Finn.  When a body is discovered on the beach, long-held secrets threaten to emerge. A sunken wreck, a missing girl, and questions that have never washed away…

“I’ve really enjoyed writing this one,” Jane said. “It’s been a lot of fun researching and writing about such a fantastic part of the country.”

And from the introductory paragraphs of the review in the Sydney Morning Herald [by Sue Turnbull, on the 22^nd September 2020]  we read:

This time we’re in one of those deserted-for-most-of-the-year beach communities in Tasmania with one main road and a restaurant called The Surf and Turf. Just in case you might miss it, there’s a giant crayfish fashioned out of sun-bleached shells glued to the wall, and a sign saying “In here for fish from there” with an “uneven arrow” pointing to the ocean.

Once again, as in all her crime novels beginning with The Dry, Australian crime writer Jane Harper creates an impressive landscape that serves to illustrate how the experience of place inevitably shapes the lives of those who live there. While Evelyn Bay might once have depended on fishing and forestry, it now limps along supported by seasonal whale-watching and deep-sea diving tours to investigate the innumerable wrecks offshore.

Evelyn Bay is the kind of small town most young people can’t wait to leave as soon as they can. Like Kieran, who now lives in Sydney but has returned home with his partner Mia and baby Audrey to help his mother pack up the family home. His father has disappeared into the “void” of early onset dementia, and his mother is only just coping with his increasingly erratic behaviour

Coming home was never going to be easy. But Kieran is also lugging a swag of grief for a tragedy 12 years earlier during a fatal storm that resulted in the death of two young men at sea. One of them was Kieran’s elder brother, Finn, the other a young father whose still-furious son now works at The Surf and Turf. This was also the night when a young women, Gabby Birch, went missing, and the mystery of her disappearance has never been solved.

Harper establishes the situation fast. Kieran’s only been home one night when another young woman, Bronte, who again works at The Surf and Turf, is found dead on the beach at the end of her shift. But then the pace slows, as Harper lets the ripples of effect wash over all the survivors of that storm in the past as they circle each other in a reunion that is now overshadowed by a death in the present.

While the police conduct their investigation in the background, the focus is always on Kieran as he comes to realise that he has been so consumed by his own guilt and grief, that he has missed the bigger picture. Like all small towns, Evelyn Bay has more than its share of intrigue now rehearsed on its social media network.

Harper deftly unravels these small-town secrets, where it’s the little things that matter. Kieran’s old friend and rival, Ash, now runs a landscaping business and is devastated by the destruction of his grandmother’s carefully tended garden by a recent blow-in, the thriller writer G.R. Barlin. This character gives Harper some playful opportunities to comment on the experience of being a writer.

Barlin writes the kinds of books that people buy at airports, stay “glued to” at the pool and then leave in their hotel room “to save on luggage weight”. Far from being dismayed by this, Barlin appears unruffled given he has made a great deal of money at his craft and approaches it in a workmanlike way. As he tells Kieran, “Writers’ block is for amateurs … I do this for a living.”

He is, however, the perceptive outsider who knows that for a community such as Evelyn Bay to survive, the people need to be “close-knit” and that “once that trust is broken, they’re stuffed”. It’s not just the loss of the traditional industries that threatens small communities, but the tensions that pull people apart.

As always in her books, Harper embraces the mythic. Visible from the whale lookout are three iron statues facing the sea, a memorial commissioned as a tribute to the 54 passengers and crew who lost their lives in a shipwreck nearly a century ago. Known as The Survivors, they are never totally submerged. For Kieran, his family, and Evelyn Bay, it is all about survival.

Despite the obvious symbolism, The Survivors is a subtle, quiet book about guilt, grief and growing up. You may find it hard to leave it behind.

[And thankfully, for my readers, this review didn’t reveal the story’s outcome  – it’s not hard to read, and you are constantly wondering, despite little clues along the way, just who has been responsible for the two murders, a decade apart, and seemingly unconnected!!  Enjoy!!]

[Jane Harper is the author of international bestsellers ‘The Dry’, ‘Force of Nature’, and ‘The Last Man’.   Her books are published in 40 territories worldwide.  Jane has won numerous top awards including the CWA Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel, the British Book Awards Crime and Thriller Book of the Year, the Australian Book Industry Awards Book of the Year and the Australian Indie Awards Book of the Year]. 

In our current Melbourne [Victorian] lockdown of the past six months or so, the Coachbuilder has managed a degree of reading, and I would like to refer to three recently read books, and the in particular, the author of one of them. The books range from Australian history, one fictional, one real history, to a light novel, while the author we look at is Australia’s  Geoffrey Blainey.

[1] Recently,  I finished reading [out in my sunny backyard]     ‘A Room Made of Leaves’ by Kate Grenville, published in  2020, 322 pages.  A wonderful little mix of fact and fantasy/fiction about Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of the ‘so-called’ Father of the Australian sheep industry.

Who was John Macarthur?  Wikipedia describes him thus –  John Macarthur (1767 – 10 April 1834] was a British Army Officer, entrepreneur, politician, architect and pioneer of settlement in Australia. Macarthur is recognised as the pioneer of the wool  industry that was to boom in Australia in the early 19th century and become a trademark of the nation. He is noted as the architect of  Farm House, his own residence in Parramatta  and as the man who commissioned architect John Verge  to design Camden Park Estate  in Camden, in New South Wales. He was instrumental in agitating for, and organising, a rebellion against the colonial government in what is often described as the Rum Bebellion, 

But was he deserving of the generally historical, and in the main, favourable picture the books have of him?

“What if Elizabeth Macarthur-wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in the earliest days of Sydney-had written a shockingly frank secret memoir? And what if novelist Kate Grenville had miraculously found and published it? That’s the starting point for A Room Made of Leaves, a playful dance of possibilities between the real and the invented.  Marriage to a ruthless bully, the impulses of her heart, the search for power in a society that gave women none- ‘this’ Elizabeth Macarthur manages her complicated life with spirit and passion, cunning and sly wit. Her memoir lets us hear-at last!-what one of those seemingly demure women from history might really have thought.  At the centre of A Room Made of Leaves is one of the most toxic issues of our own age- the seductive appeal of false stories. This book may be set in the past, but it’s just as much about the present, where secrets and lies have the dangerous power to shape reality.  Kate Grenville’s return to the territory of The Secret River is historical fiction turned inside out, a stunning sleight of hand by one of our most original writers.”

Let’s hear from the author herself

The idea for A Room Made of Leaves was sparked nearly twenty years ago, when I was doing research for The Secret River, a book set in the earliest years of the British colony in Australia. I came across some of the letters of Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of John Macarthur, a junior officer who arrived with his family in Sydney in 1790.

Australian history, like most histories, is a bit light-on when it comes to women, because they left so little behind.  Even when they were educated enough to write letters or journals, those writings are bland, sedate things, suitable to be shared in any genteel parlour.  Women at that time had no choice but to be bland.  Without any power over any aspect of their lives, they were obliged to go along with a social and legal system that equated them with children.  They might have talked together about what they felt about that destiny, but none of them could risk putting it in writing.

Elizabeth Macarthur’s letters are no different.  She and John and their infant son landed in a new, raw, violent, hungry penal colony – a thousand convicts and a couple of hundred guards – six months’ sail from home.  Yet from her letters – unrevealing, cheery, impersonal – you’d never know any of that.

More interesting to me was what she wrote – or didn’t write – about her husband.  The son of a draper, John Macarthur had no prospects other than what he could make for himself, and in Sydney he lost no time in squeezing every drop of advantage out of the place and his position there.  His letters – far from bland and sedate – show him to have been a clever, ruthless bully, a dangerous man to cross, violent and unforgiving towards anyone who tried to go against him.

Yet from Elizabeth’s letters there’s not the faintest shadow of any of that.  Reading her letters, you’d think he was a kindly, cheerful, reasonable man beloved of all around him.  Either he was a completely different man at home, or her letters are beautiful lies.

Enter William Dawes, another junior officer in the Sydney of 1790.  Dawes emerges from the record as a very likeable man: warm, selfless, with great integrity. He was the colony’s resident astronomer and Elizabeth Macarthur asked him for lessons in “a few easy stars”.  However, stars turned out not to be as easy as she thought and, she says, “I mistook my abilities, and I blush at my error.”

I blush at my error! In the context of her otherwise bloodless letters, those five words blaze off the page with an unmistakable erotic charge.  Suddenly – for the only time in all the many pages she wrote – she’s a flesh-and-blood woman. What might have happened after Mrs Macarthur blushed?

Those five words are where this book started.  What they told me was that she wasn’t as bland and boring as her letters might suggest.  She lived – or at least wrote – behind a mask, and just for that one instant, the mask slipped.

A body of myth has grown around Elizabeth and John Macarthur.  Generations of schoolchildren have learned that John Macarthur more or less singlehandedly bred the Australian Merino sheep that until recently was the basis of our economy. All over Australia, streets and schools are named in his honour.  The myth about Elizabeth is that, when John was away in England for two long  periods, she kept the family sheep empire going, a loving, industrious, pious helpmeet to her husband.

The slipping of the mask gave me a way to sneak in behind the myth and explore something more interesting, and possibly more true.  The way I put it to myself was that Elizabeth Macarthur had written the fictional account of her life, in those bland letters.  I was going to write the non-fictional account, the truth that she couldn’t ever risk putting on paper.  It would take the form of her secret memoirs, hidden in a tin box tucked away in the roof of her house. I’d pretend that I’d found these memoirs, and that I was simply transcribing and publishing them.  The joke-within-a-joke would be that the story would be based on the real documentary record, and would even include quotes from Elizabeth Macarthur’s real letters.  Fact and fiction would overlap and allow a fictional woman of the past to do what would have been impossible for any real woman of that time: to put down in writing what she really thought.

It was an exciting project to try to give Elizabeth Macarthur the voice she could never have had.  She was a remarkable woman, to have managed the gigantic enterprise of the family business at a time when women were expected to be helpless and ignorant and stay at home with the children. She was on her own – for four years during her husband’s first absence, nine years the second – in a brutal society, yet she came to thrive. By the time Macarthur came back from that second absence, he was overwhelmed by mental illness, but the business his wife had managed so well was the richest in the colony.

But as I wrote, I realised that this was more than a book about an extraordinary woman.  It was about the dangerous power of false stories, false surfaces, myths, and the way they can erase the truth.  Women were not the only people whose voices were silenced.  In the Australian context, the other great silencing concerns the story of the Aboriginal people.  The accounts left by those early settlers are the only written accounts of that history, but as Elizabeth Macarthur warns us, Do not believe too quickly!

I travelled to Devon to research Elizabeth’s childhood, and spent many hours at Elizabeth Farm and other locations around Parramatta.  I drew on as many primary sources as I could find: the parish records of Bridgerule in Devon, archives in the State Library of NSW, Governors’ correspondence, and contemporary accounts of early Sydney.  A Room Made of Leaves had found its form and content by the time Michelle Scott Tucker’s biography of Elizabeth Macarthur was published, and I didn’t draw on that book in writing my own, but Michelle was helpful in advising me how to contact Macarthur descendants to let them know of the book (which I did as a courtesy to them). My reading of the primary sources has sometimes led me in a different direction from other writers about Elizabeth Macarthur.  But what I think we all share is admiration for that remarkable woman.

This book isn’t history. It’s fiction. But, like most historical fiction, it starts in the same place history does: in the record of the past left to us in documents, oral traditions, buildings, landscapes and objects.   Historians devise one kind of story from those sources.  Fiction writers devise another kind. Those sources are flawed, partial and ambiguous.  For that reason, the stories that come out of them, although starting in the same place, can end up very differently.  But what historians and writers of historical fiction have in common is an urge to understand that past: what it meant then, and perhaps more importantly, what it means now: for us, living in the world that’s been shaped by that past.

[2]  ‘Mines in the Spinifex: The Story of Mount Isa Mines’ by Geoffrey Blainey, published in 1960, 278 pages,  a very interesting read, and depiction of the various mistakes and miscalculations made in Mt Isa getting to where it is today [or at least in 1960, when the book was written].  In it, Geoffrey Blainey shows his lifelong skill as a writer of history.  As one reviewer wrote at the time of the book’s publication – ‘Amazing book. Blainey is such a great author! He combines dense information with literary poetics, making his histories fun and readable’..

Commentary on the book some years after it’s publication, it was noted that the development of Mt. Isa was formidable, akin in many ways to the mining of Grasberg…remote, extreme temperatures, extreme transport required, and a huge deposit. Since the book was written in the ’60s it leaves a lot of what is now long past history out. But it is interesting to note that Xstata owns it now, and is now actively mining what in the book were deposits of lower grade to be saved for the future. Most amazing about Isa are the decades that it took to become profitable and the type of men who despite all the odds keep believing in it and moving it forward, until it could become a mine with greater riches than Broken Hill. If only more money had been available to develop it early on, what a different story we would have, and perhaps another mining giant company born of it. (

Another reviewer described it as a thoroughly enjoyable and informative documentary of not only Mount Isa Mines, but also prospecting and mining in general in northern Australia (mainly in Queensland). Also a good historical account of associated business ,politics and unions from the ‘struggle years’, during which individual miners and small mining operations struggled to scrape together a meagre existence, up to the more prosperous years, following the discovery of more productive ore-bearing lodes and the transition to large scale operations. Highly recommended for those who love Australian history and are proud of our heritage, including the spirit and achievements of our pioneers.

I also recently read  ‘Me & Emma by Elizabeth Flock, published in  2004, 280 pages  –  a bit of light reading in the midst of two somewhat heavier books I am was making my way through at the time. An intriguing story, set I believe in the backblocks of ‘poor’ America, and written through the eyes and words of an 8 year old girl, who feels the responsibility of protecting her 6 year old sister, Emma [who often seems much older than the story teller] and even trying to protect her indifferent mother, from the brutal attentions of their stepfather.  A story which has you wondering at the outcome, while all along, having a fairly good idea as to how it will end  – only to be way off course, with an unexpected twist, despite various vague clues along the way. I’ll say no more on that score, don’t want to spoil the storyline for potential readers.  A nice little read, albeit somewhat disturbing in view of the nature of the abuse by the stepfather, and the seeming disinterest of the mother to the welfare of her girls, or even of herself!

Here are three short reviews, which creates even more intrigue for the potential reader.;

[Goodreads]: The title characters in Me & Emma are very nearly photographic opposites–8-year-old Carrie, the raven-haired narrator, is timid and introverted, while her little sister Emma is a tow-headed powerhouse with no sense of fear. The girls live in a terrible situation: they depend on an unstable mother that has never recovered from her husband’s murder, their stepfather beats them regularly, and they must forage on their own for food.

Stop here and you have a story told many times before, as fiction and nonfiction in tales like Ellen Foster, or I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings –stories in which a young girl reveals the horrors of her childhood. Me & Emma differentiates itself with a spectacular finish, shocking the reader and turning the entire story on its head. Through several twists and turns the reader learns that things are not quite the way our narrator led us to believe and everything crescendos in a way that (like all good thrillers) immediately makes you want to go back and read the whole book again from the start.

[Booktopia]:  Narrated with simplicity and unabashed honesty, Elizabeth Flock’s critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling novel Me & Emma is a vivid portrayal of a child’s indomitable spirit, her incredible courage and the heartbreaking loss of innocence
In many ways, Carrie Parker is like any other eight-year-old; playing make-believe, going to school, dreaming of faraway places. But even in her imagination, she can’t pretend away the hardships of her impoverished North Carolina home or protect her younger sister, Emma.
As the big sister, Carrie is determined to do anything to keep Emma safe from a life of neglect and abuse at the hands of their drunken stepfather,  abuse their momma can’t seem to see, let alone stop.it. After the sisters’ plan to run away from home unravels, Carrie’s world takes a shocking turn; and one shattering moment ultimately reveals a truth that leaves everyone reeling.

[Industry review]: “Me & Emma is really two stories in one: the page-turning events and how the reader reacts emotionally as he or she colors in the picture. I personally questioned how such young children could manage to survive this string of horrors unscathed. It is a tribute to Flock’s literary talent that she answers that silent question with her unexpected ending and without compromising the book’s complexity or tenor.”-

Finally, a look at the author of  ‘Mines in the Spinifex’.  Admittedly, I always maintained a close interest in his career, after a year as a student in his Economics History classes at the University of Melbourne, and have collected a number of his books.  The following little bio has been sourced from various publications.

Geoffrey Norman Blainey AC FAHA FASSA (born 11 March 1930) is an Australian historian, academic, philanthropist and commentator with a wide international audience. He is noted for having written authoritative texts on the economic and social history of Australia , including ‘The Tyranny of Distance’.  He has published over 35 books, including wide-ranging histories of the world and of Christianity. He has often appeared in newspapers and on television. He held chairs in economic history and history at the University of Melbourne  for over 20 years. In the 1980s, he was visiting professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University.  He received the 1988 Britannica Award for dissemination of knowledge and was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2000.

He was once described by Professor Graeme Davison as the “most prolific, wide-ranging, inventive, and, in the 1980s and 1990s, most controversial of Australia’s living historians”. He has been chairman or member of a wide range of Australian Government and other institutional councils, boards and committees, including the  Australia Council, the University of Ballarat, the Australia-China Council, the Commonwealth Literary Fund  and the Australian War Memorial.  He chaired the National Council for the Centenary of Federation.   His name sometimes appears in lists of the most influential Australians, past or present. The  National Trust lists Blainey as one of Australia’s “Living Treasures’  He currently serves on the boards of philanthropic bodies, including the Ian Potter Foundation  since 1991 and the Deafness Foundation Trust since 1993, and is patron of others.

Biographer  Geoffrey Bolton argues that Blainey has played multiple roles as an Australian historian:  ‘He first came to prominence in the 1950s as a pioneer in the neglected field of Australian business history…He produced during the 1960s and 1970s a number of surveys of Australian history in which explanation was organized around the exploration of the impact of the single factor (distance, mining, pre-settlement Aboriginal society)…. Blainey next turned to the rhythms of global history in the industrial period…. Because of his authority as a historian, he was increasingly in demand as a commentator on Australian public affairs’.

Educated at Ballarat High School, Blainey won a scholarship to Wesley College, before attending Melbourne University where he studied history. He worked as a freelance historical author writing mainly business histories such as The Peaks of Lyall; Gold and Paper; a History of the National Bank of Australasia; and Mines in the Spinifex. Blainey accepted a position at the University of Melbourne in 1962 in the Faculty of Economics and Commerce. He held the positions of Professor of Economic History (1968-77); Senior Lecturer 1962; and from 1977-1988 he occupied the Ernest Scott Chair of History at Melbourne University. Professor Blainey also held the chair of Australian studies at Harvard University.
Geoffrey Blainey was appointed the foundation Chancellor of the then University of Ballarat (UB) in 1993 after an illustrious career at the University of Melbourne. He was installed as UB Chancellor in December 1994 and continued until 1998. The Blainey Auditorium at the Mt Helen Campus of UB is named in his honour. Blainey, always a keen exponent of libraries and the acquisition of books, has donated part of his extensive book collection to the UB library

In 2000,.as noted above, Professor Blainey was awarded the Companion of the Order of Australia for service to academia, research and scholarship, and as a leader of public debate at the forefront of fundamental social and economic issues confronting the wider community. At that time [at UB] the University’s Vice-Chancellor Professor Kerry Cox said ‘Geoffrey Blainey guided the new and inexperienced university through its first four years with a benevolent but firm hand. This time was challenging as the university strove to make a place for itself in higher education, grappled with funding cuts and the eventual merger with neighbouring TAFE institutes. For those at the university fortunate enough to work with Geoffrey Blainey during his time as Chancellor, they witnessed first hand his humility, and we are proud of his role in our history.’

In 2002 the degree of Doctor of Letters was conferred on Professor Blainey in recognition of his contribution to the University of Ballarat and the community in general. The same year Blainey donated a collection of material to the University of Ballarat. Included in this collection are historical books, papers and other material relating to the early history of mining and the central Victorian goldfields. A second generous donation of material was received in 2005. ‘The Geoffrey Blainey Mining Collection’.

As an economic historian, Blainey challenged the conventional view, questioning accepted contemporary understandings of European settlement of Australia as a convict nation, Aboriginal land rights, and Asian immigration. He is described as a ‘courageous public intellectual, a writer with rare grace and a master storyteller’. In a reassessment of the life of Blainey, ‘The Fuss that Never Ended’ considers his ideas, his role in Australian history, politics and public life, and the controversies that surrounded him. He was always popular with students. According to the Melbourne University home page ‘When Geoffrey Blainey spoke to final-year students in the Friends of the Baillieu Library HSC Lectures in the 1970s, the Public Lecture Theatre was packed to capacity and his audience carried copies of his books to be signed, a tribute to what Geoffrey Bolton characterised as his “skills in interpreting technological change in admirably lucid narratives that appealed to both specialist and non-specialist audiences”.  Among his most popular works are the ‘The Rush that Never Ended: A History of Australian Mining’; ‘The Tyranny of Distance’; ‘A Shorter History of Australia’; ‘A Short History of the World’; and ‘The Origins of Australian Football’……………………………………………

I occasionally read a magazine called ‘NEXUS’ [described as the ‘Alternative News Magazine] –   alternative indeed, often, quite difficult to interpret, even believe, sometimes quite scary in terms of the subject matter been explored and examined. I wonder at times how some of these ‘experts’ and ‘writers’ come to be able to, in some cases, spend their entire life trying to prove some aspect of fantasy science, occult powers, and general theories about life that most of us would consider far-fetched, and generally, conspiracies of one sort or another.

Having said that, I do find many of the magazine’s articles to be of interest, putting aside the fact of a natural born sceptic when it comes to out of this world theories,  and./or lack of clear understanding of what is been written up, if that makes sense!!  In a  recent edition, there was one example which illustrated those  conflictions [interest and vague understanding]  –  an article in it’s Science News section entitled ‘Radio Waves and Life  –  quoting an article previously published in ‘Popular Electronics’, where it was reported  by mainstream media in 1960 that strong evidence existed at that time, and as far back as the 1920s that life [human and otherwise] can detect, and be adversely affected by radio waves.

Or more easily followed, and of a personal interest, the ‘Qanats of Persia’ –  where the writer takes readers into the world of Persian  subterranean qanat technology, used by the ancients as a water transport system, and discusses its spread as far as Europe, Africa and Asia, enabling parched lands to be opened up for agriculture and trade. What a pity Australia has never managed to achieve anything of that nature on a large scale, as have many of the ‘so-called’ second and third world countries around the globe in the modern era?

Anyway, to the point of this contribution – another example of a direct personal interest –  from the Global News section of the magazine [August-September 2020], I copy below an article entitled ‘Ancient Aboriginal Artefacts found at Underwater Sites] [ as reprinted from the source of Flinders University, July 2020].

‘The first underwater Aboriginal archaeological sites have been discovered off northwest Australia, dating back thousands of years, when the current seabed was dry land.

An international team of archaeologisyts from Flinders University, the University of Western Australia, James Cook University, Airborne Research Australia and the University of York [UK] partnered with the  Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation  to locate and investigate ancient artefacts at two underwater sites which have yielded hundreds of stone tools made by Aboriginal peoples, including grinding stones.

In a study published in PLOS ONE, the ancient underwater sites , at Cape Bruguieres and Flying Foam Passage, provide new evidence of Aboriginal ways of life from when the seabed was dry land, due to lower sea levels, thousand of years ago.

The submerged cultural landscapes represent what is know today as Sea Country to many Indigenous Australians, who have a deep cultural, spiritual and historical connection to these underwater environments.

“Australia is a massive continent but few people realise that more than 30 per cent of its land mass was drowned by sea-level rise after the last ice age. This means that a huge amount of the archaeological evidence documenting the lives of Aboriginal people is now underwater”, saYS Associate Professor  Jonathan Benjamin, who is the Maritime  Archaeology Program Coordinator at Flinders University’s College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

“Now we finally have the first proof that at least some of the archaeological evidence survived the process of sea level rise.  The ancient coastal archaeology  is not lost for good; we just haven’t found it yet. These new discoveries are a first step towards exploring the last real frontier of Australian archaeology.”

The dive team mapped 269 artefacts at Cape Bruguieres in shall water at depths down to 2.4 metres below modern sea level. Radiocarbon dating and analysis of sea-level changes show the site is at least 7,000 years old.

The second site at Flying Foam includes an underwater freshwater spring 14 metres below sea level. This site is estimated to be at least 8,500 years old.

Both dates may be much older as the dates represent minimum ages only; they may be even more ancient.’  [Flinders University: 2 July, 2020]…………………

Next edition, we look at a couple more books read recently, and their authors!!

This is just a brief reference to a couple of small books recently read concerning fairly current historical events in two vastly different parts of the African continent –  one written by a Frenchman, and the second, from the experiences of a South Sudanese refugee. The contents of the second book, may prove quite disturbing to many readers, but unlike fiction, one cannot [or shouldn’t] hide from the reality of actual recent history, and pretend or ignore it didn’t happen.

.

The first of these is titled  –  ‘A Bookshop in Algiers’ by Kaouther Adimi’, translated by Chris Andrews from French, published in 2017, 146 pages.

To my own detriment perhaps, I’d really given little thought to the North African former French colony of Algeria, before picking up this little book –  a very thought provoking little story, to which I was initially attracted by the title [not surprisingly].  The story was quite tragic and disturbing in places, and did not install within me much favour towards the French, and their colonial treatment of Algeria, even as late as the tragic protests in Paris on the 17 October 1961.  Although admittedly, in many ways, some of the French reactions depicted, were little different from the attitudes of the English, and other European colonial powers over the past century or so.. Also disturbing was the reminder, that literature, books and writers have been so persecuted and ridiculed through the centuries by those who disagree with views expressed, etc.  Overall, though a small book, it provided me with an historical insight into a country I’d never given much thought to –   and encouraged me to learn so much more about that aspect of world history [if I have the time!!].

Algeria, after in ancient times being under Carthage and then Roman rule, was  conquered by the Arabs in the 7^th century, and about 800 years later, taken over by the Turks in 1518, with the country eventually becoming one of the Barbary pirate states. French conquest followed in 1830, and Algeria was declared French territory in 1848. A move towards nationalism after WWII led to much brutal fighting  in 1945-46, and then a further uprising in 1954 led to even more violence and bloodshed. French President De Gaulle promised self-determination for Algeria in 1960, but the French population rebelled, almost creating civil war, and the resulting revolt in 1961.

Much of the storyline in the book covers the period from the 1930s to this period of self-determination. A Bookshop in Algiers charts the changing fortunes of Charlot’s bookshop through the political drama of Algeria’s turbulent twentieth century of war, revolution and independence. It is a moving celebration of books, bookshops and of those who dare to dream.

A brief review from publishers, Allen & Unwin summarises, what the book is about
“A moving novel inspired by the true story of an extraordinary bookshop and the man who founded it..  A Bookshop in Algiers celebrates quixotic devotion and the love of books in the person of Edmond Charlot, who at the age of twenty founded Les Vraies Richesses (Our True Wealth), the famous Algerian bookstore/publishing house/lending library. He more than fulfilled its motto ‘by the young, for the young’, discovering the twenty-four-year-old Albert Camus in 1937. His entire archive was twice destroyed by the French colonial forces, but despite financial difficulties and the vicissitudes of wars and revolutions, Charlot carried forward Les Vraies Richesses as a cultural hub of Algiers.
A Bookshop in Algiers interweaves Charlot’s story with that of another twenty-year-old, Ryad, who is dispatched to the old shop in 2017 to empty it of books and repaint it. Ryad’s no booklover, but old Abdallah, the bookshop’s self-appointed, nearly illiterate guardian, opens the young man’s mind.  Cutting brilliantly from Charlot to Ryad, from the 1930s to current times, from WWII to the bloody 1961 Free Algeria demonstrations in Paris, Adimi delicately packs a monumental history of intense political drama into her swift and poignant novel. But most of all, it’s a hymn to the book and to the love of books.”

 

Our second book was ‘Father of the Lost Boys: A Memoir by Yuot. A. Alaak, published in 2020, 230 pages, written about a part of Africa which has always been close to my thoughts over the years –  Sudan and Ethiopia. Back in the early 2000’s, I was privileged to be a part of a small group of friends who assisted in the sponsorship of two young boys and two adults from refugee camps in the Sudan to Melbourne, greeting their arrival at Tullamarine Airport, and in later years, visiting the boys on a couple of occasions. In more recent times, I have wondered how those boys [now in their 20;s] have  made their way in Melbourne’s Sudanese society, which has so often been maligned due to the actions of a small minority of their race..

 

In this book, the worst of the actions of the human race are depicted. Back in the late 1980;s in that part of Africa – well, some of us may have read about events of those times [which in many ways continue today] or watched reports on TV, and I dare to say, in most cases, we quickly turned our minds to other matters and continued with, in the main, our comfortable and safe lives here in Australia.   This story reminds us of just how ‘lucky’ we really are!

Briefly, ‘Father of the Lost Boys’ is centred during the second Sudanese Civil War, when thousands of South Sudanese boys were displaced from their villages or orphaned in attacks by Northern “government”  troops, with many becoming refugees in Ethiopia.  When that nation’s government was subsequently overtaken [and supported by the North Sudanese government forces], those refugees, not just the boys but whole families, were forced to flee again, for their lives. In 1989, teacher and community leader Mecak Ajang Alaak [the father of the book’s author], himself a survivor of imprisonment and torture, assumed care of the Lost Boys as he sought to protect them from becoming child soldiers, and simply save their lives. He would spend the next four years leading the 20,000 Lost Boys out of Ethiopia back to Sudan [where most had fled from in the first place], and on to the supposed safety of the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya.   Together, those that survived, endured starvation, animal attacks, and the horrors of what was a determined policy of genocide that included landmines, ambushes and aerial bombardment.

 

From the pages of this book, a couple of quotations to perhaps illustrate just  ‘how lucky we are’ in Australia!!

• [The author as a an 8 year old child, fleeing to Ethiopia with his siblings and his mother] – “We spend the day under a tree in Anyidi. As evening approaches, we are told that since we don’t have a secure hut, we will have to sleep in the military compound guarded by soldiers. Hyenas and lions have been feeding on human flesh since the war started. They trail government troops, feeding on he corpses of massacred Southern villages. The adapt to hunt us, a far easier prey to catch than anything in the wild. We have moved up on their list of staple prey. Hyenas hunt in packs at night. They have almost annihilated some villages. Each night, packs roam on the outskirts of Anyidi. They search for doors left unsecured, or anyone foolish enough to step outside at night……………..The army compound lies at the centre of Anyidi. Hundreds of displaced persons sleep there each night. It is bare, open land encircled by a grass fence. If it rains, people must simply wait it out. We arrive as dusk approaches. Mum picks a spot at the centre of the compound. It is prime real estate – the safest spot. She verbally fights off several other mothers to keep it. There is little energy for a physical confrontation. As night falls, I am petrified. The howl of Hyenas is constant. It gets louder as they prowl closer to the centre of Anyidi. A lion’s roar rumbles. Gunfire rings out from surrounding villages. The roar of the beasts gets louder.  I hang onto Mum tightly through the long night….” [p.36-37]
• [The early stages of the trek from Ethiopia to Kenya, the author aged 10-11years, as Alaak attempts over many days to get thousands of boys, women and younger children over the flooded Gilo River to reach the border of Ethiopia and southern Sudan, with less than a dozen canoes at his disposal, and rebel forces closing in behind them]  –  “Before long, planes appear in the sky, and begin their attack. As bombs fall, I pray with hope and fear that Mum and Athok [my sister] are far enough that the artillery  shells from the direction of Gilo do not reach them. We step over the dead with no time to stop, no time to cry and certainbly no time to bury……Some of the shells tear into the jungle, killing wildlife. In this moment, hunter and hunted, we are all victims of war…………………….Even so, as we race towards Pochalla, lions, tigers, hyenas and African wild dogs continue to snatch babies from their mothers’ breasts, and attack the youngest and smallest of the Lost Boys. They prey on the elderly and the frail, as if they are a herd of zebras. Pythons constrict and swallow babies and children who are resting by the trackside with their exhausted mothers….. Slaughter was what the president of Sudan had ordered for his citizens in the south. The rebel soldiers mowed down refugees and Lost Boys with their bullets. Small boats loaded with machine gunners appeared on the river and opened fire on the refugees on the riverbank. The rebels fired at those already in the water trying to escape.  Bullets cut canoes and barges and their occupants into pieces. Women attempting to run with children on their backs were felled. Young children dived into the river but were snapped up by crocodiles, drawn by the smell of blood…………….When the shooting stopped, toddlers and babies were clinging to their dead mothers. Other little ones, separated from their mothers, crawled around in agony and shock. The bodies of Lost Boys were scattered along the river’s edge or were carried away in the water. The river was red with the blood of hundreds of innocent victims, most of them women and children……………My father takes the news very badly. Although he had managed an exodus of nearly twenty thousand Lost Boys, it is the loss of hundreds of lives that weighs on him…” [p. 101-103]

 

That latter quotation was taken from the very early stages of that 4 year trek  – and if readers get that far in the book, well, you may not feel like continuing. However, like so many similar stories, not just from within the African continent, but worldwide, they are aspects of history, and basically, man’s inhumanity to his fellow man, that we should never ignore, or pretend didn’t happen – well, while modern history suggests we don’t seem to have learned from the past, one can only hope, that maybe in the future, lessons can be learned  and heeded to. It’s difficult to be optimistic however.

 

I’ll conclude with reference to a recent television report, and specifically to the aspects of the story referred to the foregoing quotations.

As reported on an SBS news feature earlier in June, this eyewitness account by Mecak Ajang Alaak’s son, Yuot, is the extraordinary true story of a man who never ceased to believe that the pen is mightier than the gun.  Aged 76 years, a towering figure of a man,  Alaak now lives in a suburb of Perth, WA.. Mr Alaak’s mind is a lifetime away. Thirty years ago, in Pinyudu refugee camp in Ethiopia, he was responsible for the education of around 16,000 displaced youth from southern Sudan. “I was a teacher, and the role of a teacher is to educate the people and the community,” he told SBS News recently. “That was the role that I saw, to help these children to have a future.”  Mr Alaak had been a headmaster at a secondary school in Sudan before the country was plunged into its second civil war in 1983. Like many others, he fled to Ethiopia. As Pinyudu camp’s director of education, he was given responsibility for the schooling of ‘lost boys’, thousands of youths who had been displaced by war.   “The children were in a war where they might be attracted to be child soldiers, but my aim was to have the education for them. That is why I say ‘the pen is mightier than the gun’. I wanted to draw them away from the war,” he said..

Mr Alaak’s son, Yuot A. Alaak, who also now lives in Western Australia, was 11 years old when, in 1990, he joined his father and thousands of lost boys on a perilous march from Ethiopia through southern Sudan.

“We basically left in the wet season, it was raining so we walked through the mud. A lot of the boys were attacked by wild animals and eaten along the way. Some fell and broke bones,” Yuot, 41, recalls.

After several days of walking, the group made it to the crocodile-infested banks of the Gilo River on the border between Ethiopia and Sudan. On the other side lay the relative safety of Pochalla, a South Sudanese garrison town occupied by soldiers from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.

“Once we reached Gilo, the river had swelled during the rainy season. It was flooded, but Dad managed to take canoes from the soldiers and he used that to get as many boys across as he could,” Yuot says.

As thousands lined up and waited to cross the river, a group of Ethiopian rebels attacked, in what has come to be known as ‘the Gilo massacre’.

“Dad lost hundreds of boys that day, some were shot as they jumped into the river, or drowned while they were trying to reach the other side.”

The survivors made it across the river to Pochalla, but they arrived emaciated and faced more starvation

 

Next time we are quick to criticise the South Sudanese refugee communities [or refugees from other parts of the world], perhaps it may be wise to keep in mind that they and/or their families most likely were a part of the kind of stories depicted in this little book by a man and his father who lived through the worst of a genocidal situation…..

 

 

 

I thought I’d try this through my WordPress medium, maybe someone out there might happen to come across it, and the contents touch a cord  😊 .

Three separate queries relating to the same family from Scotland

1. Robert Kirk [1746-1820] and Helen Somerville [1755 – ?]

They had , as far as I’m aware , four children  –

• Ebenezer Kirk [c 1780- c 1841] married Isobel King [1776-1851], had James, Helen, Catherine, James & Ebernezer;
• Margaret Kirk [c 1782 –  ], married Andrew Keltie, had at least 2 children, Andrew & Helen;
• James Kirk, married a Margaret Drummond; and
• William Kirk [my ancestor].

I’m seeking contact with family descendents of Ebenezer, Margaret & James.

 

2. William Kirk [1773-1858] and Margaret Littlejohn [1775 – 1855].

They had  nine children.

• Ann Kirk [1800 -1883] married James Miller , had Charlotte, Margaret & William;
• Helen Kirk [1801-1875] married David Robertson, had 9 children;
• Robert Kirk [1802 – 1838] married Elizabeth McLean had William, Alexander & Helen;
• John Kirk [my ancestor];
• Margaret Kirk [1808 – ] married Peter Sangster [c 1799-1871], had at least 6 children, David, William, Margaret, Robert, Ann & John.;
• James Somerville Kirk [1810-1859] married Elizabeth Gibb [c1810-1866], had William, Elizabeth, James & Helen;
• Jean Kirk [1813 – ], married ? Duncan McDonald, and children were Peter, Elizabeth, Christian, Alexander, James & Catherine;
• William Kirk [1814-1837];
• Francis Kirk [1817 – ]

I’m seeking contact with family descendants of Ann, Robert, Margaret, Jean, William and Francis [not sure if the last two ever married].

3. John Kirk [1805-1866] and Elizabeth Welsh [1804-1865]

They had six children.

• William Kirk [my ancestor];
• John Kirk [1802 –  ?] married ? Isabella Law, possibly at least 2 children, Margaret and Mary [details not confirmed];
• Isabella Kirk [1834-1863] married [1] Henry Albeury [1830 – ], had Joseph and John; and [2] William Dalgliesh [1841 –   ], had William, George & Isabella;
• Margaret Kirk [1837-1914] married George Ross [1835-1878], had 8 children – they were Elizabeth, William, George, Isabella, James, Margaret, Elizabeth, and Louisa;
• James Smith Kirk [1839-1908] married Jessie Douglas [1839-1908], had 5 children, Jessie, Robert, John, Margaret & a 3^rd
• Elizabeth Kirk [1842 – 1891] married James Christopher Shearing [1839-1920], and they had 11 children named James Christopher, Elizabeth Isabella, Thomas Smith, Julia, Albert Edward, William Kirk, George Thomson, Margaret Ethel, Samuel Charles, Maude Eleanor, & Charles.

I’m seeking contact with family descendants of John [in particular], Elizabeth, Isabella, Margaret, and James Smith Kirk.

I can be contacted directly on email at billjkirk5358@gmail.com

addressed to Bill  🙂

 

When I was studying at the University of Melbourne back in the early 1970’s, one of the most memorable and impressionable lecturers was Professor Geoffrey Blainey, the noted Australian historian. His subject for my purposes was Economic History, and for what might seem to  many readers to be a rather dry topic, Blainey had a way of creating a certain fascination for the subject, particularly on such occasions,  as the excursion on one occasion, when he led us students to a site somewhere to the east of Ballarat, searching for Aboriginal artifacts. This ‘creative’ ability to make a ‘dry’ subject interesting, is also expressed in many of his books, a number of which I have read.

From one Wikipedia source, we read that –  “Geoffrey Norman Blainey AC FAHA FASSA (born 11 March 1930) is an Australian historian, academic, philanthropist and commentator with a wide international audience. He is noted for having written authoritative texts on the economic and social history of Australia, including The Tyranny of Distance..  He has published over 35 books, including wide-ranging histories of the world and of Christianity. He has often appeared in newspapers and on television. He held chairs in economic history and history at the University of Melbourne for over 20 years.  In the 1980s, he was visiting professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University. . He received the 1988 Britannica Award for dissemination of knowledge and was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2000.  He was once described by Professor Graeme Davison as the “most prolific, wide-ranging, inventive, and, in the 1980s and 1990s, most controversial of Australia’s living historians”

On the question of controversy –  “Blainey has, at times, been a controversial figure too. In the 1980s, he queried the level of Asian immigration to Australia and the policy of multiculturalism in speeches, articles and a book All for Australia. He was said by leftist critics to be closely aligned  with the former Liberal-National Coalition government of John Howard in Australia, with Howard shadowing Blainey’s conservative views on some issues, especially the view that Australian history has been hijacked by social liberals [the so-called ‘History  or Culture Wars’].    As a result of these stances, Blainey is sometimes associated with right-wing politics.^[  Blainey himself is a member of no political party”……….

From my reckoning, Geoffrey Blainey has published 51 books  from ‘The Peaks of Lyell’ [1954] to ‘Before I Forget [2019], together with countless shorter publications, newspaper and magazine articles, etc,  –  principally on the history and other aspects of a broad genre of subjects ranging from histories of Australia, Victoria, the world, Mt Isa mines, Christianity,  Australian mining, Camberwell, University of Melbourne, Wesley Colleger, the rise of Broken Hill,  the origins of Australian football, the NAB, Captain Cook  – the list goes on!! Probably the book he is best known for was ‘The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History’.  First published in 1966, the book examines how Australia’s geographical remoteness, particularly from its colonizer Great Britain, has been central to shaping the country’s history and identity and will continue to shape its future. The long distance between Australia and its colonial forebears in Europe, and also the United States, made Australians unsure of their future economic prosperity.

Geoffrey Blainey is now 89, and some might suggest he is still creating controversy, as for example with an article published in August this year in the ‘Australian’ newspaper,  headed ‘Too easy to be an Aussie: Blainey” [Historian’s Citizenship Stance].  I copy that article in full for the interest of readers…………………………………….

“Noted historian Geoffrey Blainey believes Australia gives away citizenship too easily, and that it creates a problem for our democracy.

Professor Blainey told a Sydney audience on Wednesday night  ‘Why should someone who has been in the country two or three years and does not know the language or the common discourse, why should they necessarily have a vote, if voting is compulsory?’

Last night, speaking from his Melbourne home, the 89-year old said that the right to vote was ‘quite a difficult responsibility if you know very little about the society and the language of the society. After all, democracy is government by discussion and not to have the common language limits your ability to take part in that debate and take responsibility for what happens in an election.

‘Once you accept the idea that everyone can vote, you are really downgrading democracy because you are really saying that it doesn’t matter if it is hit or miss, it doesn’t matter if a considerable proportion of the population, whether they’re native-born or not, it doesn’t matter if they know what they’re talking about or not.’

Professor Blainey said that compulsory voting was now widely favoured in Australia, and would probably not be abolished.

‘But we have to be wary of our tradition of compelling adults to vote on election day, especially when many know little or nothing about the national questions they are asked to vote upon’ he said. ‘That custom makes light of democracy.’

Professor Blainey’s initial comment was in answer to a question at a Sydney Institute event celebrating his new memoir ‘Before I Forget’, which covers his life until the age of 40.

Last night, he did not resile from his answer, but admitted to being concerned about sparking a controversy – although he has commented on the issue many times in the past.

‘I am concerned, it’s very difficult to take part in these debates’, he said. ‘But when people ask you a question you’re almost honour-bound to try to answer them.’

Professor Blainey told the audience that governing in a democracy was difficult and he would not be surprised if democracies did not exist in 100 years’ time.

‘Democracy depends not only on having parliamentarians but on 15 to 20 per cent of the population [taking responsibility for democracy],’ he said. ‘It depends on that segment of the population but I think that segment is diminishing. I remain optimistic but I remain wary in assuming that democracy will go on and on.’

Professor Blainey recalled that he invented the phrase, the ‘black armband’ view of history in the early 1990s to explain the change in approach to writing history. People had seen the phrase as anti-Aboriginal but it was ‘in no way anti-Aboriginal’. When he was younger, Australian history had been very congratulatory but later people felt ashamed.

‘They felt the treatment of the environment was terrible and in some ways, it was,’ he said. ‘Aborigines, contrary to the statements that they made [at Welcome to Country ceremonies] were not really custodians of the land. No human being can be custodian of the land. Nature is infinitely stronger than human beings.

Professor Blainey said the phrase ‘the history wars’ was exaggerated because all forms of intellectual activity involved debates ‘in which friendships are broken. History was full of disagreements, but in Australia, far more than in other countries such as the UK, history was an important arbiter in current topics such as the republic issue.

‘All the major questions have a very strong historical component. That is especially true of Australia at the moment and especially true of Aborigines and their way of life and Europeans and their way of life,’ he said.

‘The saddest thing is not that the debate takes place but that important areas of evidence are not even considered safe to investigate, and that is wrong.’

In Aboriginal.European issues there was clear-cut evidence that was regarded’as out of bounds’ because one side would not look at it.

‘We hear again and again people say it’s terrible that Aborigines were not considered worth counting in the Census,’ he said.

‘I looked up the Censuses since 1901 and there have been more Censuses that count Aborigines than count other Australians. How can you possibly allow a heresy like this to be undiscussable?  That’s when the history war becomes a war rather than a serious discussion of the facts.’

However, Professor Blainey said his view was Australia was a ‘success story’.  ‘[There] are many failings but Australia, by and large, is a success story and that’s why we have such an immigration border-protection problem,’ he said………………………….

[From the ‘Australian’ newspaper, 2 August, 2019, written by Helen Trinca].

Now admittedly, that article strayed from the nature of the way in which the article was initially headed [an easy way to attract attention to a piece of writing that might otherwise be ignored, with a leading ‘controversial’ statement].  However, I’d just make one reflection on the area where Professor Blainey comments on the question of people seeking citizenship and with it the right to vote, while not really being qualified for either because they know little or nothing about the national questions, or the language,  on which they are asked to vote or acknowledge in the relevant ceremony.  I wonder just how many ‘native’ Australians [Indigenous and non-indigenous] really have much idea themselves about the ‘debates’ and national questions that they are asked to vote on –  how many just blindly follow the way their fathers voted, or simply vote because they have to, without giving any consideration at all to policy issues, etc?

 

The 2019 FIBA Basketball World Cup was the 18th tournament of the FIBA Basketball World Cup for men’s national basketball teams. The tournament was hosted in China and was rescheduled from 2018 to 2019, becoming the first since 1967 that it did not occur in the same year as the FIFA World Cup (which was held the previous year). The group stage was expanded from 24 to 32 teams.

The tournament also acted as qualification for the 2020 Summer Olympics, which took the top two teams from each of the Americas and Europe, and the top team from each of Africa, Asia and Oceania, alongside the tournament’s host China. Czech Republic and Montenegro made their first appearance as an independent nations after previously being part of Czechoslovakia and Serbia and Montenegro, while Poland made its return to the FIBA Basketball World Cup for the first time since 1967.

In a lead-up to the tournament, Team USA played two exhibition matches against Australia, in  Melbourne, the weekend before the World Cup began

MELBOURNE (Australia) [23-25 August] – Australia fell short in round one of their preparation games series against Team USA, but they made up for it in their second encounter, with prolific guard Patty Mills basking in the spotlight. Mills dropped 30 points on Team USA as the Boomers prevailed, 98-94, today at the Marvel Stadium in Melbourne in front of more than 52,000 fans. It was a terrific bounce-back win for the home team, which lost to the Americans in their first meeting, 102-86.

The World Cup is a week away, and the United States is no lock for gold. Australia delivered that message to the world on Saturday. How prophetic that would be!! For the first time in nearly 13 years, a U.S. roster of NBA players played an international game – and lost. Patty Mills scored 30 points, and Australia rallied from a 10-point deficit in the second half to stun the Americans 98-94 and snap a 78-game U.S. winning streak that started with the bronze-medal game at the 2006 world championships.  “They wanted it more than us tonight,” U.S. guard Kemba Walker said. “Lesson learned for us.”

It was the first loss for the U.S. in a major international tournament or exhibition since the 2006 world championship semifinals against Greece. The Americans won the bronze there, then were unbeaten through the cycles for the 2007 FIBA Americas, 2008 Olympics, 2010 World Cup, 2012 Olympics, 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics.  Add all that up, along with wins over Spain and Australia with this team, and it was a 78-game winning streak for the U.S. – the longest in program history……………………And it’s now over.  “It was awesome,” Mills said.

The competing teams for the World Cup  separated into 8 first round groups

GROUP A:  Cote d’Ivoire; Poland; Venezuela,  China;

GROUP B:  Russia; Argentina; Korea; Nigeria;

GROUP C:  Spain; Iran; Puerto Rico; Tunisia;

GROUP D:  Angola; Philippines; Italy; Serbia;

GROUP E:  Turkey; Czech Republic; USA; Japan;

GROUP F:  Greece; New Zealand; Brazil; Montenegro;

GROUP G:  Dominican Republic; France; Germany; Jordan;

GROUP H:  Canada; Senegal; Lithuania; Australia;

Comments and reports which follow are generally taken from the FIBA Basketball World Cup web site reports, unless otherwise indicated..

FIRST ROUND 31/8 -5/9/2019

 Saturday, 31^st August

Serbia defeated Angola 105-59;

Poland defeated Venezuela 80-69

Russia defeated Nigeria 82-77

Iran vs Puerto  Rico defeated Iran 83-81;

Italy defeated Philippines 108-62;

China defeated Cote d’Ivoire 70-55;

Argentina defeated Korea 95-69;

Spain defeated Tunisia 101-62;

Sunday, 1^st September

Australia defeated Canada 108-92;

Brazil defeated New Zealand 102-94;

Turkey defeated Japan 86-67;

Dominican Republic defeated Jordan 80-76;

Lithuania defeated Senegal 101-47;

Greece defeated Montenegro 85-60;

Czech Republic vs USA defeated Czech Republic 88-67;

France defeated Germany 78-74;

 Monday, 2^nd September

Italy defeated Angola 92-61

Venezuela defeated Cote d’Ivoire 87-71;

Argentina defeated Nigeria 94-81;

Tunisia defeated Iran 79-67;

Serbia defeated Philippines 126-67

Poland defeated China 79-76

Russia defeated Korea 87-73

Spain defeated Puerto Rico 73-63

Tuesday 3^rd September

Australia defeated Senegal  81-68

New Zealand defeated Montenegro 93-83

Czech Republic defeated Japan 89-76

Dominican Republic defeated Germany 69-67

Lithuania defeated Canada 92-69

Brazil defeated Greece 79-78

USA defeated Turkey 93-92

France defeated Jordan 103-64

DONGGUAN, China — That didn’t go as planned. It wasn’t pretty, but the Boomers picked up their second win of the tournament, edging Senegal 81-68. Joe Ingles was at his playmaking best, falling one assist shy of a triple-double with 17 points, 10 rebounds and nine assists, while Patty Mills took over the second half, scoring 17 of his 22 points after the main break.  The outcome for the Australian Boomers was what they and the basketball community expected, but the way they got it was surprising, to say the least.

Senegal was coming off a 54-point loss to Lithuania, but the Boomers were only able to defeat them 81-68, in a game that would’ve had Australian fans worried during several portions of it. Patty Mills led the way for Australia with 20 points, while Joe Ingles had a near triple-double; 17 points, 10 rebounds, and nine assists. The win puts Australia at the top of Group H, if only temporarily, because Lithuania is facing Canada later in the evening. If Lithuania wins, then they’ll join the Boomers as the two teams through to the next phase. The top-two teams from Group H will move on to Group L, where they’ll form a new foursome that includes the best pair of teams from Group G. The likelihood is that those two teams will be France and Germany, with both points and points differential carrying over from the first group phase, into the second one.  Youssoupha Ndoye finished with 13 points and 10 rebounds for Senegal, who remain winless in the 2019 FIBA World Cup.

Wednesday, 4^th September

Angola defeated Philippines 84-81

Poland defeated Cote d’Ivoire 80-63

Nigeria defeated Korea 108-66

Puerto Rico defeated Tunisia 67-64

Serbia defeated Italy 92-77

Venezuela defeated China 72-59

Argentina defeated Russia 69-61

Spain defeated Iran 73-65

Thursday, 5^th September

Canada defeated Senegal 82-60

Brazil defeated Montenegro 84-73

Czech Republic defeated Turkey 91-76

Germany defeated Jordan 96-62

Australia defeated Lithuania 87-82

Greece defeated New Zealand 103-97

USA defeated Japan 98-45

France defeated Dominican Republic 90-56

DONGGUAN (China) – Australia confirmed the top honors in Group H with a solid all-around performance against Lithuania and a Patty Mills dagger late in the game. It finished 87-82, with both teams moving on to Group L for the Second Round.

Australia enjoyed a double digit lead for most of the game, but an 11-0 run to start the fourth quarter saw Lithuania get in front. The Boomers scored their first field goal of the fourth quarter with just 3:30 left on the game clock, and that allowed them to stop the rot and stay attached.

In the closing minutes, it was all about the one-two punch of Patty Mills and Aron Baynes. Mills hit the biggest shot of the game, while Baynes played his best game for the national team in the World Cup, with 21 points and 13 rebounds. He turned into a shooter, too – Baynes was only 1-of-3 from the three-point range in his previous 25 games at the World Cup and the Olympics, but scored 3-of-5 against Lithuania on Thursday.

Australia are a 3-0 team ahead of their  Round Two duels with France and the Dominican Republic, meaning they are an inch away from the Quarter-Finals. For Lithuania, they now know that they will most probably have to go 2-0 in the Second Round to reach elite eight status.

SECOND ROUND 6/9 -9/9/2019

Friday 6^th Sept

Poland defeated Russia 79-74

Nigeria defeated Cote d’Ivoire 83-66

Iran defeated Angola 71-62

Serbia defeated Puerto Rico 90-47

Argentina defeated Venezuela 87-67

China defeated Korea 77-73

Tunisia defeated Philippines 86-67

Spain defeated Italy 67-60

Saturday 7^th Sept

New Zealand defeated Japan 111-81

Australia defeated Dominican Republic 82-76

Canada defeated Jordan 126-71

Brazil vs Czech Republic defeated Brazil 93-71

Turkey defeated Montenegro 79-74

France defeated Lithuania 78-75

Germany defeated Senegal 89-78

USA defeated Greece 69-53

 BEIJING (China) – Two more teams advanced to the Quarter-Finals of the FIBA Basketball World Cup  with Australia and France confirming their entries and joining Poland, Argentina, Spain and Serbia in the Final Round of the competition.

Australia eked out a close 82-76 decision over the Dominican Republic to remain unbeaten in four games while France survived a thrilling 78-75 victory over Lithuania that came down to the wire.

After leading for most of the game, France had to stave off a furious rally from their European rivals which even saw Lithuania taking a 72-70 lead with 3:10 left. Nando De Colo delivered the finishing touch for France with a clutch game-winning basket. Australia and France will face each other to dispute the top spot in Group L for a better placing in the Quarter-Finals bracket.

The only remaining group with tickets up for grabs is Group K, with Czech Republic opening it up for everyone with a massive 93-71 victory against the previously unbeaten Brazil to tie their fallen foes in the standings with an identical 3-1 win-loss cards.

Meanwhile, the much-anticipated matchup between defending champions USA and the Giannis Antetekounmpo-led Greece provided an entertaining affair with the defending World Cup champions taking a 69-53 victory.

In the Classification Round 17-32, New Zealand dominated a Rui Hachimura-less Japan to the tune of a 111-81 win and get their second win of the tournament, while Turkey bounced back from a mediocre start to beat Montenegro, 79-74.

Both the Tall Blacks and 12 Giant Men sport 2-2 records and will play it out among themselves for the top spot of Group O.

In Group P action, Canada overpowered a hapless Jordan side with a 126-71 victory and tied Serbia for most assists in a game with 37, the highest total since the 1994 World Cup while Germany outclassed Senegal 89-78, setting up a battle for top honors win the group with Canada.

These Australian Boomers just can’t seem to put their proverbial foot on the throat of those less-talented teams. We saw it against Senegal in the first phase of the 2019 FIBA World Cup, and it reared its head again against the Dominican Republic. Australia managed to walk away with an 82-76 win, but it wasn’t as easy as perhaps it should have been.  “Obviously 4-0 is the key,” Joe Ingles said after the win.  “You wanna win games; that’s the end goal. There’s patches of games we need to get better at. End of the game there, we could stop those free throws; little things like that can cost you a game. A little bit of those things that we can look at, watch some film, and get better at. But, overall, we obviously wanna keep winning, and we’ve been doing that.”

On the flip-side, we’ve seen time and time again when Andrej Lemanis’ team finds that second tier when they’re up against elite teams. It happened against Lithuania in Dongguan, and, naturally, Boomers fans will be the team’s Monday night game against France follows the same trend. “We obviously prepare for every team the same way,” Ingles said, on if Australia plays better against more talented opponents. “We don’t disrespect anyone; we go in and do the same thing.

It was Patty Mills who led the way for the now 4-0 Australians, posting 19 points and nine assists; while Chris Goulding came off the bench for 15 points. With the win, Australia knocked the Dominican Republic out of finals contention, and it was clear that they were playing with everything on the line. “They were playing for their World Cup survival tonight,” Lemanis said of the Dominicans. Eloy Vargas led the way for Nestor Garcia’s team with 16 points and seven rebounds, while Victor Liz finished with 14 points.

Matthew Dellavedova opened the game with a three, setting the tone for the Boomers, but the Dominicans wouldn’t back down. Liz and Vargas found easy scores to keep the game within arm’s reach, trailing just 24-19 at the end of the first quarter. As much as the Boomers tried to step on their opponent’s throat, with an eye toward jumping out to a significant lead, the Dominican Republic grinder their way into staying in the game.

Sunday 8^th September

Russia defeated Venezuela 69-60

Korea defeated Cote d’Ivoire 80-71

Tunisia defeated Angola 86-84

Italy defeated Puerto Rico 94-89

Argentine defeated Poland 91-65

Nigeria defeated China 86-73

Iran defeated Philippines 95-75

Spain defeated Serbia 81-69

Monday 9^th September

Montenegro defeated Japan 80-65

Lithuania defeated Dominican Republic 74-55

Jordan defeated Senegal 79-77

Greece defeated Czech Republic 84-77

New Zealand defeated Turkey 102-101

Australia defeated France 100-98

Germany defeated Canada 82-76

USA defeated Brazil 89-73

NANJING (China) – In a battle between two heavyweights of the basketball world, Australia outdueled France with a heart-stopping 100-98 victory to take the top spot in Group L heading into the Quarter-Finals of the FIBA Basketball World Cup 2019. In a thrilling back and forth game that featured 15 lead changes, 17 ties on scoreboard and no one giving an inch, Patty Mills rose to the occasion with a clutch steal to deliver the win to the Boomers. Down by one, 99-98 with 4.4 seconds left, France had a chance to win the game, but Mills’ phenomenal defensive play saved the day for Australia.  The game displayed tremendous shooting from both sides with Australia and France delivering 58 percent and 57 percent respectively in a highly entertaining game

Turning Point: In a game as close as this one, there wasn’t a bigger play than Mills’ steal that sealed the win. Mills is used to making  a living on the offensive side of the ball, but the sharpshooting guard showed his determination to tow the Boomers to the top of their Second Round group.

TCL Player of the Game:  Aside from his defensive gem, Mills continued his offensive brilliance, exploding for a team-high 30 points. Mills has scored 19+ points in his last four games with Australia in the FIBA Basketball World Cup. He scored 19+ points in only one occasion in his first seven games in the competition.

Stats Don’t Lie: Both teams were hot from the outside but France could not keep up with Australia long-range barrage, hitting a scorching 13-of-27 shooting from the outside. It was a three-headed attack from the Boomers side with Mills, Aron Baynes and Joe Ingles combining for 74 points out of the 100 scored by Australia.

Bottom Line: Australia further solidified their status as one of the contenders of the Naismith trophy after a thrilling win over a tough France squad who was previously unbeaten in their first four games. The Boomers will face second-placer of Group K, Czech Republic, while France have a rendezvous with USA in the Quarter-Finals..

QUARTER-FINALS  10/9/2019

Argentina defeated Serbia  97-87

Spain defeated Poland 90-78

QUARTER-FINALS  11/9/2019

France defeated USA 89-79

Australia defeated Czech Republic 82-70

SHANGHAI (China) – Czech Republic kept things close for two quarters before Australia turned up the jets and ran away with an 82-70 Quarter-Finals win at the Shanghai Oriental Sports Center. Behind the superb playmaking of Tomas Satoransky and the scoring of Patrik Auda, Czech Republic gave Australia all they could handle for about 25 minutes, but the Boomers just blew the game open, pulled away when coach Andrej Lemanis’ players shifted into high gear to keep their foes at bay. Patty Mills, Chris Goulding and Andrew Bogut carried Australia in this game, combining to score 43 points for Australia, who booked their sixth win in a row at the FIBA Basketball World Cup 2019. Czech Republic, meanwhile, drew 21 points from Patrik Auda and a sublime performance from Tomas Satoransky, who tallied 13 points, 12 assists and 9 rebounds, narrowly missing a rare triple-double.

Turning Point: Things continued to be tight in the third quarter with the game last tied at 43-all, but that’s when Australia began to roll, outscoring the Czechs, 25-5, for the remainder of the period to take a commanding 63-48 lead into the fourth. Czech Republic would not go down without a fight, cutting the lead to 8 points, but that was as close as it would get.

TCL Player of the Game: Mills was his usual brilliant self in this game, shooting 9-of-15 from the field en route to a game-high 24 points. He also added 6 assists and 4 rebounds while also landing six bombs from beyond the arc. With Mills shooting so well, Australia were just too good against the upstart Czechs.

Stats Don’t Lie: Czech Republic experimented with a small-ball combination in the second half, and it bit them hard as Australia dominated the glass. In total, the Boomers outrebounded their opponents, 41-34, and had more second chance points, 14-2. Australia also forced five more turnovers from the Czechs, scoring 25 points off these errors.

Bottom Line: Australia qualified World Cup Semi-Finals for the first time ever and have a great chance to add even more to their already historic campaign if they advance to the Final. To do that, however, they’ll have to topple mighty Spain in Beijing on September 13.

Czech Republic, meanwhile, had an inspired run here at the World Cup but saw it come to an end in Shanghai at the hands of a bigger and deeper Boomers quintet. Now they are assured of a spot in next year’s FIBA Olympic Qualifying Tournament and are going to shoot for as high a finish as possible in the Classification Round.

CLASSIFICATION GAMES 5-8:  12/9/2019

Serbia defeated USA 94-89

Czech Republic defeated Poland 94-84

SEMI FINALS:  13/9/2019

Spain defeated Australia 95-88

Argentina defeated France 80-66

 I was a bit disappointed with the reaction of at least one Australian player, as reported below from ‘The Guardian’, Australia – the Boomers had numerous opportunities in the closing stages –  they simply failed to score when they should have, and their turnovers just kept coming – on that performance, certainly towards the end of the match, Spain fully deserved their win.
Nevertheless, we copy the following report.

“Andrew Bogut will likely be investigated for a foul-mouthed post-game spray while Boomers assistant coach Luc Longley was also fuming after the Europeans beat Australia 95-88 in a double overtime World Cup semi-final heartbreaker. Spain trailed by 11 against the Boomers in Beijing but, just like in the Rio Olympic bronze medal game three years ago, rallied and went ahead courtesy of a dubious foul – on Bogut – in the final seconds.

Spain won that match by one but this time Patty Mills (34 points) had the chance to get one back for Australia when he went to line with four seconds on the clock down by one. But his second free-throw bobbled out and Ricky Rubio’s long heave just missed to force overtime.  Matthew Dellavedova’s desperate floater on the buzzer clanged out to send teams into a second extra period, where Marc Gasol (33 points) and Rubio (19 points, seven rebounds, 12 assists) steered their si

A “furious” Boomers team surged through the media mixed zone post-game, Bogut yelling “Google where headquarters of f……g Fiba is … it’s a f……g disgrace”.  On court Bogut had earlier flashed a money signal with his hands after the foul that helped put Spain ahead, and he is likely to face investigation and a fine ahead of Sunday’s bronze medal game against either France.  His comments were curious, given Fiba headquarters are in Switzerland.

Sunday will be Longley’s fourth bronze medal game, having played in two and coached in one already, the most recent in eerily similar circumstances against the same opponent in Rio.  “We’ve got to find an altar somewhere and burn a sacrifice to the basketball gods, because they’re not kissing us on the dick yet, like they do Spain,” he said. “I feel like Spain are kissed on the dick by the basketball gods every time we play them.  “It’s gut-wrenching for the guys; they’ve been so fucking good, so consistent and played so hard and I felt like they deserved to win that and it doesn’t feel like that’s the right result.”  Australia did have their moments though, with Mills’ free-throw somehow rimming out and 22 turnovers a constant olive branch to a Spain side that shot at just 31% in the second half. Dellavedova’s attempted match-winner looked good too, before it bounced out and he was forced out of the second overtime period with cramps. Nick Kay was enormous for Australia off the bench, scoring 16 points and grabbing 11 boards as the Boomers grabbed a staggering 20 offensive rebounds. “They’re furious, crushed. .. it’s very quiet in there and it stings in lots of ways, not least of which is that’s the team we lost to in Rio,” Longley said. “It’s not the time to start pointing fingers and spitting dummies; we’ve got to reload.”

CLASSIFICATION GAMES 5-8:  14/9/2019

For 7^th -8th

USA defeated Poland 87-74

For 5^th – 6th

Serbia defeated Czech Republic 90-81

BRONZE MEDAL FINAL

France defeated Australia 67-59

Another disappointment for the Boomers – their 12^th World Cup appearance, previous best was 5^th, today’s loss, means they finished 4^th. Meanwhile, at the Olympic Games level, Australia’s best has been also 4^th – four times.

BEIJING (China) – For the second straight World Cup, France finished  third, and that just makes them hungrier to bring home more valuable silverware in the future.  Les Bleus finished among the top three teams five years ago in Spain right behind champions USA and second-place Serbia, and they duplicated that feat here in China, beating Australia in their final game to bring bronze medals home once more.  That’s all well and good, of course, but the French knew this was one of the best opportunities to take the next step, and they’ve resolved to take everything they’ve learned here to improve in the next big tournament.

 Meanwhile, for the Boomers, it happened again. The Australian Boomers are still medal-less.

It was the same story, too, and in more ways than one. Their downfall was turnovers, something that had plagued them for the entire 2019 FIBA World Cup. The outcome: fourth place, a result that’s haunted this program since day dot.  Just like their semi-final game against Spain, the Boomers abandoned a double-digit lead to France, suffering a 67-59 loss that’s become their unfortunate signature.  Patty Mills capped off his impressive tournament with 15 points, while Joe Ingles’ 17 points perhaps came a day too late; the French leaving China with bronze medals. Apart from Mitch Creek’s appearance at the mandatory press conference, the Australian players went straight to the locker rooms and left the arena without talking with the media.

The Australians left with their hands empty, and that’s not just because of the 19 turnovers.  “Some of it is, now, just ensuring that we’re really tight in offensive and defensive schemes when we get in those crunch situations; where we’re gonna go to,” Andrej Lemanis, the Boomers’ head coach, told the Australian media of where the team goes from here.  “Particularly when we’re fatigued. I thought obviously earlier in the tournament, we were able to deliver in those situations. Back end of the tournament – day on, day off; four different cities in between – there’s a fatigue factor there you’ve gotta account for as well.  “Perhaps just ensuring a couple of things where we can get to the point, and an offence that moves quite a bit, and involves player and ball movement, perhaps more stuff when we can get a bit more to the point, in those games when we’re looking a little tired.”  Taking care of the ball had been an issue all tournament for the Boomers, and their inability to fix it came back to bite them, with Nando de Colo leading France’s second-half onslaught, posting 19 points off the bench. Evan Fournier finished with 16 points.

The fourth place finish is tied for the Boomers’ highest finish in a major international tournament, with the program placing in the same position in four other Olympics: 1988, 1996, 2000, and 2016.

“The sorrow comes from having the effort that the boys put in, and then them not being rewarded for the sacrifices, and the commitment to team, and playing the right way, and all those things they do,” Lemanis said.  “They represent Australian basketball and, as I said, I’m really obviously proud of that, and being connected with this group. It’s an honour and it’s always humbling being around these guys. You want to see them rewarded. It’s tough to see them with just the hurt that they have at the moment.”

 

GOLD MEDAL FINAL:  15/9/2019

Spain defeated Argentine 95-75

From Fox Sports.

Spain has captured its second World Cup championship, defeating Argentina 95-75 on Sunday to give Marc Gasol a rare double-title year.

Tournament MVP Ricky Rubio scored 20 points and Sergio Llull added 15 for Spain (8-0), the ninth team to make it through a World Cup or world championship unbeaten. Gasol scored 14 for the winners, who never trailed.  For Gasol, it was historic.  The Toronto Raptors center becomes the second player to win an NBA title and a FIBA world gold medal in the same year, joining Lamar Odom – who did it for the Los Angeles Lakers and USA Basketball in 2010.  Gasol is also the 19th to win either an NBA or WNBA crown along with a gold medal, either of the Olympic or World Cup variety, in the same year. And he’s the first to accomplish that feat while representing a nation other than the U.S.  When Spain won its first title in 2006, it was Pau Gasol – Marc’s older brother – leading the way. This time, it was the not-so-little brother who led his nation to gold, hoisting the World Cup trophy three months after getting his hands on the NBA’s Larry O’Brien Trophy for the first time.

Gabriel Deck scored 24 points for Argentina (8-1), which got off to a slow start and played uphill the rest of the way. Luis Scola was held to eight points, shooting 1 for 10 from the floor.

Spain led 43-31 at the half, riding the strength of two big runs. Spain ran out to a quick 14-2 lead, only to have Argentina answer with an 11-0 spurt. But when that ended, Spain came back with a 17-1 run and took what was then its biggest lead at 31-14. Scola, even at 39 years old still Argentina’s best player throughout the tournament, didn’t get on the scoresheet until he made a pair of free throws with 2:57 left in the third.  But they only cut the Spain lead to 19, and by then the Argentinian fans – who stood in the stands a few rows from their team’s bench, singing and chanting for much of the game – were relatively quiet. They probably had a good idea what was coming. There was one last gasp from Argentina, an 11-4 run to open the fourth quarter and cut Spain’s lead to 12 with 6:30 left. But Llull’s three-point play on the next Spain possession pushed the lead back to 15.

From NBA Sporting News, written by Gilbert McGregor [not necessarily the views of NBA] – ‘What’s next for the Boomers’?

After winning their first six games at the 2019 FIBA Basketball World Cup, the Australian Boomers again failed to medal in international play as they suffered heartbreaking losses to both Spain and France to close the tournament.  Still, despite coming up short with a fourth-place finish in China, the summer of 2019 is a step in the right direction for the Boomers future With a spot secured in the 2020 Olympics, Australia could potentially roll out an even more talented roster next year meaning the unfortunate streak without medalling could come to an end sooner rather than later.

For more on what lies ahead, take a look at where Australia stands…

Australia finished fourth at the World Cup with a record of 6-2 with its two losses coming in the Semi-Final round and the third-place game after winning six straight to open the tournament.

First Round

108-92 Win vs. Canada…………….81-68 Win vs. Senegal………..87-82 Win vs. Lithuania

It was essentially smooth sailing for the Boomers in the First Round, with the biggest test coming in the third game against a staunch Lithuania squad. Patty Mills established his dominance from the get-go, averaging 20.0 points and 3.0 assists per game in the First Round, serving as the teams leading scorer in the second and third game.

Second Round

82-76 Win vs. Dominican Republic……………….100-98 Win vs. France

In the win over the Dominican Republic, the Boomers put on a ball movement clinic, assisting on all 30 of their made baskets in the six-point win to set up an undefeated showdown with the French National Team. It came down to the wire but a combined 74 points from Mills (30), Joe Ingles (23) and Aron Baynes (21) proved to be the difference for Australia as it earned a 100-98 win.

Quarter-Finals

82-70 Win vs. Czech Republic

Coming in first in both of its groups proved to be beneficial for Australia, as it faced the Czech Republic in the Quarter-Final round. It was another win and another big performance from Mills, as he led the way for Australia with 24 points and six assists while shooting 9-for-15 from the field and 6-for-9 from beyond the arc.

Semi-Finals

88-95 Loss vs. Spain

As one win stood between Australia and its first medal, heartbreak came in the form of a double overtime loss at the hands of eventual-champion Spain. Mills once again led the way with 34 points in 45 minutes of action but it was the Spanish National Team that made more plays in the end.

Third Place Game

59-67 Loss vs. France

With a bronze medal still in sight, Australia failed to truly get going offensively as it scored just 59 points while shooting 4-for-17 (23.5%) from beyond the arc in the eight-point loss to France. In a rematch of the thrilling Second Round meeting, the Boomers simply didn’t have enough as it appeared the rigours of the tournament had finally taken their toll.

Australia’s top performers

Scoring: Patty Mills, 22.8 points per game

Rebounds: Joe Ingles, 6.1 rebounds per game

Assists: Matthew Dellavedova, 6.3 assists per game

Other top performer: Aron Baynes – 11.4 ppg, 5.5 rpg, 1.8 apg, 56.5 FG%

Through its performance at the World Cup, Australia is one of the eight countries that has qualified for basketball at the 2020 Olympic Games. The Boomers join Spain, Argentina, France, Nigeria, Iran, the United States and host country Japan as eight of the 12 teams that will compete for Olympic gold.  With Australia qualifying, it will not need to participate in one of the four Olympic Qualifying Tournaments in the summer of 2020.  While the key pieces from the World Cup should be expected to reprise their roles in 2020, there are some other names that could be in the mix for the Olympics. An increase in depth can be major for the Boomers, who used their top three players more than any other team at the World Cup. Mills, who at times put the team on his back during the tournament, and Joe Ingles each averaged a team-high 33.9 minutes per game while Dellavedova wasn’t too far behind at 30.6 minutes per contest. Baynes, the only other current NBA player on the roster, logged over 21 minutes per contest and made his impact felt in his time on the floor.

It’s no coincidence that the four NBA players on the roster saw the most playing time and next year, with potentially more NBA talent joining the Boomers next summer, there could be a dispersal of playing time.  Of course, all eyes shift to Philadelphia 76ers All-Star Ben Simmons, who did not participate this summer but has already stated that he is “committed and excited to compete in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.” Simmons, the only Aussie All-Star in NBA history, could lift this team to another level with his size, rebounding and playmaking ability should he stand firm on his commitment. At 17, Simmons made his first and only appearance with the Boomers to date at the 2013 FIBA Oceania Championship, where the team would go on to win gold. He stands to rejoin the senior team at 24 as he continues to establish himself as one of the best young players in the NBA.

In addition to Simmons, the Boomers have the option to include the likes of Deng Adel, Jonah Bolden, Ryan Broekhoff, Dante Exum and Thon Maker. Adel was one of the Boomers’ final cuts ahead of the World Cup while Bolden had full intentions of competing this summer before withdrawing due to outside circumstances.  Broekhoff, Exum and Maker have each represented Australia at various competitions and, barring any hindrances, could be wearing the green and gold in Japan. Prep standout Josh Green, who is set to embark on his freshman year at the University of Arizona, is another name that could be placed in the mix to play for the Boomers in 2020. The 18-year-old was a consensus five-star recruit and could turn in a big season in the Pac-12. An invite for Green, who is a member of the long-term future of Aussie basketball, could be the experience he needs to lead the charge of the next generation of Australian hoops. Factor in 2005 No. 1 overall pick Andrew Bogut, who could again make an NBA return after the upcoming season with the Sydney Kings, and the crop of NBL talent that has suited up for Australia, and the Boomers could very well be bringing their most talented team ever to the 2020 Olympics……….The future is bright for the Boomers and next summer could be a benchmark year ushering in a new era of basketball for the nation. It all begins with using their unbelievable talent to capture their first medal in international competition.