Australia Day

[Neferti]

Happy Australia Day everyone.

[mellie]

Happy Australia Nerf, and everyone else.






I started another Australia day festivities thread for my Australia day gripes as I didn't want to pollute yours with it.

[Neferti]

We have already had the RAAF Roulettes practising overhead this morning. I believe they are due in Melbourne at 2 pm for a demonstration down there. Not sure whether they will be doing a fly over here in Canberra. Probably, you hear them every so often. Cloudy here this morning so couldn't see them.

This is an old clip.

[Neferti]

Good old Ray Martin has a few words about THE FLAG

I TAKE a lot of photos. Heaps.

It’s become an obsession of mine, which is a bit amusing given that I’ve made a career out of words or out of being in front of a camera.

I recently snapped a shot of Sydney’s iconic Anzac Bridge, with its supersized Aussie and Kiwi statues posted like armed sentinels at the western end, in the dawn’s ethereal light.

It was part of a photo essay I’m cobbling together for April 25 this special year.

The commemoration of Gallipoli — and those first, wide-eyed Anzacs who jumped ashore — is about to wash over our collective emotions, on both sides of the ditch. In 1915 our brothers died on that godforsaken Turkish peninsula at the appalling rate of 45 Anzacs a day.

But. When I focused on the high Anzac Bridge flagpole all I could see was a fluttering Union Jack. The Southern Cross — with it’s familiar Federation Star — was somehow lost in the flag’s folds.

smiled to myself, thinking how appropriate it was — given that most of the 10,920 Anzac boys who died at Gallipoli had fought under the Union Jack.

Or, occasionally the red Australian ensign.

The mythology — and rampant misinformation — about Australians “dying under the flag” boggles the mind. It’s just not true.

For neither of the two World Wars.

The now familiar blue ensign, which didn’t officially become our flag until April 14, 1954, was rarely even sighted at Gallipoli — or any of the other bloody killing fields that followed on the Western Front.

In the War Memorial’s prized photograph taken on December 23, 1943, Sgt T.C Derrick — a South Australian who went on to win the VC — is shown hoisting the red ensign in Sattleberg PNG, after the village had been taken from the Japanese.

But it isn’t just ‘ at war’ that the facts are distorted.

The famous Septimus Powers’ painting of the 1927 grand opening in Canberra of the old Parliament House shows a sparkling white building festooned with Union Jacks on the top and red Australian flags obligingly waving below.

There’s not an Aussie blue flag to be seen.

More with pictures at the below link.

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/ray- ... 7196535675