G'd Day Australia!

Subject: G'd Day Australia!
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 25 Jan 04 - 07:19 PM

Have a good Australia Day, all you Ozzie Mudcatters, and tell us about it when you sober up.

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia!
From: Sorcha
Date: 25 Jan 04 - 07:22 PM

Hoppy Ozzie Day! Have a nice picnic, it's Winter here.

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia!
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 25 Jan 04 - 07:37 PM

Happy Birthday to us...

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia!
From: JennieG
Date: 25 Jan 04 - 07:47 PM

It's overcast and warm in Sydney, we have been having tropical storms for a few days now. But it's a good day because it's a holiday! I am at the computer in shorts and t-shirt (not a pretty sight but comfortable).
Back to work tomorrow - bummer - the greatest thing about working in a school is the built-in holidays. I've been on hols since mid-Dec.
Cheers
JennieG

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia!
From: Helen
Date: 25 Jan 04 - 10:15 PM

Hi all,

Thanks for the good wishes, from a very sober Aussie :-)

Don't forget to send some love and light to the Aboriginal people of Oz today too, who see Oz Day as a reminder of the invasion of their land, and of the atrocities committed by some white people against them.

National Sorry Day should also be 26th January.

Helen

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia!
From: freda underhill
Date: 26 Jan 04 - 12:24 AM

hi mudcatters out there and thanks for the B'day greetings..
it is a beautiful day here and the sun is shining. i have been spending it quietly (including a trip to see Mystic river up the road in Newtown), puttering about.

On this Australia Day we aussies are waiting to see if our government has any loyalty to Australia left. Our fearless leader is so far up George Bush's A that all you can see hanging out is his toenails.

jennyg - i didn't realise u r a sydney catter - we may have met, even.

thanks for the kind thoughts - this day is even more special to me because my daughter has given me some very special news, and I'm floating.

thanks and best wishes

freda

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia!
From: freda underhill
Date: 26 Jan 04 - 12:26 AM

ps.. and happy bday to youse two , Ftroupe and Helen!

yes, a good day for National Sorry Day!

f.

Subject: RE: G'day Australia!
From: Bob Bolton
Date: 26 Jan 04 - 12:35 AM

G'day freda underhill,

We can live without the punctuation ... but you will have to remain incognito around Sydney folk events ... unless you spell JennieG's cognomen correctly!

Regard(les)s,

Bob Bolton

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia!
From: freda underhill
Date: 26 Jan 04 - 12:37 AM

whoops! sorry, jennieg - Bob - why don't u introduce us some time?

fred

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia!
From: Naemanson
Date: 26 Jan 04 - 01:18 AM

So, my Aussie friends, if I should happen to move to Australia some day what would I expect to see on this wondrous day of the year?

Oh, and about the Aboriginals, I have personally named Columbus Day in the USA. I now call it Invasion Day. You might consider doing something similar there.

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia!
From: freda underhill
Date: 26 Jan 04 - 01:34 AM

we have an Invasion day celebration here every yyear, Nm, at La Perouse or Redfern.

Music and speeches to commemorate Invasion day here- i'll take you there some time. (but its a long way from Cairns)

the rest of the stuff i don't go to.

fred

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia!
From: GUEST
Date: 26 Jan 04 - 05:09 AM

It might be an idea to rename St George's Day in England Invasion Day to commerate the expulsion of the Britons into Wales and Cornwall by the invading Angles, Saxons and Jutes. For just one day, the Welsh could expel the inhabitants of an English inhabitation and live in their houses.

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia!
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 26 Jan 04 - 06:40 AM

Happy Birthday Australia, commiserations to those whose land it really is. To those who get to Oz, I recommend a visit to the William Ricketts sanctuary in the Dandenongs, up behind Melbourne. Now there's a guy who felt for the Australian Aboriginal, and his sculptures are unique.
John

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia!
From: Sandra in Sydney
Date: 26 Jan 04 - 07:11 AM

freda - if your friends would only stop inviting you out on Dog nights, you would have already had the chance to hear JennieG sing & recite at the Dog. AS I recall you were also AWOL for Jenny & John's party, so you missed meeting her there, too, ditto the first James Craig session.

Here's a pic of her on the James Craig (next to Jane)
http://home.gwi.net/~ipbar/oz/oz2003/oz03-74.jpg

Creeping back to the topic - I had a quiet day alone & was indoors till about 6 when I popped out to the supermarket. I read, did the crossword, sewed & listened to CDS (Oz & others, whatever I picked up)

Some Oz days I go down to The Rocks & watch the crowds & listen to friends perform (dunno how they normally cope in the heat, tho) & look at the Harbour & the Tall Ships & small ships & ferries & everything. I might have gone today 'cept me legs were killing me. The Dr I consulted yesterday said his were killing him, too!! Witty bloke, but he sent me off to the X-Ray place to get scanned for DVT - first bones & muscles, now apparently veins, what next?

sandra

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia!
From: Charley Noble
Date: 26 Jan 04 - 09:29 AM

G'd day to you all-

As the porch thermometer rises slowly above the 0 F mark in the early morning sun we think of you. And, yes, on mornings like this we do "stir our coffee with our thumbs", not so much to dissolve the sugar or mix in the milk but to thaw out our thumbs.

Cheerily,
Charley Noble and JudyB in Maine

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia!
From: Ernest
Date: 26 Jan 04 - 01:50 PM

G`day all you down under!

Wish I could be there, since I can`t, here`s

A (vegemite) toast!

Yours
Ernest (running for cover)

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia!
From: GUEST
Date: 26 Jan 04 - 03:25 PM

Can't the Ozzies find a better hero than Ned Kelly, who was nothing more than a bank robber, a cop-killer, and general all round tosser.

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia! and G'day Ned Kelly
From: freda underhill
Date: 26 Jan 04 - 04:21 PM

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia! and G'day Ned Kelly
From: freda underhill
Date: 26 Jan 04 - 04:25 PM

Hi Guest

take a look at this website, an educational summary for schoolchildren:

http://www.convictcreations.com/history/nedkelly.htm

Among other things it comments:

Despite Ned being found guilty, sixty thousand Victorians signed a petition demanding Ned's life be spared. Tensions in the community remained at fever pitch and sympathisers threatened the kind of revolt that Ned may have been planning.

To defuse the powder keg, an inquest was held into the actions of the police. Nearly every officer involved in the Kelly case was subsequently dismissed from the force or reduced in rank. As for Constable Fitzpatrick, the trooper who started the whole thing, he was dismissed as "not being fit to be in the police force; that he associated with the lowest persons in Lancefield; that he could not be trusted out of sight; and that he never did his duty".

Just like the Eureka Diggers three decades earlier, it seems Ned lost the battle but won the war. His actions led to police corruption coming under scrutiny which ultimately freed his fellow selectors from oppression. Of course at the time, it was unlikely that he was able to appreciate the immense change his actions were to have upon Australian society. Prior to mounting the scaffold, his final words were the somewhat cynical "Such is life".

Ned's comments on the trial were:
"It's no use blaming anyone now.... It is not that I fear death. I fear it as little as to drink a cup of tea. On the evidence that has been given, no juryman could have given any other verdict. That is my opinion. But, as I say, if I'd examined the witnesses, I'd had shown matters in a different light... For my own part, I don't care one straw about my life, nor the result of the trial; and I know very well from the stories I've been told, of how I am spoken of- that the public at large execrate my name... But I don't mind, for I am the last that carries public favour or dreads the public frown. Let the hand of the law strike me down if it will; but I ask my story be heard and considered."
(Ned Kelly 1880)
........

to challenge and expose corruption in the police force in those years was a great achievement. NSW police over the years have suffered occasional similar purges after findings of corruption. (as seen in the 1997 Wood Royal Commission into the NSW Police in which Wood found that "on a prima facie basis, widespread corruption, criminal conduct ... and perjury existed within the NSW police force".
Major General Sir John Monash, former commander of the AIF in World War 1, was witness to the The Jerilderie Bank of New South Wales Robbery. : He was a Jerilderie storekeeper's son on the last day of Christmas holidays from Scotch College, Melbourne. The storekeeper was Mr Louis Monash, his son John Monash, in the next century to become one of Australia's greatest statesman and most distinguished general. Looking back through fifty remarkable years, Sir John Monash told a journalist that as a small boy of thirteen he sat on his father's verandah while the outlaws collected their prisoners: Sir John says that he has never been so overawed in his life as when the redoubtable bushranger spoke a few words to him, and for many a month he was the envied hero of the school as 'the boy who talked to Ned Kelly'.

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia!
From: Rapparee
Date: 26 Jan 04 - 05:48 PM

You guys down under sober yet?

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia!
From: Herga Kitty
Date: 26 Jan 04 - 07:00 PM

We've just marked Oz Day vicariously at Herga by having Cloudstreet (no vicars though)as guests.

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia!
From: jaze
Date: 26 Jan 04 - 08:54 PM

I'm having a beer in your honor. Not a Foster's, but a beer. Have a great day.

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia!
From: Bob Bolton
Date: 27 Jan 04 - 01:43 AM

G'day,

Jaze: You might as well have any other beer ... Fosters was an early American firm that took up brewing in Australia ... but they did bother to learn a bit more about what beer was than the scant ideas they brought with them!

GUEST (26 Jan 04 - 03:25 PM): freda underhill has very well covered the unappreciated fact that the Kellys were (at least at the end) sure they were bringing about a revolt for (mostly) Irish emancipation. The bank robbing they did was far more in line with many later "revolutionary movements" in being a 'fund-raiser' for arms, supplies and helping supporters.

The really worrying thing is that, as Carey's quite fictional True History of the Kelly Gang does point out, the aggression did not come from John "Red" Kelly - Ned's dad ... but (more likely) from his mother Ellen (neé Quinn) ... apparently sister of one of my great-great grandmothers - Jane-Anne Quinn! Poor old John kept his head down and hoped the police troopers would leave him alone ... Ellen - and Ned - hit back.

Regard(les)s,

Bob Bolton

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia!
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 27 Jan 04 - 05:43 PM

One of the things that helped to make Ned Kelly popular was the hatred of the banks for their action/attitudes (if I had the money, I wouldn't be asking for a loan!), not unlike the US hatred of Railways which fed the support of similar people like Jesse James. It wasn't entirely all their own work.

Robin

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia!
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 27 Jan 04 - 08:32 PM

"Worrying thing" Bob? I'd tend to assume that it works that way.

Subject: RE: G'd Day Australia!
From: Bob Bolton
Date: 27 Jan 04 - 09:05 PM

G'day McGrath,

The "Worrying thing" is that I'm descended from her sister ... explains a lot about some of us Boltons! OK - maybe G-G-Grandmother Jane balanced out some of that Irish rebellion by marrying a Dutch sailor ... although he probably jumped ship to get to the gold rush.

Regard(les)s,

Bob Bolton