Redgum

21 July 1969: The day that stopped the clock in Vietnam

Bill Wilcox’s watch stopped dead at 2.20pm on 21 July 1969 and never restarted. A field engineer in 1 Squadron in the Royal Australian Engineers (RAE) in the Australian army, he’d been up in the Long Hai hills in south-eastern Vietnam for about 10 days. He and his mates were due for a break.

It had been dirty work, even by wartime standards: dropping into active tunnel systems used by the Viet Cong, at risk of underground combat or possible asphyxiation and mine demolitions.

The irony was the engineers were mostly destroying their own mines, laid two years earlier. Nearly 23,000 US M16 “jumping jack” mines had been buried in a barrier aimed at isolating their enemy combatants in the jungle.

But the field hadn’t been properly secured. At enormous risk to themselves, with many soldiers lost, the North Vietnamese army learned to excavate and redeploy the mines against Australian forces.

Wilcox and the rest of 1 Squadron were heading back to base in a helicopter when they received the news that members of the 6th Battalion, of the Royal Australian Regiment, had strayed into a minefield in the “light green”, with one killed and many more wounded.

The “light green” was an area on the map that had been partially cleared – where defoliants including Agent Orange were used to strip the forest canopy of cover and where mines were likely to have been buried.… Read more..

21 July 1969: The day that stopped the clock in Vietnam Read More »

Preserving the past

A 100-year-old chocolate bar may not sound like the tastiest treat in the world. But imagine receiving it in the trenches of World War 1.

Bill Thompson, museum curator at the Ballina RSL sub-branch in northern New South Wales, says the chocolate was a Christmas present to soldiers – a small token of luxury during a time of international trauma, courtesy of the Australian War Contingent Association in London.

Now, the chocolate lives in the museum, donated by Dorothy Brumley. The recipient had been her father, Henry Wharton-Braithwaite, when he was in France in 1915, after he had served at Gallipoli.

“It’s still in the tin, [and] it’s in excellent condition – except the chocolate, of course. It looks bloody awful!” Thompson says.

Almost all Australians are familiar, at least by name, with the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, and its treasures of memorabilia. But fewer know that their local RSLs often feature their own exhibits, sometimes of thousands of items.

These pieces have the power to touch not only those with personal associations and memories of wartime, but younger generations who have grown up without any kind of equivalent experience.

“We get a lot of visitors from schools, and they all arrive with a great list of questions, and they’re usually more orientated with some of the later conflicts,” Thompson goes on.… Read more..

Preserving the past Read More »

Here are all the great Aussie protest songs

On Tuesday an Australian newspaper of repute published an earnest think-piece asking the question: where are all the great Aussie protest songs? Where oh where – in this, our Age of Unreason – are the new Midnight Oils, Goannas, Redgums and Chisels, the author, Jeff Apter, asks?

“Why do the musos of today … seem more concerned with navel-gazing and their fragile broken hearts than weightier, more universal issues?” he writes. “Why the resistance? It’s not like there’s a shortage of subjects to rail against.”

Indeed there isn’t: asylum seekers, Australia Day, violence against women, Aboriginal deaths in custody, marriage equality. And if you spare a moment to actually listen to the musos of today – particularly women, who don’t rate a mention in the piece, and people of colour – you’ll find each of those subjects feature in some of the best new Australian protest music around.

So, where are all the great Aussie protest songs? Well, a lot of them are on Spotify, where it took us about 10 minutes to make a playlist. Feel free to make your own!

AB Original: January 26 (2016)

mic drop on the nation. If the mark of a good protest song is to start a conversation, this song applied a set of jumper leads to the question of when we should hold our national day of celebration – and got voted to #16 in Triple J’s Hottest 100, before Triple J decided to change that date too.… Read more..

Here are all the great Aussie protest songs Read More »

Camp Cope: How To Socialise & Make Friends

In his “mongrel memoir” How To Make Gravy, Paul Kelly has a chapter on circle songs – songs that are built on a chord progression that cycles in the same order from beginning to end. The melody may vary, but there’s no bridge or change in the chorus to break the circle. Wide Open Road, by the Triffids, is a circle song; so too Kelly’s Careless. A lot of folk music, Kelly observes, is like this: “We just pick it up and pass it on.”

The Opener, by Camp Cope, is another circle song. With it, and their defiant gesture at the Falls festival – calling out the organisers in front of a jam-packed tent for their lowly placement on the bill, in keeping with the song’s theme – the Melbourne three-piece instantly stamped themselves as the Australian band of the moment and the #MeToo generation. They resonate because they are so real.

Even if not for singer and guitarist Georgia “Maq” McDonald’s pedigree (she is the daughter of the late Hugh McDonald, formerly of Australian folk-rock band Redgum), Camp Cope’s second album How To Socialise & Make Friends would sound like a baton being passed to a new generation.… Read more..

Camp Cope: How To Socialise & Make Friends Read More »

Scroll to Top