© 2018 Greg & Sylvia RAY

An uncensored letter from wartime New Guinea

To beat the official censors who read mail sent by Australians serving in New Guinea in World War 2, those servicemen sometimes got their mates going home on leave to carry letters and post them in Australia. It was a simple and effective way to evade the prying eyes of officialdom, whose job it was to make sure that important military details didn't accidentally fall into enemy hands and that the people at home didn't hear too much about the grim reality of the war. Accounts I have read by servicemen suggest that mail from home…

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Locking down against Murdochracy

August 28, 2021 Opinion by Greg Ray They say that in crises people show their true colours. It is especially true of leaders, who can either blossom into greatness or shrink into cowardly mediocrity. It is also true of media outlets, as evidenced by the Murdoch empire. The Murdoch empire fought during the bushfire crisis to make it all about "arsonists" and "greenies" - anything except climate change. Now, in the Covid crisis, it seems to me to be desperate for us to "open up" and "live with the virus". I don't subscribe to any Murdoch…

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Read more about the article Front line of the new cold war
World War 2 Australian propaganda poster

Front line of the new cold war

For Australia, “the yellow peril” has always been a defining factor in nationhood. It didn’t take long, after white colonisers arrived on the great southern continent, for fears of the “Asiatic hordes” to take root and grow. Being an English colony on Asia’s doorstep explains it, of course. And hence the anti-Chinese sentiment in the Gold Rush days, the anti-Asian-labour sentiments that ebbed and flowed over decades, the White Australia Policy and Britain’s calculated use of colonial fears of Japanese invasion to induce Australia to raise an army just in time for the slaughter of The…

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