Breakfast Club Blog
Archive for April, 2008
One More Memory
23 April 2008
We had Bud Tingwell on the Breakfast Club yesterday.
Bud is an acting icon in Australia. He was there when the Australian film industry started back in the 1940s. But he left all that to join the air force in the battle against the Axis powers in World War Two, flying spitfires and mosquitos, the fastest fighter planes of the time.
He was a great looking boy back in those days. Check him out:
He may have been smiling, but he told us that he spent the entire war in a state of fear. His plane was, of course, shot at repeatedly, and many were the times that he thought he would not be coming home.
He also told us that he had never acknowledged this fear, and it was only at a meeting of other World War Two vets that they talked openly about being scared.
Bud is in his eighties. That is a long time to be carrying the feelings.
It makes you wonder how many of the other people you see on the street, how many veterans, are also keeping their chins up and bearing it all alone. I have an uncle who has done the same thing. I have known him my whole life, but it was only a couple of years ago that he told me that he had fought in that war. He had kept the whole thing to himself.
As we remember ANZAC Day this week, we should also think about the wounds that people carry with them. For lifetimes perhaps.
For Bud, he got on with building a life and career. He went on to be a movie and TV star in Brtain and has since become an institution in the acting scene in Australia.
And he hasn’t changed all that much, as this page from the program for his recent stage production The Man From Snowy River proves:
Good on yer Bud, and thanks sharing your stories with us.
A Time to Remember the Times
22 April 2008
The bad times that is.
This week every year Australians remember soldiers who died in conflict. Conflicts are not to be celebrated, because as historian Robert Macklin told us on the Club yesterday, war is an obscenity. Innocents die. Countries are destroyed. People learn terror.
Remembering is the very important thing here, because as generations change, and the soldiers from wars past pass on, there are very few people left to tell the stories.
Remembering is all that is left.
It will be a sad day when those young men who charged into machine gun fire at Gallipoli are forgotten. These men who may have been too young to have ever known love, confidence, success, failure. These men who were barely men, not old enough to vote, but were old enough to be sent to their deaths. Ordered to end their lives before their lives had even begun.
The men who learned a fear that we hopefully will never know. They suffered at a time when they should be discovering what life is.
The one thing they should never suffer is the indignity of being forgotten.
People who fought wars through history have been forgotten. Waterloo. Roman conquests. Hastings Hill. Greece in world war two. These are all hard fought times remembered by the title of the battles and the names of the leaders, but not the soldiers who perished.
With ANZAC Day we remember those soldiers.
It’s the least we can do.
A Republic. Maybe.
21 April 2008
Australia’s super think-tank, the 2020 summit, is over and a lot of people did a lot of thinking of ideas for where the country should be in 12 years.
Now the prime minister Kevin Rudd has to sort through all the ideas, decide which ones are worth anything, decide whether he likes them, decide which ones the public will not throw him our of office for, and then figure out how to put them in place.
The summit issue that has caught the eye of the media and the public was the push for Australia to become a republic.
At the moment Australia’s head of State is the Queen. The closest we have come to being completely autonomous was when Gough Whitlam, as prime mininster in the 1970s, declared that Queen Elizabeth was now formally the Queen of Australia.
It satisfied the republications for about four minutes.
A few years ago John Howard put the republic idea to a public referendum, grudgingly, and then fought really hard against it. Of course it failed. No referendum proposal has ever passed in Australia if one side of politics was against it.
This time.. with the summit backing it.. and the PM and the Opposition both quite happy for a republic.. it might actually happen.
The big question is what kind of republic. The governor-general is the Queen’s representative. The actions of the governor-general are dictated mostly not by law, but by convention. The governor-general, if she/he so desired could run the military, refuse to grant elections, and deny laws that have passed through parliament. These powers were shown in 1975 when Sir John Kerr used his reserve powers as governor-general to sack Gough Whitlam.
Who can forget this image of Gough Whitlam standing behind David Smith who was reading the governor-general’s proclamation that ending Whitlam’s prime ministership.
It was an extraordinary day for Australia, and a day that split Australia for many years.
So then, if we replace the governor-general by a president of the republic, what would happen to these reserve powers? The fear of monarchists is that if the president is elected, he or she might have the belief that they can use some of these reserve powers. After all, the president would have been elected by the people, just like the prime minister.
This is obviously one of the things that Kevin Rudd will be mulling, while he’s thinking about inflation.
And interest rates.
And climate change
And education.
And immigration.
And international alliances.
Yeah. You get the picture.
Blasting Everyone Else Away
18 April 2008
We just got word today that the Aussie superband Small Mercies will be coming in the studio next month to give us an early play of songs from their new album.
Small Mercies is a favourite of many of our listeners, especially for their hit song Innocent, which stayed on the Breakfast Club’s Top Ten for a gazillion years. Sometimes a song will just get people’s blood racing, and that is one of them.
And they’re good looking guys too:
Well.. good looking for rockers.
The lead singer, who’s next to Addy in the photo, was chuffed when I said that he looked like Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan (back in Purple’s wild early days of 1969).
Small Mercies is a rollicking band, and we’re SO looking forward to having them in the studio, albeit with acoustic guitars.
We just hope it’s not a repeat of the time we had Deep Purple’s Glenn Hughes performing live. I’ve written about that elsewhere in the blog. In short, he blasted the foundations off this building (and that was when he was being acoustic too.)
It just goes to prove: if you rock, you rock.
Another Whack on the Head
17 April 2008
Today we’re interviewing a man who has gone further than Al Gore ever dared.Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, was pretty damning of the way we are hurting the planet, but in the end it is fairly positive, with the message that if we cut down on our power consumption, buy a hybrid car and do carbon offsets when we fly, then things will get better.
Not so, says Aaron Scheibner. Sorry Al, he says, but you’re wrong there.
Scheibner says that we’ll need to make a whole lot of changes on a personal level if we are to have a planet to live on.By that he means we have to give up meat.
Yep. Meat.
He also says we have to give up dairy products. Milk. Cheese. Even eggs.In the Australian film critics award-nominated doco (called A Delicate Balance), he has a whole swag of experts who say that meat and dairy production sucks up huge amounts of water (one figure says 100,00 litres of water is used to produce a kilo of meat). That’s the water that is used to grow the grasses needed for livestock to graze.
It’s not just about the planet. Scheibner has plenty of medical practitioners and resreachers who testify that meat and dairy consumption is what is causing the cancers so prevalent in western societies at the moment. It’s not the meat that is causing the cancers, it’s the cooking of the meat, and also he says that the meat stops the body protecting itself from cancer formation.Whoa. It’s heavy.
After I watched the DVD of the doco. I thought how glad I was that I am a vegan. But I wondered about how the doco would be accpted by meat-eaters. Would there be denial? Would his doco by disparaged? Would people get angry? How would they cope with such aan indictment of their way of living.After he’s telling people that the ways of their parents and grandparents are wrong.
Well sorta. You see some of the medical practitioners in the doco make the point that eighty years ago, many people in the world were living a largely vegetarian diet. Chicken roasts were special yearly treats. Greek islanders were largely vegetarians and occasionally ate fish, which was uncontaminated by today’s toxins. Koreans rarely ate meat. It was only after the Americans came during the Korean war that the taste for meat was developed. Now South Korea is a heavy meat-eating nation.
We’ll be interviewing Scheibner today on the Club, and we’ll be podcasting the chat too. Have a listen if you can.
Somehow I don’t think this message is going to go away.
