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The discussion in Australia as to how such atrocities are to be approached is telling. The call for responsibility has varied by degrees. Most tend to some variant of the rotten apple theory: a few particularly fruits that may be isolated and extruded from the barrel. Culpability can thereby be confined, preserving the integrity of other military personnel and, importantly, political decision makers.
In an age where destruction of eco-systems is occurring at a fast rate and sanctioned by governments, these absurdities are lethal for collective humanity. Non-Indigenous support for the Embassy and trees reflects a desire to reverse the absurd lie that human culture and nature are not in a continual, intergenerational relationship.
Cheryl Strayed is haunted by her past — by her own sins, and by tragedies that have befallen her. As she walks, she hums, and the music she hears in her head leads her in and out of the past. Her solo 1600-plus km trek along America's Pacific Crest Trail is a metaphor for her life: each hardship she overcomes brings her a step closer to facing down the fierce regrets that gnash at her heels.
Paul Mees, who died last week at the age of 52, was a public intellectual in the best sense of the term; a scholar and teacher with an international reputation; an activist who never shrank from a fight. He was also a man of deep faith, though many who admired Paul ignored this or regarded it as an eccentricity.
The action takes place in 2008 on the eve of the GFC, at an investment bank loosely modelled on Lehman Bros. The CEO is monstrous; a kind of sinewy bishop to capitalism, gaunt and vicious. Yet even the most principled characters are shown to compromise to varying degrees in the name of self-interest.
Great sports men and women have emerged from suburban backyards and the tutelage of their parents on the rapidly wearing lawn. The yard Michael Younes wanted to obliterate in order to construct town houses had been the childhood training ground of one of Australia's greatest sportspeople.
Sadly the Commission played the blame game. This happens after every major fire and originates in the need to find scapegoats. Neither Christine Nixon nor the others who copped the blame could have known they were dealing with a whole new era of firestorm.
There were many mistakes made on Black Saturday and the Interim Report of the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission points them out. For now the commissioners avoid the 'bigger fire questions', but in the end these will have to be faced.
In 1999, after a decade of noting rainfall figures for his fellow retirees, a Bureau of Meteorology representative asked Andy Ultri whether he would be interested in joining the hundreds of volunteers around Australia who record official rainfall figures for the national weather bureau.