Souvenirs of a dead man

The cap of a dead Japanese soldier is kept in a box in a cupboard at my place.  It was given to me by my grandfather when I was quite small.

It was one of my WWII playthings I got from him, along with a fibreglass insert for an American helmet.

The cap is quite small, and I often wondered how a man could have possibly worn it.  Or was he a child like me?

There are words inked inside the cap.  I still wonder if it is the name of the soldier.

My grandfather drove jeeps for the Americans in New Guinea in WWII, and came back from the war with a range of souvenirs, besides the cap.

He told a story that he had a brace of Colt 45 pistols.  On the way into Newstead wharf, an officer told the returning soldiers to get rid of their contraband.  Dutifully my grandfather threw his pistols over the side of the ship.  To his dismay, he was never searched, and always bemoaned the loss of his pistols.

I think of those pistols at the bottom of the Brisbane River whenever I cross the Breakfast Creek bridge and look at the agitated brown river water.

For whatever reason, he kept the cap.  I have little doubt it came off a dead soldier.

When going through my father’s things in 2010, I found a bundle of small photos my grandfather took in New Guinea.  There are photos of a wrecked Japanese ship on a beach.

The writing on the back says “Kioto Maru/Japanese ship-grounded/1943”.  I now know the Kyoto Maru was already grounded when the Allies took Lae, but I always wondered if the cap came from a soldier who perished on that ship.

I have started to think I should see if it is a name inside the cap, and establish whether he perished in the Lae area.

I now fantasize that I find out who it belonged to, and I send it back to a tearful and grateful family.

But the reality is that there are souvenirs throughout Australia that won’t be going back to Japan.  A cap is not the worst souvenir Australian soldiers brought back.  In Australian museums, I have heard there are collections of Japanese bones.  

When fathers and grandfathers have died, and children have looked in those boxes buried deep in cupboards, they must have found these shocking souvenirs. 

Unsure what to do, they have donated them to museums, where they in turn are put in boxes at the back of cupboards.

War is brutal and gruesome, but the war in the Pacific was probably the conflict that most brutalised our soldiers.  Things happened in the jungle that were not passed down into our popular culture.

I was always fascinated by what my grandfather did, and I still am.  When I was a wide-eyed kid, I asked him if he killed anyone.  He gently said no, he had to keep both hands on the wheel of the jeep.

I believe him, and the paper of his war record backs him up.  His war was a mundane one of driving supplies.

But I still have the cap of a dead soldier in my cupboard.  I don’t know where it will be in the future, or if I will pass it onto my own son or grandson.

If I do keep it in the family, I will tell the truth of it.  Of nameless bones, of the needless Australian deaths at Tarakan and Balikpapan, and a rusting ship on a beach.

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Shields, steel and saddles: The modern sport of jousting explained.

 On 7 and 8 July, at the Abbey Medieval Festival, Caboolture will host an international tournament for one of most interesting of modern sports – jousting.

You may think jousting was a historic chivalric pursuit, but it thrives today as a modern contact sport.  

Picture this: hundreds of kilos of humans, horses and armour charging at each other, intent on landing the point of their 3 metre lance on the body of their opponent.

There will be wood flying, dents in armour, and if the crowd gets what they want, someone will be knocked off their horse.

No wonder it is popular.  In fact, so popular there is now an International Jousting League, with rankings, and there are annual prestigious jousting events that attract the best from around the world.

Sounds modern?  It’s the way the sport was organised in the 13^th century.  In medieval times, the best knights would travel from tournament to tournament, and were the “sports celebrities” of their day. 

Like all the best sports, the rules of jousting are simple and straightforward, but they allow a great deal of subtlety and gamesmanship from the competitors.

The object of jousting is for a knight to land their lance tip on their opponent - that scores points.   A hit is called an “ataint” and an ataint scores if it is a hit on the shield, body or helmet.  But you get even more points if you shatter your lance upon your opponent.  Yes, wince as you picture that.

The lances are designed to shatter on impact, and the tips are replaced after each ataint.  The breaking point is a set distance from the tip, and a lance must break at that point if it the ataint is to count.

And what does the  jousting “stadium” look like?  Like all sports, there are tiers of seatings all around, so the spectators can see every hit, hear every grunt, and all of the action.  Some things are eternal – it was the same for the gladiatorial games in Rome.

Like most equestrian sports, spectators are more worried about the horses than the humans. Fear not, the horses are safe.  Safer than the jousters. 

There have always been great protections built into jousting to protect the horses.  Harming or targeting  the horses is dreadfully taboo.  If a horse is hit, the offending knight loses the tournament and traditionally had to surrender his own horse.

In fact, we think the horses rather enjoy the action and attention.  Like the jousting knights, they don’t hold back.  And that is how all elite modern sports should be .

As a modern sport, jousting  may even be better than many of the ball-chasing events you see on pay TV.  

It is a brief, intense one-on-one  contest where you can’t miss the action.  All the drama is distilled down to a single moment, the moment of impact.   There is noise, there is shiny armour, there are the “oohs” and “aahs” from the crowd.

And sometimes, we see a knight knocked off his horse.

So take your kids to see an international sporting event in July. An event  with no drunken spectators, one where you get to see a result, and one where everyone learns something about the past.  Go to the jousting.

(Click here to read about the jousting at the Abbey Medieval Festival)

Soldiers, not Saints

ANZAC DAY has … evolved over the last dozen years, and started to swell in size and significance.  

When I was a kid, some WWI veterans still marched, and the most of the kids involved were the Scouts holding the unit signs at the head of the march.  Now there are no WW1 veterans, and there are legions of school kids within and around the march.

My local ANZAC Day has grown to over a thousand people.  When I first started as a councillor, it was a couple of hundred residents.

How did it evolve?  ANZAC Day was once an annual day for the returned soldiers who could never reconcile that they had survived, while worthy others were left on Gallipoli or in Flanders fields.

As the WW1 veterans slowly then suddenly disappeared, we elevated the day to also celebrate the values they exhibited – mateship, endurance, courage, good humour.

That is fitting, but it is now moving beyond that.  We are giving the day a national spiritual dimension.   Don Watson wrote a very perceptive article in the latest Monthly magazine about the growing deification of ANZAC Day.

He asked are we giving it a “religious sort of meaning?”  Then:

“  we appear to be in the presence of a default state religion.”

There’s a jolt of recognition from me.  He’s right.  For anyone of standing or ambition in communities 100 years ago, you could not miss church on Sunday.  The same unbreakable obligation now applies to missing local ANZAC Day commemorations.

Australians all: the ANZACs should always be remembered, but not worshipped. 

Don’t forget, most of the ANZACs were 19 or 20 year old boys overseas for the first time.  They were young men having the most memorable and intense experience of their lives.  

Ever heard about the Wasser riot in Cairo on Good Friday 1915?  That’s when the young Australian troops nearly wrecked the red light district of Cairo.  After months of seemingly pointless training in Egypt, tensions and frustrations boiled over.

Here’s what one historian wrote:

“… when the story spread that some soldiers had been stabbed in a brothel, a crowd of men gathered, threw prostitutes and standover men from several houses into an alley, piled beds … and everything else portable  … into the street, and set fire to them.  At least one building was incinerated, and the mud walls … of several others were pulled down.”

“British military police arrived on horseback and attempted to disperse the rioters by firing at them.  They wounded several soldiers, but in return were bombarded with rocks, beer bottles, lengths of fire hose, and abuse, and wisely withdrew.  A few men then took to looting nearby shops …”

Whew.  You won’t see that event in the list of ANZAC Centenary commemorations.  If you want to see that, I am informed that an Australian bus tour of Oktoberfest in Munich is the closest thing.

The historian who wrote this (not the Oktoberfest bit) was Bill Gammage, in a book called The Broken Years.  It is a great book all Australians should read.

The book recounts the experience of the men from World War 1, using their own words.  Gammage absorbed the diaries and letters of over a thousand soldiers, and let them speak for themselves.

You can find incidents of incredible bravery, genuinely funny accounts of larrikinism, and tales of desertion and ill-discipline in The Broken Years.  It gives a balanced account that fills in the less pleasing aspects you won’t hear from archbishops and politicians.

When reading The Broken Years, you see these were extraordinary men, but you wonder if it is the proper thing to sanctify these men.

Still, it is something we have been doing ever since Australian men were crowned with the slouched hat, as I found when I did my Honours thesis on Australia in WW1.  I found we assigned saintly virtues to soldiers as soon as they donned the khaki.   And we were surprised when they acted like, well, young men.

Picture this:  15,000 men encamped around Brisbane in the early days of the war.  A total of 60,000 encamped during the war at Enoggera, Chermside and Bowen Park during WW1.  You can guess what happened.

I discovered reports of a lot of drunken soldiers and “serious trouble” on Brisbane streets at night.  Between November 1915 and June 1918, there 1,360 charges of drunkenness laid against soldiers.  The Secretary of the YMCA would collect drunk soldiers who missed the last tram or train to Enoggera and drive them there.

There was a social panic that loose women were” camped” around Enoggera.  There were strident shrills that these immoral women would lead these men astray, or sap the martial virtues of these Queensland soldiers.

It builds the picture of hordes of fit young men in 1914 and 1915, imbued with the sense they were off on a big adventure.  

ANZAC Day should be important, and we should remember how it seemed our national character emerged when these same fit young men were under fire at Gallipoli.

But let us not raise these young men to be a fixture behind an altar.

Let us remember what the original ANZAC Days were like.  Streets were filled with returned servicemen, drinking and catching up with their mates.  It may not have been a family atmosphere on ANZAC Day in the 1920’s.

It was a day of grief, remembering, and coping.  It was rawer, without the hushed ceremonies of set format and phrases we have today.

Bill Gammage best expresses what drove the original ANZAC Days.  He wrote that “[t]he living would never forget the dead, for war and men had bound men closely, till their united brotherhood contained everything worthwhile.”  ANZAC Day was their day, not ours.

And now ANZAC Day should belong to us, not cardinals and Cabinet members.  After all, the WW1 Diggers were ordinary Australian men, probably not different to the young Australian men who walk the streets today in hoodies and caps.

Like young Australian men today, they cannot be denied a good time.  And like young Australians today, they would show exceptional qualities when placed under almost unimaginable duress. 

They were ordinary Australian men who had the chance to shine in an extraordinary time.

The Whiting Report Returns ... Every Friday 

THE PHONE stopped ringing at 7.30pm on the night I lost the election, as soon as it was clear I was not going to be the next Mayor.  And the harsh jangling of the ring tone has hardly been heard since. 

Now the phone rings a couple of times a day, when friends or family call.  Instead of fearing it and it problems it may bring, I welcome the chirpy ring tone.

How are you feeling, people asked in lowered tones.  Fine, I say, and it is true.  I have a feeling of strange contentment and detachment as I leave the tide of politics and current affairs to wash around me.

Let those who push that tide fret about the swirling minutiae of politics: I now give my focus to my family.

But as an ex-pollie, I don’t have to be silent.  I still have a lot to say.  I can still speak out when I see what needs to be said or done.  If fact, I can’t stop it.

It was the desire to speak up, to make a change that propelled me into running for local government 12 years ago.  And what kept me running was the desire to make a difference, not the desire to hold onto a well-paid job.    I never feared losing: my fear was that would be politically ineffectual, a political ornament.

I now hold no office, but I still have my voice, heard through this keyboard.

And I will keep speaking out, keeping up a dialogue.  I hope it will make a difference.  Maybe it will make you think, or nudge you to take some action.

You will be able to hear my thoughts on my weekly blog, sent every Friday.  That is my commitment to you.  I already have a swelling list of topics to discuss.

If you have any thoughts or any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.  And if you think I’m wrong, feel free to tell me, too.  You can email me at chris@chriswhiting.com.au or even call me.  As I said, I like to hear the jingle of the phone these days.

Next week, I look at the cultural monolith of the ANZAC legend.

19 March - Council Live! On Line!

WHEN you are watching the Australian Open tennis or an Australian Test Match, you can regard it as entertainment.   For the sportsmen and women on the screen, they can regard it as work.

And they are not the only wages earners slugging it out on your screen .  You can watch other people at work as well.  Your political representatives.

Our televisions are full of State and Federal politicians hard at their jobs, arguing in Parliament or opening stuff in hard hats and vests.  You can now see live Parliamentary debates on line.

Yet we can’t go on line and see the most accessible level of government at work.  Why can’t we see council meetings on line?

So that’s what I propose to do.

In my “Council Meetings Live On-Line” plan, broadcasts of council meetings will be on the council website.  Recordings of the meetings will also be stored on the council website.

You can watch your councillors at work anywhere, any time.  If there is an agenda item that interests you, you don’t have to take the day off work to come into council chambers to see what happens.

This is not rocket science.  If it was the equivalent of going to the moon, we would find there is a bunch of councils already set up camp on the lunar surface.

The State government thinks something similar.  In fact, they want all Queensland local councils to get on and do it by July 1.

On line broadcasts are done by councils all over the world, including the Gold Coast.  They know this is the 21st century and the on-line world offers a much better way for Council to do business.  There is no reason it shouldn’t happen here.

The real advantage is that it keeps Moreton Bay Regional Council more open and accountable.  It opens Council up to the people, and puts councillors under scrutiny.

 Scrutiny is good for us, both politicians and elite sportsmen.  At least that is something I will share with these well-tuned athletes.

Yup, I will never play for Australia.  But I can say that we both work better when the eye of the camera is broadcasting our efforts to your computer or living room.

23 February - How to turn a “supersize” council into a local council

The key word in the title “Moreton Bay Regional Council” is the word “regional”.  There is not much that is local about our local government anymore.

Despite amalgamation, the original challenge of any local government is more acute than ever:  how do we provide local services, at a local scale by local officers who know the area?

Here is my answer.  I will restructure council to deliver a better service to residents and rate payers.  This new council structure will be based around the three districts, with a full range of “customer services” being provided at each district.

Local work teams and local staff will return to local council offices at Caboolture, Redcliffe and Pine Rivers.  “Grass roots” council services will be delivered by local council officers and crews who know their local community.

If we cannot have de-amalgamation, this is the next best thing.  It aims to return the level of council services to where they were before amalgamation.  The aim is to have council officers based in local communities, officers who maintain local roads, parks, drains and sports clubs.

There is another aspect to a restructure that can help deliver better local services.  We need to return to a flatter structure with less hierarchy so local teams can make quick, common-sense decisions on servicing residents’ requests.

The third aspect for a restructure is to do it once, and do it properly.  The worst way to do it, is to do it over and over again.  Unfortunately, that has what happened at Moreton Bay with a total of 34 restructures in this term.  For staff to do their job and deliver council services, they need a settled structure that allows them to do their job.

Doing it once leads me to the next point.  Residents are asking how much will this cost?  The answer is very little – it is the internal movement of staff that is the point, not a refitting of everyone’s office.  My plan is certainly cheaper than the current practice of moving people around, time and time again.

It may be we are stuck with a regional government.  But that is no reason why we can’t return to delivering local services

January 31

Another interesting day in Moreton Bay Regional Council!  Like most days these days, actually.

Today we made a big leap forward in getting a buy-back scheme for flood-prone properties.  Dale St residents came to Council today, and their presence made a strong and silent case for the scheme.  Their quiet resilience and determination spoke volumes.

And they need to be resilient.  This is the third year in a row Dale St has flooded.  Three years in a row muddy waters have come in under the houses of Dale St, and left a layer of mud on their ground floors.

I have seen four families come and go from one house due to the floods.  It is the fifth time in about four years that one family has had to move out their gear from under their house.

But they cannot go on. They are at the limit of endurance.

Each year they have to put their life on hold as they move out of the way of flood waters. One family had just got their house sorted out two months ago, following the last flood.  Relationships have broken down under the stress.

This is not about houses and property.  This is about ordinary people, and the trauma and stress they are suffering. And that is why I plead with my fellow councillors to do the right thing and adopt the flood buy back scheme.

Can't wait 'til next week ...

Yesterday, I was asked if I minded that the Queensland local government election was being held back one month.

Yesterday, that seemed to be a minor issue, as I was dealing with  the confronting plight of local residents affected by a new round of floods.

I heard about the Queensland election shuffling yesterday at Beachmere, when I was visiting a property that was literally awash. The ground floor underneath this family's Queenslander house was a pool. The pool itself was a brown dam. And the dam was a lake across the property.

All their belongings they couldn't get up from the floors of the shed or underneath the house were under water.  There was the old Jag he is restoring, their mowers, a motorbike.

A lady who lived close by broke into silent tears when she described how their granny flat has just flooded for the third summer in a row.

And this is the essence of the  trauma faced - this flooding keeps happening. There is huge mental stress suffered by individuals as their flood nightmares are re-lived each year.  In the last three summers, their houses have flooded, and the water has hit the previously-rare Q100 mark.

The stress on people facing a continuous cycle of inundation can shatter families and relationships. Kids get agitated or cry whenever it rains. One  Burpengary family told me that they had only got their house in order two months and two weeks ago, following last January's flood.

How can you live a fulfilling life, when your life is built around a cycle of floods that invade your home each year?

So that is why I am unfussed by putting back local government elections, due ultimately to the floods and Flood Commission.  There are bigger issues for me and my local residents.

In fact, I'm quite prepared to fight an election on the question of how we deal with floods.  

After the last floods, I stood up and said the response of our Council was not good enough. Our communication was inadequate, and we had disturbing problems with the creation of our evacuation centres.

I then calld for a Council flood buy back scheme, and an SMS-based warning system for residents.  Council is still considering the flood buy back scheme, but we have a new SMS warning system for floods and severe weather.

This year and last year, I have waded through flood water to visit residents, moved their furniture, listened to them, and hugged them. And this year, I went to bed the other night with a hollow dead heart, thinking about the residents who faced another flood where brown water is lapping inside their walls.

We need to do more. There are areas of Beachmere that have become virtual creek overflow paths within the last three years.  People still do not have faith in the ability of this Council to look after them or protect them.

So holding back an election for four weeks so we can deal with the Flood Commission and a State election is really not important, compared to the huge burden of flood recovery some residents are facing.

In fact, it may be good thing for our whole community if people want to determine how they vote according to who best can handle this annual cycle of flooding.

I know that as our weather continues to alter over coming years, people will be looking to Council, or any government, to protect them from the impact of flooding and storms .

 

15 November

Sometimes the best policy ideas come from the simplest and clearest starting points.  Take for example this letter I received from one of my residents, Hans-Dietrich Mielke of Beachmere:

I’m writing this letter in desperation of recognition as a rate payer of this Council for precisely 23 years. My problem is the kerbside “big rubbish” collection in Beachmere! I’m disabled and don’t have a trailer or towbar to carry my unwanted rubbish to the tip. I request a collection as soon as possible as summer is coming fast!

So here's what i'm promising as Mayor -  to bring back a free kerb-side rubbish collection for Moreton Bay Regional Council residents.

The free rubbish collection was a feature of Council services in Caboolture until it was cut under the newly-amalgamated Council.

Still, it wasn't just Hans who has spoken out about this. Other rate payers have consistently told me they want to see a return of the kerb-side collection for big items of rubbish.

The elderly, disabled residents, and those without a car or trailer have been calling for a return of this valued Council service.

The service will give them a chance to get those large household or garden items to local transfer stations.

It is part of my plan to deliver a better customer service to rate payers.

At this stage the service will be delivered once every two years for Moreton Bay Regional Council residents.  It will be available to residents who have the weekly wheelie bin collection service.

Council is more than rates, roads and rubbish - but you've got to get those right before you do anything else.

September 18 - Why school concerts are important

For many parents of new kids in Prep or year 1, the thought of spending hours at the annual school concern must be, well, disconcerting.

Yet at the recent Burpengary State School concert, the time seemed to slip by as I watched and listened to these kids sing and dance.

I did not expect to get so much pleasure out of the concert, and what I found so grin-inducing and heart-warming was the reactions of the kids on stage.

I saw children spot their parents, and their eyes light up and they wave madly, or another tries to wave discreetly.

I saw kids of astonishing talent, with booming voices and serious stage presence.

And the best to see is their faces when they get the applause.

Some have a look of astonishment.  I realise it may be first time they have heard adults outside the family give them applause, loud and sustained applause.

As a new father, I find I have greater awareness of reactions of young kids and new parents.

I can appreciate why my school concerts were such an event for my mother.  She still talks about them.

In a nice piece of synchronicity, she recently found the program from my year 2 concert.  I have it here, and there is listed C. Whiting and D. Romagnolo as “A Couple of Tramps”, and we sang “Side By Side”.

I even have the picture of us singing the song, focusing on the microphone, straining forward to get the volume from our seven year old throats.

David was one of my closest boyhood friends.  We were at school together from kindergarten to year 12.  He was quiet and determined, and in our teenage years he developed a raucous and absurdist sense of humour sparked by “The Kenny Everett Video Show” and Monty Python.

I always envied his precise talent at drawing, and his finely-practiced cricketing abilities.  Yet David followed his father into a respected local accounting firm, and I now see he is a director of the company.

David, if you are reading this, go and tell your kids that you sang “The LumberJack Song” in the school concert in Year 12.  Better than that, sing it to them.

I hope in the years to come, the children at Burpengary State School can remember their friends in their school concerts.

A little sadly, they will be hard to remember from photos, as no photos were allowed during the performance.  I think that makes the photo I have even more special.

So I hope the parents can hold onto their memories, as has my mother.

For the parents who are baulking at being seated in an auditorium for hours, do not begrudge it.  Keep the program for when your child grows up.

And keep talking to them about the concert songs they sang when they were seven.