We in Western Australia –bordered by the Indian Ocean–have been benefiting visually from the Tonga volcanic mid-January eruption in the Pacific, 7000 thousand kilometres distant, and we are still getting brilliant post-sunset glows high in the sky after the setting sun has disappeared below the horizon.

Today we celebrate our Australia Day, with a date that upsets many of our first citizens. Which doesn’t sit well with me. (Why on earth would we want to do that??) But quite apart from that , it really annoys me for quite a different reason.The original date — 26th January 1788– has nothing to do with Western Australia. There was no W.A. then. (In fact there was more of a chance we’d be settled by France not Britain at that time.)

There was a bunch of Brits over on the eastern seaboard, flying a British flag, being governed by a British Governor serving British interests, and longing to retire back to Britain.So here we are celebrating a date that marks the beginnings of a British invasion of someone else’s land a couple of thousand miles from where I now live, by a bunch of people who mostly didn’t want to be there. We certainly weren’t a country. We weren’t even called Australia back then!! January 26th.

How inappropriate can you get?

Well, even more. That date was later the date of a massacre of an indigenous group by settlers.So I don’t fly a flag, especially not one with a Union Jack in the corner.

I wonder what my grandfather’s dad would think of it all. He was transported to Van Dieman’s Land for stealing a brass tap…

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Just had my half-year statement from one of my foreign language publishers. This is for 3 books published quite a few years ago, now only being sold as eBooks, so virtually not costing the publisher much at all at the moment. They sell for about 5 to 10 Euros each.
In the past 6 months they sold 35 books and I earned the princely sum of 22 Euros which is 34 Aussie dollars.
That’s .6 of a Euro each.
Or 97c Australian per book.
Gee, Authors earn a lot, don’t they?
(This is not really a complaint; just a statement of fact. Most published writers earn very little from sales.)

Among other things (like working on the copy edited MS of my latest book), I have been sorting through the photos and letters that record bits and pieces of my father’s war history.

That’s the First World War, not the second. Not that they called it that…they had no idea they were fighting for nothing, rather than gloriously battling “the war to end all wars” as they were told. The photo of him was taken in France. He was about 27 y.o.

Here’s an extract, written to his sister in W.A. in pencil on a tiny piece of paper now brown with age: “I can tell you it is a great consolation to one and all of us when we get good news from home…Of course I don’t get letters very regular on account of so much shifting about…” He goes on to mention two friends from the wheatbelt of Western Australia where he owned a farm with his brother. He writes, “Reggie Parker was lucky getting out with a wound; I only wish Alec Waterhouse and all the other lads were as lucky…”

The Alec he mentions was English-born. They had both embarked with the Australian forces in January 1916, but Alec went missing, believed killed, at Pozieres in France in August of that same year.

But more than a year or so later, having been a German PoW, and having recovered from a chest wound, Alec escaped — walked through enemy lines and turned up in Holland… Back in England he sent a message to his mother, who still lived in Kent:

A happy story? Yes — and no. I believe Alec found it hard to deal with life after returning to Australia.