Wake Up Australia

by Viv Forbes

 

Today is Remembrance Day, an appropriate time to reflect on our ability to defend ourselves.

History holds lessons.

 

Back in Dec 1941, Japan suddenly attacked the huge US Naval base at Pearl Harbour. Three days later, two “invincible” British warships, “Repulse” and “Prince of Wales” were sunk by Japanese planes off Malaya. Soon Japanese armies were rampaging through Asia towards Australia. By Feb 1942, the British fortress of Singapore surrendered and Japanese bombs were falling on Darwin. By Sept 1942 the Japanese army had slashed their way down the Kokoda Track and could see the lights of Port Moresby. They were looking across Torres Strait to Australia. At that time, most of our trained soldiers were fighting Rommel in North Africa or in Japanese prison camps.

Suddenly Australia was on its own and needed to defend itself with what we had here. Armies need soldiers, weapons, bullets, vehicles, fuel, food (and cigarettes).

Rationing was introduced for petrol, food and cigarettes. An immediate critical shortage was copper for cartridge cases - we had mines producing lead, zinc, silver, gold and iron, but there was a critical shortage of copper.

The mill, Mt Isa, R Emerson Curtis, Australian War Memorial

Fortuitously, just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, an exploration drill hole at Mount Isa had struck rich copper ore.

Mount Isa was called on to avert a calamitous shortage of copper in Australia. With government encouragement, Mount Isa Mines made the brave decision to suspend the profitable silver/lead/zinc operations and convert all mining and treatment facilities to extracting copper.

The lead concentrator could be converted to treat copper ore, but the biggest problem was how to smelt the copper concentrates. Luckily the company had skilled engineers and metallurgists in the lead smelter. In a miracle of improvisation, scrap steel and spare parts were purchased and scavenged from old mines and smelters from Cloncurry, Mt Elliott, Mt Cuthbert and Kuridala and cobbled into a workable copper smelter. In 1943 the first Mount Isa blister copper was produced. Production continued after the war when Mount Isa returned to extracting the then more profitable silver/lead/zinc. Later new plant was built enabling both lead and copper to be produced from this fabulous mine.

This story of the importance of self-reliance has lessons for today.

The war on carbon energy, the carbon tax, the renewable energy targets, escalating electricity costs and the voices in Parliament calling for Emissions Trading Schemes have all unnerved our big users of carbon fuels and electricity. Smelting and refining have become threatened industries in Australia, and closure of the Mount Isa copper smelter and the Townsville copper refinery has been foreshadowed. Already six major metal smelting/refining operations have closed in Australia this century and more are likely. The closures have affected copper, lead, zinc, steel and aluminium – the sinews of modern industry. And the car industry, with all its skills and tools, is closing

Mt Isa mines sourced Herald Sun

Local production and refining of oil is also declining, while anti “fossil fuel” vandals are trying to 
prevent domestic exploration and production. More and more land and offshore waters are closed to exploration and mining, and heavy industry is scorned. It was estimated recently that by next year, half of Australia’s oil refining capacity will have closed. In the event of a disruption to tanker routes, Australia has just 12 days of diesel supplies before city fuel and food supplies start to dry up.




We are losing the resources, skills and machinery needed for our own security, while we fritter precious resources on green energy, direct action, carbon capture and storage and other pointless anti-carbon chimeras.

Our foolish green energy policies and the suicidal war on carbon fuels are killing real industry leaving us unskilled and defenceless – like a fat toothless walrus basking on a sunny beach.

Wake up Australia.
 Viv Forbes,
Rosewood    Qld   Australia
forbes@carbon-sense.com


For those who would like to read more:

Australian Fuel supplies very vulnerable to disruption. Food and fuel Chaos within days:
https://au.news.yahoo.com/a/25427007/al-qaeda-threatens-australias-overseas-oil-supplies-expert-warns-of-possible-society-collapse/

“Mines in the Spinifex – the Story of Mount Isa Mines” by Geoffrey Blainey, Angus and Robertson, 1960

“The Challenge of Standing on the Shoulders of Giants” by Collin Myers, Congress of the International Mining History Association, Charters Towers, 2014.

Disclosure: Viv Forbes is a geologist, financial analyst and farmer. He has spent a lifetime working in various roles and places including Rum Jungle, El Sherana, Mt Isa, Goonyella, Blackwater, Nebo, Brisbane and Sydney. He is a non-executive Director of a small Australian coal exploration company and, with his wife Judy, breeds cattle and sheep at Rosevale in Queensland. He was the founder of the Carbon Sense Coalition.
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Veteran’s deepest wounds

I enjoy listening to ABC radio The Conversation Hour with Richard Fidler and not so long back there was an interview with John Cantwell.

It is interesting to learn of John Cantwell’s career, born in country Qld, joined the army & rose through the ranks from a humble private to reach the rank of Major General. He served in the 1990/ 1991 Operation Desert Storm campaign as a major in charge of a British tank squadron. In 2006 he returned to fight in the second war in Iraq. He was given command of all Australian troops in Afghanistan, 2010. After 38 years’ service he retired to Cooroy, Qld. A more complete bio is available at Wikipedia.

The good thing about radio or audio is that you can take in another world, gain insights and learn while you continue with your daily tasks. The audio is available [here] of Richard Fidler’s interview with retired Major General John Cantwell; I thoroughly recommend you doing so. Cantwell does well in expressing what attracted him to the military and why he felt the challenge to prove himself in the field of battle. He gives accounts of his times in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan and lays open his life to the main subject of the book, Exit Wounds, that he released earlier this year, post-traumatic stress.

Radom House offers the following observation in its brief review of Exit Wounds 

Exit Wounds is the compassionate and deeply human account of one man's tour of the War on Terror, the moving story of life on a modern battlefield: from the nightmare of cheating death in a minefield, to the poignancy of calling home while under rocket fire in Baghdad, to the utter despair of looking into the face of a dead soldier before sending him home to his mother. He has hidden his post traumatic stress disorder for decades, fearing it will affect his career.

With the article, Home safe,but left torn by the horrors of war, the Canberra Times published a lengthy extract from John Cantwell’s book. Here we are introduced to the book when Major General John Cantwell returns home from Afghanistan and retires from the army and was forced to face what he had worked hard to supress for many years.

 Released from responsibility, it is as though a dam in my mind has cracked, flooding me with despair. The barriers I built and shored up over the years, especially over the past 12 months, start to shift and buckle, releasing a pent-up misery.

The sadness and regret that I had pushed deep down inside resurface, amplified. Memories flood my mind: cold bodies in a morgue, torsos violated by bullets or explosives or a shattered helicopter; the pain and uncertainty of the wounded whose lives have been forever changed; the horror in the eyes of men who have picked up pieces of their mates. My nights are tormented by ghastly nightmares, punctuated by sudden shouts as I come awake, shaking and confused. The melancholy that has lurked in my heart begins to tear at my sanity.

In retirement John Cantwell does what he can to support veterans with PTSD. In a Herald Sun article, General says he has no mortgage on PTSD, defense force chief General David Hurley is quoted as saying:

“But for some the stigma remains, with soldiers reluctant to come forward because of fears their careers will suffer.

"What I really felt we needed, and John provided an answer there, was for someone of seniority and significant experience to come forward and say, 'Hey, it's okay to be open about this,'"