This page provides a forum for my more heartfelt thoughts on what it means to be an Australian, to be an Australian Researcher in High Technogy baffled by the negative incentives to the development of high technology in Australia, and to my feelings for Aboriginal (Koori) Affairs derived from my practical involvement.
But life is not meant to be always so serious. Why is Melbourne the Comedy centre of Australia, while Sydney is the place for Hoaxes and Jokeses? Is there a place for humour in Computer Science -- even in Introductory Lectures in Computer Logic? And should we start spelling colour as color when we get out of Urope in 2000 ?

Email:           H.Cohen@latrobe.edu.au
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Are we as Australians only and always
Provincial Players on the World Stage?
This letter was published in the Weekend Australian, 2-3 December, 1995, in response to an article by Philip Adams.
So Philip Adams claims (Saturday November 25) that only on the day of The Dismissal[1] did Australia move from B-grade to A-grade level on the world stage. Adams has presented a litany of keynote events in Australia's history, and claimed, with but devastating wit, that all these events of OUR history are but provincial nothings to the happenings especially of American History.
But is our history truly so provincial ? : for every event Adams lists, and those other obvious ones, one can immediately see an American (=US) counterpart - but almost always on the same scale. We do have no counterpart to the bloody battles west of Washington, where so many Americans were killed by Americans, but the events that are really well- known to Americans, and heartfelt, are mostly on the same scale as actual Australian counterparts. Adams does concede the compelling analogy between the OJ Simpson case and the Chamberlain cases. But he derides Eureka, whose direct counterpart is the Battle of Lexington, the first, most rencountered, and most telling of the Battles of American Independence, where but 8 minutemen were killed.
Adams derides the bombing of Darwin as petty: but this direct attack on the sovereign land of Australia has its American analogue, the capture of part of American soil by Mexicans, with its denouement at the Alamo in San Antonio. Some 30 American soldiers - Davy Crockett amongst them, were killed. Its noteable that the Alamo is a sacred shrine, whereas the details of the recapture of Texas by Gen. Houston are unknown to most Americans.
Defiance of authority does take an interesting form in Australia - Boston had its Tea Party, but here in Victoria no group of honest citizens selected as a jury could find Lalor, a leader at Eureka, guilty. And to balance the Witchcraft Trials of Salem, where judicial decisions were based on the judicial acceptance of the secret and unverifiable knowledge of some few children, we have the Hindmarsh Island affair, where again judicial decisions are based on secretly held knowledge. Sorry, like Adams, I'm just joking!
Harvey A. Cohen
Eltham
Footnotes: Not in the original letter
[1] The Dismissal = Nov 11, 1975 = The Day the Governor General (Kerr) dismissed the elected Prime Minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam

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