The Danger Zone (DZ)

In 1995 the TV Series “Mr Bean” went to air for the first time. It was a strange programme. Mr Bean was mostly silent – with only a handful of words being spoken by him throughout the whole three series. The audience reaction to him varies a lot. I think the cleverness of the wordless comic actions is brilliant and I love the show. My wife finds Mr Bean to be an incredibly nasty human being, which...

The remarkable thing about chess is that you can’t lose. I mean you’re looking down on the board. You can see every piece that your opponents has and where they are. You can see every piece that you have and where they are. Does it get any better than that! You can’t lose. But is that the right way to look at it? Because that’s how some of the top military people in the US thought it worked when t...

This series of programmes is all about how war has improved all of our lives. And this programme’s all about how modern heart surgery happened thanks to war and because of one man’s struggle to overcome what, up to and during World War II, was an area of surgery that no right thinking surgeon would do. Heart surgery. The heart’s an incredible pumping machine. It’s the size of a grapefruit, it beat...

Back in the happy days before the white imperialist invaders came to Australia’s shores everyone was happy, healthy and contented. Well maybe I’m exaggerating a bit. If you weren’t healthy then you would die. A hunter gatherer community, that lived from day to day, needed everybody to be contributing to making their society work. So if you weren’t healthy, and couldn’t keep up when your clan moved...

Human beings have always known about blood. In civilisations since the earliest stone age hunter gatherers until today, too much blood has been spilt. But what we’ve known about blood has, for most of time, been completely wrong. Thank God we finally got it right. This programme’s about the world that war has made so in this programme I’m going to tell you a bloody good story – which is what war i...

War has shaped all of our lives. You may not like it. You might think that war is evil. That war must come to an end. But whatever you think, every day of your life, and throughout every day more than you’d like to think, so many of the things that you do or get the benefit of, have been shaped or come out of war. Anyway enough of that depressing talk. How about you just go into that coffee shop t...

In September 1939, Czechoslovakia was betrayed to Adolf Hitler by the British and the French. It had been done for the most noble of motives, in an effort to avoid another war with Germany. They had thrown Czechoslovakia to the ravenous beast that Adolf Hitler was. It turned out to be rather unsuccessful in avoiding disaster as 60 million people died in World War II rather than a few thousand that...

On 8 May 1945, the German commander of Prague, General Rudolf Toussaint, signed an instrument of surrender with the Czech resistance. The deal was that the resistance would let the German armed forces leave the city without being shot at. Toussaint lamented: “ Who am I now? A general without an army. All I can do is go home and sit in the ditch and look at the blue sky”. The next morning a convoy...

Queen Libussa was a legendary witch in central Europe. But you won’t have heard of her. She lived a thousand years ago. One day, in a trance like state, while she was standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down at the River Vltava and the forest on its far side, she spoke a prophecy saying: “ I see a great city. Its glory will touch the stars ”. Then she said to one of her courtiers, “ In the fo...

In last week’s programme I did the first part of a programme remembering the 60thanniversary of the beginning of Australia’s involvement in the war in Vietnam. A war to stop the brutal Stalinist regime of Ho Chi Minh from taking over the democratic country of South Vietnam. I was joined for that programme by Gary McKay (now with Mat McLachlan Battlefield Tours), a nasho, who served in Vietnam as a...

Time flies when you’re having fun. 31st July 2022 is the 60thAnniversary of Australia committing troops to the war in Vietnam. I was university student during those heady days and I was totally sucked in by that slick left wing propaganda machine. The left, the same people who had sold Hitler as being a good guy, until Germany invaded Russia, then made the tens of millions of their own people who...

By the end of World War II, the 125,000 men of Bomber Command weren’t just forgotten but were shunned. There was a deep sense of shame at the devastation that had been inflicted on Germany and its cities by what is called the indiscriminate area bombing campaign. I can understand the mood as being something like I experienced when the war in Vietnam came to an end. The brave men and women who serv...

On 9 November 1934, five years before World War 2 began, a schoolboy in the German city of Dresden, wrote an essay on aerial warfare. He imagined what would happen if some enemy decided to bomb his city. He wrote: “ The sirens howled and the people fled into their air-raid shelters. The bombs fell with deafening noise, blowing in windows and destroying all the houses.. Vast flames rage over Dresde...

Your everyday working life is, or was if you’ve retired, getting up out of bed, getting dressed for work and then heading off. At the end of the day you’d come home. It would be a shocking experience if you, or any of your work mates suffered some sort of reasonably serious work place accident. That would really throw you. But if you were a crew member of a Lancaster bomber flying regular bombing...

In Don McNaughton’s book about his father’s wartime experiences when he was the mid-upper gunner on a Lancaster bomber during World War 2, retold in “ Lucky Pommie Bastard ”, he talks about the night, some time after his father had passed away, that he and his mother watched a programme on TV about the British bombing campaign against Germany in World War 2. His mother told him she found it helpfu...

In 1939 the cost of travelling by cruise ship from Australia to England was beyond the wildest dreams of your average Australian. Overseas travel was an absolute luxury and only for the very richest people. Most Australlian workers at this time got one week’s paid annual leave. Not much good if you wanted to spend two months sailing to England and then spend another two months sailing back. There...

Today we know that China is doing fabulously well and winning the cyber and technological wars. How do we know this? Because China is telling us it is. Hang on. China said there was no terrible new virus breaking out from its laboratory in Wuhan and went out of its way to hide the story. Problem with a pandemic is that sooner or later you have to fess up. Well they didn’t fess up but the rest of t...

Woody Allen started performing as a stand up comic in New York. Some really funny stuff. But who would ever have thought that he was a prophet! I mean he’s Jewish, which has a history going back thousands of years of having some extraordinary prophets. But this will really throw you. I’m going to tell you that the Chinese Communist Party probably has you under surveillance inside your home right n...

Liu Xiaobo is a dangerous man. The Nobel Peace Prize website tells us this about how serious a threat he poses to the freedom, peace loving Chinese Communist Party. Liu was born on the 28th December 1955. He studied literature and philosophy. Then he worked as a literary critic and university lecturer in Beijing. He took a doctorate in 1988. After that he was a guest lecturer at universities throu...

The Chinese Communist Party has emerged as the major threat that Australia is facing today to our national security and even our national sovereignty. But the news isn’t all bad. In the event of a military conflict, the technology that Australian scientists have developed give, at least, them a guaranteed successful outcome. That might sound a ridiculous thing to say but I say it with absolute con...

Here’s a bit of fun. Complete this sentence: “ There is a common sentiment in China that government officials will only speak the truth when … ” – over to you. Finish that sentence. I’m sorry times up. If you said “ when they are drunk or careless ” you were right. That question was read out of a standard book, “ Human Resources Management ” by Raymond J Stone, then used at Monash University in Me...

I love this story. In 2014, Prime Minister Tony Abbott made his first visit to China. One of the people who went with him was his chief of staff, Peta Credlin. They were attending the Boao Forum. A Chinese Communist Party initiative for meetings of high level leaders from government, business and academics to share their visions on the most pressing issues in this part of the world. It also enjoys...

In February 2019, a female Chinese born and resident student, attending the Australian National University in Canberra, made a comment in class. To an Australian who heard her comment, they would think nothing of it, the comment she made was just part of the normal exchange of ideas and thoughts that happen all of the time in class and interacting with other students on campus. But that isn’t the...

There are over one million people in Australia of ethnic Chinese descent. World wide there are over 50 million ethnic Chinese, living in countries other than China. The earliest date when the first Chinese visited Australia isn’t known for sure. But maybe this gives us a clue. In one book by Confucius, in his “ Spring and Autumn Annals ”, written in 481 BC he recorded that two solar eclipses were...

Myths and legends. It’s funny how some ideas get a hold on your head and you either never realise it, or it’s just so against what you know that you just refuse to believe it. I’ll give you a for example. A lot of people think that the ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, is a body funded by the Australian government, independent with its own charter, that provides a neutral, even handed,...