As Australian readers may know, there is an impending funding crisis for Trove:
The National Library is threatening to pull the plug on Trove, its free online service that provides public access to collections from Australian libraries, universities, museums, galleries and archives. (Read more about it at The Conversation.)
Regular readers know that I am not into what has been described as Anzackery. Nor am I interested in family history, tracing back generations of people about whom nothing is known apart from their BDM dates. But on the one and only day I attended an Anzac service, I thought of the people in the family archives. Many years ago my first mother-in-law told me about them as we travelled to Swan Hill to visit her sister. It is through Trove that I have been able to confirm and expand on her family story.
The expeditionary forces path the ADF seems destined to pursue is not new. It is as old as colonialism. Joseph Conrad captured the sense well at the beginning of his book Heart of Darkness:
“In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she [a French warship] was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives – he called them enemies! – hidden out of sight somewhere.”
Australia’s defence delusions increase the risk of deadly conflict
