How much time has been wasted on this to achieve what?? Give the fake media something to carry on about for a few days.

thinkabit,

You are incorrect.

The first group to reach what we now call Australia walked out of East Africa and followed basically an unimpeded coastal route between Arabia and Indonesia then managed to make it across the waters separating Sundha and Sahul.

Where did you find the neanderthal link mentioned? I think you have misinterpreted something you read.

Yes, Pete, girt does mean surrounded by!

Thank heavens it is the ocean and not hostiles from our north? Incidentally, we can turn seawater into endlessly sustainable fuel using old science. Just need cheap clean energy!

The process involves vacuum towers and extracting the CO2 content from the flow stream. Then subjecting the CO2 to a number of compressions. Which convert it into a liquid. Then while it is the liquid, combining it with liquid hydrogen. To make alternative diesel, jet fuel and a petrol substitute. Plus plastics and fertilisers.

Interestingly, as CO2 is removed from ocean water in volume, it draws down a similar quality directly from the atmosphere. We could conceivably if intelligently led by pollies, not in the pockets of foreign fuel companies? Become totally self-sufficient in all the above and forever at prices that could send the fossil full robber barons bankrupt?

And You guessed it we'd need a source oF ultra-cheap energy and that ain't coal! Give you three guess what that energy source is? Suggest you look at thorium in five minutes to discover what energy source (around 1 cent PKWH) could make this nation an energy-exporting superpower forever! And address climate change as a direct and first consequence!

And make Oz a place where millions of medical tourists come annually to get treatment with the MSR thorium byproduct, miracle cancer cure, copious bismuth 213!

This would be turbocharged recovery on steroids! But we or rather our hopelessly conflicted pollies don't want that? After all, they'd never ever get permission from their political masters!? Wadda ya reckon?

How one does that actually make us? Or should we redo it as we are, them and us? Girt by carpetbagging foreign nationals all wanting a piece of us and ours!?
Alan B.

National symbols represent traditions, history, and
beliefs of a nation and its people. They help evoke
feelings of patriotism among the country's citizens,
reminds them of their nation's glory, beauty and
rich heritage.

The National Anthem does not need to be perfect.
Few are, and changing a few words is not a disaster
if it makes the Anthem more inclusive. Whether it's
"One and free" or "In peace and harmony" - surely a
consensus can be found ?

Foxy,

A national anthem is just a piece of nation-building propaganda to create an image of unity or oneness irrespective of the ethnic diversity of the nation-state.

Actually the whole idea of nation-building after WW2 including Australia is problematic because there really is no such thing as an intrinsic unity of the peoples within the nation-state.

I don't think anybody in their right mind actually gives two hoots about having a national identity anymore. I like my wife's idea: think about yourself and forget the rest because it is only the dishonest and untrustworthy politicians, bureaucrats and business people who stand to profit from a nation-building agenda.

Thinkabit,

I've never seen any reference to the ancestors of Aboriginal people here taking only three hundred years to migrate from Africa, eventually, perhaps via East Asia (hence Denisovan ancestry), down through the Malayan bottle-neck, the Javanese bottleneck, and the PNG coastal bottle-neck, to Australia. Ten to thirty thousand years seems a more sensible estimate.

After all (and this may come as a surprise to Misop), those ancestors didn't have any World Atlas or Gregory's Road Map: they had no fore-knowledge or awareness about where, generation by generation, they were heading. So of course, they were heading in every direction, perhaps also back towards Africa.

So movement from A to B would have been more a consequence of group population growth in Arabia and India and southern China and Malaya, etc., than human curiosity about what might be over the next hill.

Consequently, thirty thousand years sounds about right. Of course, the Cornish Aboriginal Professor Bruce Pascoe asserts that Aboriginal people have been here for at least 127,000 years and, being a Professor, he should know. Pity about the lack of any evidence, but belief trumps evidence, doesn't it ?

Joe