Essays in Idleness

In years past, I would rely on a date book, to remind me of important public events. I had one, for instance, fifty years ago, in which the 200th anniversary of the Botany Bay landing was pre-printed. It wouldn’t have been necessary to consult it, however, for the visit of Her Majesty the Queen to Australia was then prominent in the news. It was, undoubtedly, a glorious anniversary, of which all Australians — note that I wrote, “all” — could be proud. I recall feeling almost antipodean myself that day, for I had been blessed with Australian acquaintance from a very early age; and have been ever since. I could fill pages with memoir of impressive characters I have met from that “far south.”

To a Canadian, that island continent is also a special place for the heart, coloured pink on our old classroom maps of the world: our brothers and our sisters of the Britannic realm.

Captain Cook himself, the first European to look upon Australia’s east coast, with what I must guess was “a wild surmise,” remains by any standard a hero. His feats as navigator — as explorer, surveyor, and cartographer — are in several ways unmatched and unrepeatable in the history of the world.

Australia was only a part of his discoveries and researches, and in Canada’s Newfoundland he also deserves his monument. I have stood upon that hill, over the city of Corner Brook, amid the Blomidon Mountains, and viewed at dusk that water passage, with its string of holy outports, to our own Bay of Islands. It was Captain Cook who accurately surveyed the entrance to the Saint Lawrence, thus speeding General Wolfe to Quebec. Captain Cook stands there in statue, with his quadrant, and likewise stands in statue on our opposite frontier, upon that island named for his protégé, George Vancouver. His noble Whitby collier, the HMS Endeavour, sailed right around the world, and her crew endured terrible privations, to achieve what they did.

Yesterday was the 250th anniversary. Two more generations have now flit by, and as I learn from Australian correspondents, it is not just the Batflu that has tamped celebrations. The Marxist filth are a virus in Australia as they are everywhere else — we saw their work recently in the incarceration of the obviously innocent Father Pell. Wherever great accomplishments of men would be commemorated, for the inspiration of the young and free, these vicious and ignorant “antifa” creatures will be there instead, in their ghoulish costumage, spreading their moral stench. Nihilists, they condemn events upon which their own existence still depends.

It is our duty as civilized men and women to confront these “post-modern” savages, and drive them off, until once more they can be ignored and, except by the devil, forgotten.