Credit where it’s due

I thought that John Andersen had two excellent pieces in Saturday’s Bully – links for neither of which are available on their site.

The first was, I thought, a sensitive response to Lendl Ryan’s disgraceful front page trash-piece on 9/10 titled “Cemetery Outrage. Aborigines desecrate city graves”. To quote Happy Valley resident, Ray Condren, from Andersen’s piece “We respect graves. Our own people are buried here…We respect all graves”.

The article and Ray then rightly slam Councillor Brian Hewett’s original defamation of Happy Valley residents in Ryan's trash-piece and shewer Council for it’s own neglect and disrespect for the graves of a number of early (white) settlers of the town.

Andersen also wrote a great piece to mark recent the passing of Bill ‘Kookaburra” Coolburra on Palm Island. Again it’s not available on-line but it respectfully tells the story of a veteran who “served with distinction in not just Vietnam, but in Borneo, Malaysia and Singapore” … “but when he returned to Australia (after working as a Tunnel Rat in Vietnam) he couldn’t go to the RSL or into a bar because Aborigines then were still non-citizens with no right to vote, no right to drink and no right to think he was Australian”