Terry Barnes

During the cold months of July and August, many southern Australians head north to warmer climes. A favourite destination is north Queensland, with its jungles, rainforests, mangrove swamps and rivers. And saltwater crocodiles. David Hogbin, a 40-year-old father-of-three and GP from New South Wales, was one such sun-seeking tourists. He travelled north with his family on holiday, but will never return home. After falling into a river when a path he was walking on gave way, he was eaten by a crocodile. Crocodile attacks in Australia are big news because they’re so rare Hogbin's death is tragic, not least because he leaves behind a young family, but because this incident last Saturday was a desperate mishap. It is hard to see how he could have avoided his fate.

Jack Karlson, whose death this week aged 82 has been reported in Britain and around the world, was an Australian small-time crook, prison escaper and colourful character who had a tough and difficult life. He was also, however, the reluctant star of a 1991 TV news report that later became an internet sensation. Back then, Karlson was having a bite to eat in a local Chinese café in suburban Brisbane, when, like Monty Python’s Spanish inquisition, a posse of Queensland police suddenly and unexpectedly swooped to arrest him. Thanks to a tip-off to a journalist, it was all captured on camera.

Convicted spy Julian Assange has come home to Australia. Assange’s chartered private jet touched down in Australia’s capital, Canberra, early in the evening local time to a hero’s reception. That the plea-bargaining deal ensuring his freedom was executed in a remote courthouse on the American territorial island of Saipan, in the isolated western Pacific but satisfying American demand that Assange be convicted on American territory, added a bizarre touch of the exotic to the whole tawdry business. It was a rubber stamp stopover en route from London to Canberra. Assange is a figure of whom we are ashamed to call our own It’s appropriate the deed was done on Saipan.

A government-sanctioned programme to cull the brumby mobs of wild horses in Australia’s High Country has become a hot political issue in New South Wales and Victoria, the two states whose border is straddled by the Snowy Mountains. Immortalised in Australian literature through the famous 1890 bush ballad ‘The Man from Snowy River’, by the poet and journalist Andrew ‘Banjo’ Paterson, to many, these wild horses represent a living part of the Australian national legend.  Set in the Snowy Mountains, the poem tells the story of a posse of riders who chase down a mob of wild horses – brumbies – to recapture an escaped racehorse colt who has joined them. It's a story that triggers pride in a great many Australians.

Whatever one thinks of all that happened in the Covid years, and how the experience scarified so many and even compelled us to question the solidity of democratic institutions and values throughout the West, most of us simply want to forget. The Covid time is like a relationship gone bad: it’s easier to cope by burying it it and moving on. In Australia this week, however, unpleasant reminders of the dark Covid time resurfaced in an unexpected place: the national King’s Birthday honours list. What a face-slapping insult Andrews’s gong is to Victorians Since dispensing with imperial honours several decades ago, the highest civilian honour here is to be appointed by the King as a Companion of the Order of Australia.

In the unedifying clash of heads between billionaire Twitter/X owner, Elon Musk, and Australia’s e-safety commissioner Julie Inman Grant, there could only be one rightful winner. Elon Musk. On Monday, Musk’s X succeeded in having a temporary injunction thrown out by Australia’s Federal Court preventing it and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta from posting images of last month’s Sydney stabbing. An Armenian Orthodox bishop, Mar Mari Emmanuel, was attacked in his church, allegedly by a religiously radicalised youth, in April. The incident was captured by the church’s own livestream of the event and beamed across the internet: the footage is disturbing but already there for the world to see, if anyone chose to see it.

The Northern Territory News, Darwin’s daily paper, is known worldwide for its front pages with headlines so cleverly lurid that they outshine the efforts of the Sun’s Kelvin McKenzie in his editorial heyday. Over the years, the newspaper has run front pages highlighting everything from UFO and mythical beast sightings to the bizarre behaviour of Territorians, who, if you go by the NT News, are no strangers to acting oddly. But there’s one hot topic always guaranteed a NT News front page when it comes up: crocodiles. ‘I love crocodiles and anytime we have a good one we put it on the front page,’ a former NT News editor, Matt Williams, once said. ‘When we get a good crocodile story, we actually sell more papers.

In her new book, Liz Truss says she likes Australia and Australians. The country is, she says, ‘like Britain without the hand-wringing and declinism’. But had Truss cared to scratch beneath the surface on her visits Down Under, she might have realised that Australians today are anything but the laid-back, easygoing, and ‘she’ll be right’ society of our national mythology. Following the Hamas atrocities of 7 October, things have only got worse Far from it. Australians are struggling to keep a lid on social, political, ethnic and religious tensions reflected in their society.

Sydney has been rocked by another stabbing rampage – just days after six people were murdered in a knife attack in the city's Bondi Junction. A bishop of the Assyrian Orthodox Church, Mar Mari Emmanuel, was knifed at the altar during the incident yesterday afternoon in the working-class suburb of Wakeley. Several other parishioners were also injured as they sought to disarm the attacker. Police have arrested a teenager and are treating it as a terrorist attack. The horror was broadcast on the livestream of the Assyrian Christ The Good Shepherd Church, meaning that thousands of followers witnessed the attack. News of the stabbings spread fast among the local Assyrian community, and an angry mob descended on the church.

While the King and the Princess of Wales both battle cancer, the business of monarchy goes on. In the realms of the Commonwealth that includes ensuring the Crown is represented in each respective constitutional government. In Australia, though, the choice of candidate for governor-general is far from reassuring news for the monarchy. Samantha ‘Sam’ Mostyn, an activist and lawyer, was named by Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese as the country’s 28th governor-general. ‘Ms Mostyn is known for her exceptional service to the Australian community. She is a businesswoman and community leader with a long history in executive and governance roles across diverse sectors’, said Albanese.

Captain James Cook has fallen. Not on the shore of Hawaii’s Kealakekua Bay on Valentine’s Day 1779, but in the Melbourne bohemian bayside suburb of St Kilda. His statue was sawn off at the ankles in the dead of night with an angle grinder; his plinth daubed in a blood-red, anti-colonial slogan. The culprits haven’t been caught yet. Their act of vandalism happened on the eve of Australia Day, celebrated on 26 January as the anniversary of the day in 1788 when a British penal settlement was established by a motley crew of seamen, marines and convicts, which ultimately became the great city of Sydney and the birthplace of modern Australia.

What do you do if you have dozens of combat helicopters you don’t want? If you’re the Australian government, you dismantle them and turn them into landfill. That’s the imminent fate of 45 Australian Army and Royal Australian Navy MRH-90 Taipan helicopters, grounded since a crash in Queensland last summer and withdrawn from service. Australia has had something of a troubled history with its European-UK designed MEH-90s, the Taipan being an adaptation of the NH-90 type currently in service with a number of Nato countries. Severe procurement and operating cost blowouts, mechanical failures, high maintenance costs, difficulty in obtaining spare parts, and several whole-fleet groundings have plagued the aircraft.

Australia's government has been determined to ‘do a Barbados’ and ditch the British monarchy for an Australian republic with an Australian president. But now, it seems, prime minister Anthony Albanese has lost his nerve. In the week that the first Australian coins of Charles III’s reign entered general circulation, and it was confirmed the King and Queen will visit Australia later this year, Albanese and his government scuttled away from his party’s proclaimed republican intentions with a speed that makes even Rishi Sunak look decisive and in control.

In the days after the 7 October attack on Israel, Australia vowed to stand with Israel. It appears to have forgotten that pledge. When the United Nations General Assembly voted in October in favour of an immediate humanitarian truce in Gaza, Australia abstained because the motion failed to explicitly mention, let alone condemn, Hamas. James Larsen, Australia’s representative to the UN, said he could not support the resolution because its failure to name the 7 October culprits meant it was 'incomplete'. Last night, the UN General Assembly again voted resoundingly in favour of a ceasefire. This time, Australia abandoned its principles, broke with the United States and the United Kingdom, and supported the motion – despite it still failing to condemn Hamas.