Attachment to Weekly News, 30 March 2025
http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/
Jackspeak
Gets on my tits Jack’s usual way of describing something or someone that annoys him; note also grudge fight.
Getting the logbook Recent sexual activity
stamped
Defence Records
including:
- Health records
- Incident and inquiry records
- Psychology records
- Service records
:https://www.defence.gov.au/about/accessing-information/personal-information-requests .
Marty Grogan forwarded these:
Marles give aways
Marles confirms just $1bn in defence spending to be accelerated in federal budget
The Albanese government will accelerate just $1bn worth of Defence spending in Tuesday’s federal budget over and above its already-planned funding trajectory, defying growing calls for a substantial funding boost for new military capabilities.
Richard Marles revealed on Monday that there would be a $10.6bn increase in Defence funding over the four-year forward estimates period, with $1bn of that reallocated into the 2026-27 and 2027-28 budget years.
“Part of the $10.6bn sees the bringing forward of an additional $1bn, and that’s because of the need to accelerate Australia’s capability development,” the Defence Minister said at the Avalon Airshow on Monday.
None of the four-year funding forecasts are new money, as they are part of the government’s promised $50bn in extra Defence spending over a decade.
But Mr Marles said the funding represented “the most significant increase in defence spending in peacetime Australia since the end of the Second World War”.
The brought-forward funding would go towards readying Perth’s HMAS Stirling naval base for the rotation of US submarine rotations, progressing the government’s guided weapons enterprise, and accelerating the purchase of new general purpose frigates, Mr Marles said.
“The acceleration of the $1bn is really there to ensure that the very ambitious timelines that we have in relation to all of this are going to be met,” he said.
The government had been considering bringing forward as much as $5bn in extra spending, according to its discussions with industry, but ultimately opted for just a fifth of that figure.
The announcement came after Treasurer Jim Chalmers played down the likelihood of a big Defence budget boost.
“We’ve already made huge commitments in defence spending,” he said on Sunday.
“We’re taking defence spending from about 2 per cent of our economy to more than 2.3 per cent in the course of the next decade or so.
“An extra $50 billion plus in defence spending that’s already in the budget. That’s an important way that we keep Australians safe and make our country and our economy more secure.”
The small funding boost comes despite mounting US pressure for a substantial increase, with the Trump administration’s nominee for a senior Pentagon post, Elbridge Colby, calling for Australia to lift annual spending by more than $25bn to lift the Defence budget to 3 per cent of GDP.
Peter Dutton has vowed a Coalition government would spend “much more” on Defence, but has declined to put a number on the increase beyond an extra $3bn for a promised extra squadron of F-35 fighters.
LEUT GAVIN CAMPBELL RAN Rtd
Gentlemen,
Today's funeral for LEUT Gavin Campbell RAN (ret) went off superbly, a simple service to a full house.
It was remarkable that men from all three of the Perth ships were there, along with many friends and relatives.
Navy's part in the ceremony was executed perfectly, with the AWE and Gavin's cap, sword and medals adorning the casket. Lee Goddard spoke some well chosen words and presented an ensign to Mrs Sue Campbell. The playing of The Last Post and Reveille was especially moving.
The Campbell family and everyone there were grateful for Navy's participation, and wish to express their deepest thanks to VADM Barrett and all concerned. It was a proud moment.
I've attached the eulogy I gave for those who might want to read it.
Best wishes
Mike Carlton
Funeral Oration
SBLT Gavin Cambell, RAN – survivor from HMAS Perth (I)
Deliverd by Mike Carlton 15 December 2015.
It is a great honour to be asked to speak about Gavin today, because he's perhaps the bravest man I ever met. One of the finest men I ever met.
I ask you to picture this scene. It is the year 1942, on Wednesday the 25th of February. Singapore has fallen to the Japanese, and they are now sweeping south towards the Dutch East Indies, modern day Indonesia. Conquering and crushing all in their path, apparently unbeatable and unstoppable. Australia is in mortal peril.
Tanjung Priok...which is the harbour for Batavia, now Jakarta...is burning in pillars of fire and oily black smoke, the port devastated by waves of Japanese air raids. The cruiser HMAS Perth has just arrived from Australia to join the fight, and she is alongside fuelling at a wharf and fighting off the Japanese bombers as they come over.
In a brief lull between air raids, there is time for a few beers in the wardroom to celebrate a birthday. Sub Lieutenant Gavin Campbell, a lanky young bloke from Portland in Victoria, has turned 21 this day. In the custom of the time, he's officially come of age, become a man. Perth's captain, Hec Waller, comes in for a drink, for Gavin is his secretary. And another guest is Lieutenant Commander Robert Rankin, captain of the little sloop HMAS Yarra, which is berthed nearby. Both these men will be dead within days, killed on the bridge in command, fighting their ships against hopeless, overpowering odds.
Perth sails that afternoon. She is to join an allied force of Dutch, British and American cruisers and destroyers off East Java, in what will be a gallant but hopeless attempt to turn back a Japanese invasion force. At the Battle of the Java Sea, on the night of February 27, that Allied squadron is badly mauled and beaten. Two Dutch cruisers and one British and three Allied destroyers are sunk.
Perth survives, and the next day she is ordered to make a break for it, to head south. But on that night the 28th of February, she and the American cruiser USS Houston are attacked by a swarm of Japanese destroyers in the Sunda Strait, the narrow passage of water between the islands of Java and Sumatra.
Captain Waller fights back, but the odds are hopeless. Perth is struck by three torpedoes and a blizzard of gunfire, left shattered and sinking. Not long after midnight comes the order to abandon ship. The night is black, the water dark and threatening, but men begin jumping into the sea. Gavin leaves his action station at one of the .5 machine guns aft and is on the rail and about to jump himself when the fourth and final enemy torpedo hits the ship and blows him high into the air.
It was like floating through the sky, he told me. Luckily, he was wearing his life jacket, his Mae West, and when he came-to in the water it held him up. But only to find, as he tried to swim, that he had a broken leg, trailing uselessly behind him. The pain must have been excruciating, but somehow he hauled himself onto a raft with some other men and there an Able Seaman named Bob Collins came to his help.
Collins had his sailor's knife with him, his "pusser's dirk." He used it to hack off some strips of wood from a floating packing case, slashed Gavin's overalls to make bandages, and he splinted the leg as best he could on this bobbing, lurching raft. It was the first of countless acts of mateship given and received by these Perth sailors in the months and years ahead, and it saved Gavin's leg and his life.
But his ordeal, though, was far from over in these terrible days after the sinking. It had just begun. When they eventually staggered ashore on Java, Gavin - barely able to move - found himself alone on a beach with another wounded sailor, Able Seaman Denny Maher, a young bloke from Sydney.
"We can't just stay here," Gavin told him. "We've got to move on or we'll die." They decided they would try to escape the Japanese by heading south...their only hope. Perhaps there would be some Allied troops they could link up with. Using sign language, Denny Maher got some local villagers to make a rough crutch from the branch of a tree, which he padded with some kapok pulled out of a life jacket.
And they began their extraordinary trek. An odyssey. For three weeks these two staggered down the coast of Java, in the burning tropical heat of March: Gavin wracked with waves of pain, limping and hobbling...both of them tormented by hunger and thirst. Sometimes the villagers might give them a handful of rice..or they would drink muddy water from puddles. At other times the locals were hostile and threatening, scared of the Japanese, and moved them on.
Three weeks. There were some days when Gavin simply couldn't move at all...but Denny Maher stuck with him. They encouraged each other, abused each other in salty sailor's language, cajoled and cursed each other. But they went on, unbeatable, indomitable. Until eventually they entered a small town, where a Dutch Eurasian nurse discovered them, took them in, and bathed their wounds and fed them. The Japanese arrived the next day.
For Gavin, this was the beginning of three long, agonising years as a prisoner-of-war. Three years of cruel abuse, of atrocities, of savagery the rest of us can only imagine. Three years of your mates sick and dying around you, in the horrors of the Burma-Siam Railway. There were 681 men in Perth's ship's company the night she was lost. Only 328 of them survived the battle. 106 of them died as prisoners of the Japanese. Less than a third of her ship's company, 218 men, lived to return to Australia.
Miraculously, against all the odds, Gavin's broken leg came good and he could walk again, although with a slight limp that would last a lifetime. In October 1942 he was in a group taken from the notorious Changi Prison in Singapore and packed into the hold of what they called a hell-ship, a filthy crowded transport which took them to Burma and the railway. One of those with him was a Perth shipmate who would become, eventually, one of his oldest and best mates, Able Seaman Frank McGovern, a young bloke from Sydney, aged 23. Frank is with us here today.
The nightmare began. Of men worked until they were skeletons, bashed or shot by their guards if they did not. Hunger and disease and sickness were their constant companions - cholera, dengue fever, amoebic dysentery, hideous tropical ulcers. Gavin came down with Beri Beri, a disease caused by starvation and vitamin deficiency...in which the body swells up with fluid, like a great bladder of poison. Untreated, it's fatal, and very swiftly so. But miraculously, he was nursed back to health by an Australian doctor, Albert Coates, and a Dutch chemist, also a prisoner, who had developed a vitamin injection from some local fruit. It was his second, perhaps third escape from death. Not his last.
Gavin endured the endless agony of those three years as a PoW with the strength and courage and unbreakable spirit that were the hallmarks of his life. He found an elder brother on the railway, too: Ian Campbell, an army signaller who'd been captured at the Fall of Singapore. They had a brief, emotional reunion at what they called the 40-kilo mark on the railway before they were dragged their separate ways again.
In 1945, in the last days of the war, it was Gavin's turn to give mateship. The Japanese marched them from a place called Tamarkan to a new camp outside Bangkok. Another of Perth's officers, the assistant navigator, Lieutenant Lloyd Burgess, was too weak to make it on his own. Gavin carried him most of the way, mile after mile after mile through the jungle. That saved Lloyd Burgess's life. Both of them made it back. Lloyd's son and daughter-in-law are with us today.
Gavin was liberated in Thailand. Suddenly, a British commando appeared from out of the jungle with a sub-machine gun, and it was all over. War's end. In what must have been an utterly surreal transformation, they put him up in Bangkok's most luxurious hotel, the Oriental, and eventually got him on a plane to Australia. He arrived at Melbourne's old Essendon airport on the 15th of November, 1945...on a chilly day. There was no one there to meet him, so he went over to a Red Cross Hut and explained to the lady there that he'd just returned from being a prisoner of war of the Japanese.
"Well, " she said. "I suppose you'd like a cup of tea then."
Gavin stayed on in the navy for a while, until 1950, but it must have been tough. In those days nobody had heard of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. They just told you told you to try to forget what had happened - best not to talk about it - just pick yourself up and get on with it. Many men relived the ordeal of the railway with the most terrible nightmares, night after night, and it broke a lot of them. But not Gavin.
He told me his story as I was writing my book about HMAS Perth and her crew a few years ago. We spent a lot of time together, putting it all down. And I am proud to say we became friends. Never once did I hear from him even a hint of boasting or bravado or bullshit. No flag-waving, no attempt to glorify his own part in it all. He was unfailingly modest and humble, to the point where sometimes I had to drag it out of him.
Yet he wanted the story told. Not to brag, or to portray himself as some heroic figure. Nothing could have been further from his mind. But I think it was important to him for his shipmates who had not returned, important that their story should be recorded and not forgotten. So he told it with simplicity and honesty, anxious only that it should be true and accurate.
But, as always with Gavin, there were flashes of a delicious, dry wit and humour - a twinkle in his eye - that made him such a delightful man to be with. I asked him once about one of his former navy captains. "Complete bastard," he said. "Much worse than the Japanese."
The sinking of Perth wasn't all bad, he would say. It meant he hadn't had to pay that wardroom mess bill for all those beers he'd bought on his 21st birthday. A few years ago, when I told him I was taking a television crew up to the Sunda Strait to dive on the wreck of Perth, he looked at me in horror. "If you find that bill, " he said," just leave it there. I couldn't afford the interest." I can see him now, lanky frame hunched in a chair, chuckling at the thought of it.
Most striking of all, there was no bitterness nor hatred to him. Life dealt Gavin a bad hand. Like all his generation, he was a child of the Depression. The war stole the best years of his young manhood. After the war he found happiness in his marriage to Adrienne, until she was stricken by polio. Then, in 1999, he was diagnosed with mesothelioma, the asbestos poisoning that got him in the end.
But never once - never - did I hear a word of complaint, or anger,or regret. He was calm, almost serene, in a way. This surprised and puzzled me at first. It was not what I had expected, and I couldn't quite understand it. But I came to think it was because he had seen so much violence and killing, cruelty and horror, sickness and death - so much of man's inhumanity to man - that he wanted no more part of it. Many of the other PoWs were like that, too. They'd seen enough.
I think he believed that if he had succumbed to hatred, or a thirst for revenge, or if he wallowed in self-pity, these things would eventually corrode his soul and his spirit, and destroy him. And Gavin Campbell was not to be destroyed. It was a characteristic he shared with many of those former Perth POWs I had the good luck and the privilege to meet. Frank McGovern, Arthur Bancroft, Fred Lasslett, Fred Skeels, and many more. Extraordinary men who rose above and triumphed over the worst that life could throw at them. And they stuck together in the HMAS Perth Association, a band of brothers.
In the words of Alfred Lord Tennyson, in his epic poem, Ulysses, they were:
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Gavin never yielded. Instead, he cherished and nurtured those things most close to him. The things that mattered. Home, family, mates. Small pleasures, like a good whisky or a bad game of golf, or following the Sydney Swans (probably his only major flaw and failing.) The Royal Australian Navy remained an important part of his life, for he was proud of his service. In fact he loved the Navy, and he followed with interest and loyalty the two later ships named Perth, first a guided missile destroyer and the present-day Perth, a frigate. He was a sailor to the end. I'll tell you something Sue told me - Gavin's lying there now wearing his HMAS PERTH ASSOCIATION dress shirt, and a Sydney Swan's scarf.
The navy returned the respect, deeply felt. Gavin's last visitor in hospital before he died was the current commanding officer of HMAS Perth 3, Captain Ivan Ingham. Another former Perth CO is with us today: Commodore Lee Goddard, who knew Gavin and admired him deeply,who loved inviting him to visit the ship and who is here today as a brother officer; a friend ; and also officially representing the Chief of Navy, Vice Admiral Tim Barrett, by whose order the Australian White Ensign adorns Gavin's casket today. Lieutenant Campbell was the last surviving officer of HMAS Perth. The Navy salutes one of its true heroes. One of the men who built the traditions that inspire the Navy today.
But for Gavin it was the people who mattered most. Old shipmates, like Frank McGovern. That shared hell of the railway forged the unbreakable bonds of true mateship which held Frank and Gavin together for 70 years, closer than brothers. Here in Sydney they would meet on the second Thursday of every month, without fail, year in year out, just to share a beer and keep touch, for as long as they lived. Frank felt he couldn't speak today, but reckoned that I'd know what to say on his behalf.
But I don't really. I don't have the words, beyond telling you that these two are the best and finest men I have ever had the privilege to meet. Frank lost his brother Vince, who went down with Perth in the Sunda Strait. Today he farewells another brother, a loss that is profound, infinite. You have our sympathy, mate.
But above all for Gavin there was family. Sue, the wife he loved for 30 years and who loves him still. His children, grandchildren, two great grandchildren, who also have our deepest sympathy in this time of their loss.
But we are all of us in sorrow today, in the sadness of final parting. But I like to think of it, too, as a celebration of a life well lived. And how lucky we were that our lives were touched by this fine man. A sailor and warrior who gave so much in the service of our country in its time of need and peril. It is a debt that we can repay only by keeping the memory alive...
Gavin Campbell was a kind, gentle and humble man of extraordinary grace and humanity. How good it was to know him. How sad it is to say goodbye this one last time.
Gavin, in the sailors' farewell: may you have fair winds and following seas.
You were a truly great Australian.
Rocky Freier forwarded this:
BROADSIDE
Members,
Your MARCH edition of BROADSIDE is now available to read in book format:
https://online.fliphtml5.com/qchrf/fles/
or,
you can read it at:
https://navyvic.net/broadside/march2025broadside.html
or,
you can download the .pdf file:
https://navyvic.net/broadside/march2025broadside.pdf
Please feel free to distribute widely.
Yours Aye!
NVN Team
Ward Hack forwarded these:
Victor Osborne: Second World War naval veteran
Sailor who witnessed the flash of the Nagasaki atomic bomb and who was the last of those who served in the battlecruiser HMS Hood
Victor Osborne joined the Royal Navy as a Boy Second Class at the age of 15, initially at the new training establishment HMS St Vincent.
On November 5, 1934, he joined his first ship, HMS Hood, the largest warship in the world. During his last few months in Hood, it was a part of a Franco-British non-intervention force in Spanish waters, safeguarding British interests, protecting maritime trade and seeking to prevent the civil war from spreading. He left HMS Hood on September 26, 1937, nearly four years before its destruction by the German battleship Bismarck, with the loss of at least 1415 men.
In total, Osborne served in 11 ships and establishments during his career in the Royal Navy, including, notably, the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle. He was serving in Eagle when war was declared in September 1939, and remained on board until mid-1942. During this time the ship was involved in intensive hostilities in the Indian Ocean, the South Atlantic and particularly in the Mediterranean.
His specialisation in torpedoes and explosives allowed him to be landed ashore in Crete with six torpedo men to destroy the airfield. “We very nearly became prisoners of war when German paratroopers dropped right on top of us,” he recalled. “My six colleagues were lost when HMS Eagle was sunk some months later.”
On another occasion he said, “I was landed in Libya with nine Swordfish aircraft, joining a brigade with Australians to capture Benghazi. However, Eagle had to retire to Alexandria as Rommel advanced.” In Egypt, the Italian air force had dropped mines in the Suez Canal. Osborne added: “I volunteered to walk along the bottom of the canal in a rebreathing suit to search for mines to be destroyed.”
In October 1940, Osborne volunteered for service in submarines and in June 1942 was posted to HMS Dolphin, home of the Royal Navy’s submarines. During this time he trained in the submarine HMS Thunderbolt. It had originally been HMS Thetis, lost in Liverpool Bay just before the war with heavy loss of life, and was subsequently salvaged.
Thunderbolt was carrying out trials with “Chariots”, the two-man motorised torpedo that was used successfully in the Mediterranean to attack Italian cruisers. Osborne then returned to general service as it was found that a head wound incurred in Eagle precluded him from submarine service.
On D-Day, June 6, 1944, he was off Normandy, the coxswain of a landing craft. He later related how this was the worst moment of his war. “When the ramp went down, eight soldiers were killed by German machinegun fire. I couldn’t make another run after that as it shook me up so much. I blamed myself for their deaths.”
In July 1944, he was posted to the destroyer HMS Quality. Osborne was involved in the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines and the Battle of Okinawa. Osborne and his shipmates were responsible for rescuing many downed pilots during these battles, while under the threat of kamikaze attack. He described how this was done. “When picking up crashed pilots, we did a slow 13 knots and sent a good swimmer off the forecastle with a cod line tied to his belt. He would grab hold of the airman and be drawn back to a net with two sailors waiting to lift the very heavy airman in his flight gear to our deck.”
Osborne related how he and his shipmates witnessed the flash when the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, and he was in Tokyo Bay in September 1945 to witness the surrender of Japan, ending the Second World War.
Victor Osborne was born in Hackney, east London, on November 11, 1918, Armistice Day. He was one of 11 children of Edward Osborne and Emily (née Wright). His father had fought in the Boer War and the First World War and survived them both, but died in the Luftwaffe’s first daylight raid on London in 1940.
In December 1941, Osborne married Joyce Fox. They had two sons and a daughter, and were married for 60 years until she died in 2001 at the age of 80. A loving husband, a good provider, a loving but stern father, Osborne believed in honour and honesty, was no sufferer of fools, and enjoyed gardening. He is survived by his sons Roger and Michael, his daughter Suzanne, plus many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Osborne was released from the navy in 1949 and pursued the trade of electrician. In 1950, the family emigrated to Australia, where he helped to build hydroelectric plants, hospitals and schools in Tasmania. After spending a couple of years in British Columbia, Canada, from 1954, the family moved to California in 1956 when Osborne took a job as head of maintenance for Walt Disney at the newly constructed Disneyland. In 1970, Osborne left Disney, and the family moved back to British Columbia, where he worked in the Canadian Forces Base, Esquimalt, building destroyers. He retired in 1983 at the age of 65.
In 2020, he was contacted by the HMS Hood Association, who had discovered that Osborne was the last sailor living to have served in HMS Hood. It led to his writing a three-part story of his life for the Hood magazine The Chough. He had learnt to use a computer in his nineties.
Victor Osborne, Royal Navy veteran, was born on November 11, 1918. He died on February 1, 2025, aged 106
Hazel Picking, who has died aged 100, was a visual signaller in the WRNS during the Second World War.
As a Girl Guide, Hazel Roberts (as she was born) had been good at Morse and semaphore, and, coming from a naval family, it was clear during the war that as soon as she became old enough she would join the Women’s Royal Naval Service. She spent a few months at Kensington Secretarial School, but in 1943, aged 18, she volunteered, and was trained at the signals training centre, HMS Cabbala, outside Wigan. Her job was to relay Morse-code signals by light through an Aldis lamp.
Her first trained job was in Rosyth dockyard before she was sent to the shore establishment HMS Rosemarkie on the Black Isle in the Scottish Highlands. At a party in the “Wrennery” on Christmas Night 1943 she met 26-year-old Royal Marines Captain Bernie “Stormy” Webb. She had first seen him through the lens of her signals telescope and thought him “the best-looking of a bad-looking bunch”.
When Webb was posted to Fort Gilkicker in Gosport, Hazel Roberts wangled an appointment to HMS Hornet, the nearby base for fast motorboats. Webb, she recalled, would send out scouts from his unit to find out which pub had beer, and there they would meet. If across the harbour, they would often rush to catch the last ferry back, sometimes having to jump on as it was leaving. They married at the end of 1944, when Webb was about to embark for the war in the Pacific.
On the night before D-Day, when Hazel had finished her watch by sending messages in readiness for the fleet’s departure, she saw the Solent so full of craft that “you could have walked all the way to the Isle of Wight without getting wet”. But when she returned the next morning, “there was not a boat to be seen – just clear blue water.”
On VE-Day she was at the end of the pier at Ryde signal station, unable to join the celebrations, and spent her night on watch sending chatty messages to the few remaining ships in the Solent. She was demobbed at the end of 1945, and Webb returned home in early 1946.
Hazel Mary Roberts was born on January 17 1925 in Poole. She was brought up along the coast in Southampton and educated at the Parents’ National Educational Union school there, and later at Christ’s Hospital, Hertford.
Her father, Edward Roberts, fought in the battleship Vanguard at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, and an ancestor, 18-year-old midshipman John Aikenhead, was killed in the ship of the line, Royal Sovereign, at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
Hazel’s first marriage lasted 10 years, after which she supported herself as a medical secretary, working for Linwood Strong opticians, then for the Blood Transfusion Service in Sutton, and at an X-ray unit in nearby Worcester Park as the medical director’s secretary.
In 1967 she went to Epsom College as school secretary. On Burns Night 1972 she met Thomas Picking on a blind date: during their marriage they travelled extensively in Europe, South Africa and North America, and they later became volunteers and team leaders at Painshill Park in Surrey, where they undertook a wide range of jobs.
Hazel Picking became a donation governor at Christ’s Hospital and presented two pupils to the school. Her husband died in 2009, and she is survived by a son from her first marriage.
Hazel Picking, born January 17 1925, died February 14 2025
JOKES
|
<><>
Last week, I stated this woman was the ugliest woman I had ever seen. I have since been visited by her sister, and now wish to withdraw that statement.
- Mark Twain
<><>
The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending; and to have the two as close together as possible.
- George Burns
<><>
Santa Claus has the right idea. Visit people only once a year.
- Victor Borge
<><>
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
- Mark Twain
<><>
By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one,you'll become a philosopher.
- Socrates
<><>
I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.
- Groucho Marx
<><>
My wife has a slight impediment in her speech. Every now and then she stops to breathe.
- Jimmy Durante
<><>
I have never hated a man enough to give his diamonds back.
- Zsa Zsa Gabor
<><>
Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups: alcohol, caffeine, sugar and fat.
- Alex Levine
<><>
My luck is so bad that if I bought a cemetery, people would stop dying.
- Rodney Dangerfield
<><>
Money can't buy you happiness. But it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.
- Spike Milligan
<><>
Until I was thirteen, I thought my name was: 'SHUT UP.'
- Joe Namath
<><>
I don't feel old. I don't feel anything until noon. Then it's time for my nap.
- Bob Hope
<><>
I never drink water because of the disgusting things that fish do in it.
- W. C. Fields
<><>
We could certainly slow the aging process down if it had to work its way through Congress.
- Will Rogers
<><>
Don't worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, it will avoid you.
- Winston Churchill
<><>
Maybe it's true that life begins at fifty, but everything else starts to wear out, fall out, or spread out.
- Phyllis Diller
<><>
By the time a man is wise enough to watch his step, he's too old to go anywhere.
- Billy Crystal
And the cardiologist's diet: if it tastes good spit it out.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
May your troubles be less, may your blessings be more, and may nothing but happiness come through your door.
1. When one door closes and another door opens, you are probably in prison.
2. To me, "drink responsibly" means don't spill it.
3. Age 60 might be the new 40, but 9:00 pm is the new midnight.
4. It's the start of a brand new day, and I'm off like a herd of turtles.
5. The older I get, the earlier it gets late.
6. When I say, "The other day," I could be referring to any time between yesterday and 15 years ago.
7. I remember being able to get up without making sound effects.
8. I had my patience tested. I'm negative.
9. Remember, if you lose a sock in the dryer, it comes back as a Tupperware lid that doesn't fit any of your containers.
10. If you're sitting in public and a stranger takes the seat next to you, just stare straight ahead and say, "Did you bring the money?"
11. When you ask me what I am doing today, and I say "nothing," it does not mean I am free. It means I am doing nothing.
12. I finally got eight hours of sleep. It took me three days, but whatever.
13. I run like the winded.
14. I hate when a couple argues in public, and I missed the beginning and don't know whose side I'm on.
15. When someone asks what I did over the weekend, I squint and ask, "Why, what did you hear?"
16. When you do squats, are your knees supposed to sound like a goat chewing on an aluminum can stuffed with celery?
17. I don't mean to interrupt people. I just randomly remember things and get really excited.
18. When I ask for directions, please don't use words like "east."
19. Don't bother walking a mile in my shoes. That would be boring. Spend 30 seconds in my head. That'll freak you right out.
20. Sometimes, someone unexpected comes into your life out of nowhere, makes your heart race, and changes you forever. We call those people cops.
21. My luck is like a bald guy who just won a comb."
Attachment to Weekly News, 23 March 2025
http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/
Jackspeak
Get up to speed Absorb all the current or necessary information about a subject; or
Getting up to flying speed describes the first few wets of a drinking session or run ashore.
Get your hat! Said to a sailor who has just committed an offence, since he will need his hat to take off as an offender when he see the bloke
JOKES
If you have any jokes (they are best in written form, which can be copied in Word) you would like to forward, please do. I am running out. Thanks to all who have responded; your jokes are appreciated and will appear in the upcoming weeks.
Russ Dale forwarded this:
Debrief Magazine
Marty Grogan forwarded these:
Future of the RAN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmXyD342lP8
and
"Three-Headed Dog Newsletter" – March 2025
http://www.nhsavic.navyvic.net/.
and
Australian Submarines
failure to upgrade ageing subs sees Australia falter at first AUKUS hurdle
The ageing Collins-class submarines – including HMAS Collins, HMAS Farncomb, HMAS Dechaineux and HMAS Sheean – need major upgrades to keep them in service. Picture: Lt Chris Prescott
Attachment to Weekly News, 16 March 2025
http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/
Jackspeak
George Euphemism for the act of defaecation. Supposed to date from the reign of King George VI. You had to go and say good morning to him twice each day, at ‘colours and at your morning dump’.
Gestapo Yet another soubriquet for Regulating Branch personnel.
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JOKES
If you have any jokes (they are best in written form, which can be copied in Word) you would like to forward, please do. I am running out. Thanks to all who have responded; your jokes are appreciated and will appear in the upcoming weeks.
RSL NSW – REVILLE - March
and Disaster relief for affected veterans and their families
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Russ Dale forwarded this:
Community Survey: Open Arms Digital Mental Health Strategy
If you would like to participate emai DVA at OPENARMSPPASSURANCE@dva.gov.au
This service was founded by Vietnam Veterans and now used for all Veterans.
Marty Grogan forwarded these: Good reading
ANZUS
Australia's Naval Fleet Renewal Faces Urgent Decisions – Frontline
https://frontline.asn.au/news/australias-naval-fleet-renewal-faces-urgent-decisions/
Biography - Warwick Seymour Bracegirdle
https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/bracegirdle-warwick-seymour-28425
Ward Hack forwarded these:
Jessie Mahaffey obituary:
Pearl Harbor serviceman
who cheated death twice
The veteran of the 1941 Japanese attack also escaped the sinkingof another warship during the Second World War and lived to 102
Mahaffey swam to the USS Maryland, left, after the Oklahoma, behind it, was struck and capsized in the attack on Pearl Harbor
Jessie Mahaffey was one of the last 15 known American survivors of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and one of the last three known survivors of USS Oklahoma, a battleship that lost 429 members of its crew when it was sunk on what President Roosevelt called that “day of infamy”.
Mahaffey had another distinction, however. He was almost certainly the last Pearl Harbor veteran to survive the sinking of not one, but two US warships during the Second World War.
A week short of a year after Pearl Harbor he was serving in the Pacific on USS Northampton when that heavy cruiser was torpedoed and sunk by Japanese warplanes.
As he told a local television station in his home state of Louisiana when he turned 100 two years ago: “I never thought I would make it this far, but if I make it a little bit further that’s fine.”
Jessie Alton Mahaffey was born in Florien, a tiny community in western Louisiana, in 1922, to John and Mary Mahaffey. After graduating from high school in the summer of 1941 he and two friends hitchhiked 90 miles to Shreveport to enlist in the US navy, spending the night in a police station because they arrived after the recruitment office had closed and had no money.
Mahaffey was sent to a training camp in San Diego, California, then assigned to the Oklahoma.
Early on the morning of December 7 he was preparing the ship for its annual inspection. “We had a holystone on a broomstick, six of us were scrubbing the deck, and we were just talking, talking. It was a quiet Sunday,” he recalled.
Then, just before 8am local time, Japanese torpedo bombers launched the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor’s battleship row that would suck the US into the war and change the course of the conflict. They flew in low above the water and fired their torpedoes at point-blank range. “We heard a siren, saw planes and smoke. It must have only gone on for 45 minutes but it was crazy,” Mahaffey recalled.
Within 10 minutes the Oklahoma had been hit by three torpedoes. As it began to list to port it was struck twice more and quickly capsized. “It turned upside down and we had to slide over the bottom of the ship into the water,” said Mahaffey. He managed to swim to an adjacent ship, USS Maryland, even though the Japanese were strafing the water.
More than 2400 American servicemen and civilians were killed that day, and nearly 1800 wounded. The Oklahoma suffered the second highest toll of the eight battleships sunk or damaged, with hundreds of her 1200-strong crew trapped below deck.
Mahaffey’s grandson, John, told The New York Times that he believed his father had been transferred from the ship’s powder store a month before the attack — “he went from being in the hull to on the deck, and that saved his life”.
Mahaffey was subsequently assigned to USS Northampton, part of a naval force that engaged Japanese warships in the battle of Tassafaronga on November 30, 1942, to prevent them reinforcing a garrison on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.
Just before midnight the Northampton was hit by two Japanese torpedoes, which tore a huge hole in her port side. Within three hours the crew had to abandon her as she began to sink. “We had to stay on rafts the whole night,” Mahaffey remembered, but on that occasion the loss of life was much less severe, with about 50 sailors killed and nearly 800 rescued.
Mahaffey’s was one of two rafts picked up by PT-109, the patrol boat of which the future president John F Kennedy would take command five months later.
Mahaffey spent most of the rest of the war serving on USS Frederick Funston, an attack transport ship, in the Mediterranean. A month after the conflict ended he received an honourable discharge as a boatswain’s second mate, and returned to his native Louisiana.
There he married Joyce. “My best day would be marrying that little gal that had just turned 18 years old,” he said. “Me, her and her brother went to that church.”
The couple settled outside Many, a town just north of Florien, and had two sons, George and Clarence. Mahaffey worked for more than 30 years as a pole climber for Southwestern Bell, a regional telephone company, and always refused to take a job indoors. His wife died in 2003. He carried on driving, and tending his large garden, until he was nearly 100.
Reflecting on his life, he said: “Finishing school in the 11th grade — that was a highlight. Joining the navy — that was a highlight. Had two ships that were sunk. The first right there at Pearl Harbor, and the second one was in the South Pacific, but I made it through OK.”
Jessie Mahaffey, Pearl Harbor survivor, was born on November 23, 1922. He died on March 1, 2025, aged 102
Richard Fortey, head of palaeontology at the Natural History Museum Credit: Alamy
Richard Fortey, who has died aged 79, enjoyed a long career as head of palaeontology at the Natural History Museum, with a particular interest in trilobites, woodlouse-shaped marine arthropods that roamed the oceans for around 270 million years – well before the dinosaurs and 200 times longer than humans beings have walked the earth – before becoming extinct 250 million years ago; their evolution can help date the history of the earth.
Avuncular, authoritative, slightly craggy, fluent and humorous, Fortey was a born communicator whose documentaries for BBC Four explored such diverse interests as The Secret Life of Rockpools, The Magic of Mushrooms and Islands of Evolution, a three-parter in which he investigated why islands are natural laboratories of evolution.
The wide range of his interests was reflected in popular science books, rich with human stories and literary references, that drew praise from scientists and ordinary readers alike. His Life: An Unauthorised Biography (1997) was listed as one of 10 Books of the Year by The New York Times and cited by John Gribbin as “the best natural history of the first four billion years of life on earth”.
It was a history to which Fortey had contributed through his fascination with trilobites, which had been sparked aged 14 when, fossil hunting in Wales, he saw a promising-looking rock and tapped it with a hammer. “The rock simply parted around the animal like some sort of revelation,” he wrote in Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution (2000). “I was left holding two pieces of rock – surely what I held was the textbook come alive. The long, thin eyes of the trilobite regarded me and I returned the gaze. More compelling than any pair of blue eyes, there was a shiver of recognition across five hundred million years.”
Over six decades his search for the fossils took him to Norway, Canada, the Nevada desert and Australian Outback. As well as discovering many examples new to science, he even ate the closest living relative of a trilobite, a horseshoe crab, in a Bangkok restaurant, noting that it had “a rather overwhelming rancid-fishy taste”.
Fortey earned scientific renown by discovering another purpose for the study of trilobites, which take many shapes, each distinct to a geographical area. While it was known that the continents were once joined in a single land mass, it was less well-known that previously they were apart.
“It became clear that trilobites could inhabit three or four major habitat types,” he told The Biologist journal in 2016. “I could find shallow water ones where shallow seas had flooded former continents, deeper-water ones surrounding the edges of the continents, sometimes intercontinental ones. This coincided with a revolution in plate tectonics, when people started to realise that during the age of these trilobites, the continents were totally different… So for 20 years I was involved in trying to reconstruct what the world was like, using trilobites to define the position of the continents.”
In a 2001 interview with The Sunday Times he likened the fossils to “postage stamps issued by a particular continent”: “I kind of remade the world according to them. When I meet one of my commuting acquaintances on the 6.21 home to Henley-on-Thames, they occasionally inquire what I have done that day. I have been known to reply: ‘I moved north Africa 200km to the east.’”
Richard Alan Fortey was born in Ealing, west London on February 15 1946 to Frank Fortey, and Margaret, née Wilshin, and was fascinated by natural history from early childhood, searching out strange-looking fungi to fossils on holidays with his father, who ran a couple of fishing tackle shops and was a keen fly-fisherman.
Unusually, Ealing Grammar School had a geology teacher who took Fortey’s class on a trip to the Natural History Museum and pointed to a door where, he said, lived “experts who work on fossils”. “I thought: ‘I’d like to be that,’” Fortey recalled.
Fortey took his passion for trilobites to King’s College, Cambridge, where he read Natural Sciences, specialising in palaeontology and taking a PhD under Harry B Whittington, one of the world’s foremost experts on trilobites.
He began his career as a research fellow at the Natural History Museum in 1970, eventually retiring as senior palaeontologist at the museum in 2006. As well as publishing more than 250 scientific papers, he wrote the museum’s book on fossils, now in its fifth edition, while indulging a quirky humour in two pseudonymously penned books in 1981, The Roderick Masters Book of Money Making Schemes, and Not Another Cube Book! (as WC Bindweed), which he described as “an opportunistic work [which] hit the Christmas market and sold vast numbers of copies”.
In 2008 Fortey would publish Dry Store Room No 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum, an affectionate look at his former employer (Dry Store Room No 1 is the place where miscellaneous junk ends up in limbo), with amusing accounts of the politics, scandals and intrigues that have shaped it over the centuries.
Fortey’s first foray into popular science was The Hidden Landscape: A Journey into the Geological Past, which was named Natural World Book of the Year in 1993. Trilobite! An Eyewitness to Evolution was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize.
Before becoming a documentary presenter, Fortey appeared in several David Attenborough series including Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives (1989) and First Life (2010), in which the two men travelled to the Atlas mountains to find trilobite fossils.
In 2011 he used some of the proceeds of his television appearances to buy four acres of ancient beech-and-bluebell woodland in the Chiltern Hills near his home in Henley-on-Thames. He spent two years tempting former colleagues from the Natural History Museum – experts on everything from lichens to moths – to carry out a natural inventory of the wood, and wrote a book about it: The Wood for the Trees (2016).
As well as several medals for his academic work, Fortey’s popular science books earned him the Lewis Thomas Prize for science writing (2003) and the 2006 Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize for the public communication of science.
His other books included Earth: An Intimate History (2005), which was shortlisted for the Royal Society’s Aventis prize, and Survivors: Animals & Plants Time Left Behind (2011) about “living fossils” such as horseshoe crabs which have survived almost unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.
In his last book, Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind (2024), he returned to one of his first loves, drawing together history, geography, language, literature, scientific method and even touches of science fiction in celebration of the morels, puffballs, stinkhorns, inkcaps and magic mushrooms found on his rambles over more than 60 years.
Fortey was Collier Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Technology at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the University of Bristol in 2002 and visiting professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Oxford from 1999 to 2009.
He was elected president of the Geological Society of London for its bicentennial year of 2007. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1997 and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2010, he was appointed OBE in 2023.
Fortey had a son from his first marriage, to Bridget Thomas, and two daughters and a son from his second marriage, to Jacqueline Francis.
Richard Fortey, born February 15 1946, died March 7 2025
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