Just before midnight on 7 December 1941, Flying Officer Peter Gibbes stepped off the train at Kota Bharu on the coast of northeast Malaya after a long, tiring journey up the peninsula from Singapore. Gibbes, an airline pilot in peacetime, had been newly posted to the Royal Australian Air Force’s 1 Squadron, which in the ensuing hours would become the first Australian military unit to see action in the Pacific War.
This video vividly tells the story of Australia’s first action of the Pacific war.
This excellent video was created by the Australian Military Aviation History Association. See more of their great videos and information here.
Why Aotearoa New Zealand’s early Polynesian settlement should be recognised with World Heritage Site status
Reading time: 5 minutes
Despite Aotearoa New Zealand’s rich and celebrated natural and cultural wonders, we have contributed only three to the international list: Te Wahipounamu in the South Island, Tongariro National Park in the North Island, and New Zealand’s sub-Antarctic islands.
While there is a good tentative list of potential submissions, we believe it is now out of date and the country needs to go further. Mostly, we need to be thinking in much broader terms about the reasons we value our heritage.
How do archaeologists know where to dig?
National Geographic magazines and Indiana Jones movies might have you picturing archaeologists excavating near Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge and Machu Picchu. And some of us do work at these famous places. But archaeologists like us want to learn about how people from the past lived all over the planet. We rely on left-behind artifacts to help fill out that […]
Could the Charge of the Light Brigade have worked?
COULD THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE HAVE WORKED? Middle East tensions. Russian soldiers in Crimea. Western nations’ warships in the Black Sea. Those descriptions sound like Russia’s 2014 takeover of Crimea. But they also applied 150 years earlier during The Crimean War between Russia and a British-French-Turkish alliance. That war is largely forgotten now, apart […]
