Contemporary politics,local and international current affairs, science, music and extracts from the Queensland Newspaper "THE WORKER" documenting the proud history of the Labour Movement.
MAHATMA GANDHI ~ Truth never damages a cause that is just.
The flash flooding in Alice Springs left multiple people stranded and in need of rescue. (ABC News: Xavier Martin)
Overnight, dangerous thunderstorms poured almost 100 millimetresof rain on the usually bone-dry Todd River in Alice Springs, in the space of just three hours.
The waters rose rapidly, leaving multiple people stranded in the early hours of Thursday morning.
Three
people resorted to standing on top of a car as the river swelled, while
one woman clung to a tree for hours and waited to be rescued after she
was swept off a bridge.
While
the floodwaters are now slowly receding, they are still flowing, and
emergency services are warning residents they are still dangerous and
could contain strong currents.
From
cars submerged to trees ripped out of the ground and floodwaters
tearing through roads, these are the scenes from the flash flooding in
Alice Springs.
Emergency service workers were on stand-by during the rescue of a woman who was trapped up a tree for multiple hours. (ABC News: Ryan Liddle)
Paramedics helping a woman rescued from the floodwaters. (ABC News: Xavier Martin)
Footage
from Thursday morning showing the flooded Todd River flowing alongside
the Stuart Highway, near the Palm Circuit turn-off. (Supplied/ABC News)
Several vehicle were caught up in the flooding, including this car. (ABC News: Xavier Martin)
Roads were cut off by waves of fast-running water, leaving people stuck on either side of the Todd River. (ABC News: Xavier Martin)
River levels rose dramatically overnight in the Red Centre. (ABC News: Xavier Martin)
Many cars, like this one, had to be abandoned as the floodwaters swept across roads. (ABC News, Xavier Martin)
The flooded Todd River tore through Alice Springs, ripping trees out of the ground in its wake. (ABC News: Xavier Martin)
While
emergency services warned people of the dangers of floodwaters, some
took to the banks of the Todd River looking for excitement. (ABC News: Xavier Martin)
For some Alice Springs locals, seeing the Todd River flow is a novelty, as its banks are usually red dirt. (ABC News: Xavier Martin)
Debris from the Todd River has already washed up on footpaths, but the full scale of the damage is yet to be seen. (ABC News: Xavier Martin)
Strong currents tore out trees along the banks of the usually bone-dry Todd River. (ABC News: Xavier Martin)
North of Alice Springs, the Marshall River flooded the Plenty Highway. (Supplied: Bradd Thexton)
The flooding on the Plenty Highway made the usually dry terrain impossible to cross safely. (Supplied: Bradd Thexton)
Vehicles
parked at the Mercure Alice Springs Resort were impacted by the
flooding overnight, which left mud throughout the car park. (ABC News: Emma Haskin)
The Todd River flowing rapidly on Thursday morning, in a dramatic change for the usually dry river bed. (ABC News)
Crouching
amid a pile of rubble that used to be his Gaza home, Mahmoud Hammad
scoops dirt into a large sieve and shakes it, looking carefully before
dumping it out.
Warning: This story contains graphic content that some readers may find disturbing.
In recent days, tiny bones have appeared.
Mr
Hammad believes they belong to the unborn girl his pregnant wife was
carrying when an Israeli air strike hit the family's building more than
two years ago, killing his wife and their five children.
He
adds the fragments to a box of bones he has collected during months of
burrowing into the wreckage on his own, using picks, shovels and his
hands.
"I won't find them all," Mr Hammad said.
Some
8,000 people remain buried under the rubble of their homes that were
destroyed by Israel's bombardment during its campaign against Hamas,
according to Gaza's Health Ministry.
While air strikes and ground assaults raged, retrieving most was out of the question. But since a ceasefire deal in October, efforts to dig them out have increased, although it has been hampered by a lack of heavy equipment.
Mahmoud Hammad is searching for the remains of his family. (Supplied: AAP)
Wife returned despite shelling
Mr
Hammad said at about 11:30am on December 6, 2023, an Israeli strike
smashed into the six-storey building where his and his brother's
families lived in Gaza City's Sabra neighbourhood.
Mr
Hammad said he had just stepped out of the apartment to go upstairs as
his wife, Nema, who was nine months pregnant, and their five children,
aged 8 to 16, were finishing breakfast.
In the days
leading to the strike, the Israeli military had dropped leaflets over
the area, ordering people to leave and head to the southern half of the
strip. But Mr Hammad said he refused to leave.
Mr Hammad said his wife had taken the children to her parents' home in the nearby Jabaliya district, while he stayed behind.
But
Mr Hammad said his wife wanted to come back despite the bombardment. On
December 5, he said, he found his wife and kids at his door.
Mr Hammad said his wife told him: "Either we live together or we are martyred together."
"They were martyred, and I survived," he said.
His brother, sister-in-law and their four sons were also killed.
Mr
Hammad said he was taken to a nearby clinic with multiple injuries,
including fractures in the chest, pelvis, knee and internal chest
bleeding.
After the strike,
neighbours were able to recover the body of his eldest son, Ismail, and
two of his brother's children, he said.
The rest remained under the rubble.
Digging through his home
Mr Hammad said after recovering from his wounds, he returned to his home's ruins and set up a shelter nearby to live in.
"I stayed with them, my wife and children, in the rubble,"
he said.
"Every day, I am talking to them. Their scent lingered, and I felt a deep connection with them."
He then began the search for their bodies. Mr Hammad said he first sought help from Gaza's Civil Defense corps.
But,
he said, rescue teams never came, either because it was too dangerous
amid intense Israeli bombing or because they did not have the equipment
and machinery to remove the rubble.
So,
Mr Hammad said, he started digging himself. He began with the collapsed
ceilings and walls, breaking them into small stones and putting them in
sacks. Piles of dozens of sacks now surround the site like a wall.
Mr Hammad said that in March 2024, he found some remains that he believed were of his family.
"There were simple bones covered with flesh … some of which had been eaten by animals," he said.
Mahmoud Hammad's relatives help search for his wife's remains, still buried beneath the rubble of their home. (AP: Jehad Alshrafi)
Mr
Hammad said that in late 2024, he had dug down to his brother's
apartment, which had been on the third floor, where he found the bodies
of his brother and sister-in-law.
He
buried them in a temporary graveyard that residents of the area created
during the war to hold their dead until they could be moved to a proper
cemetery.
Once Mr Hammad
resumed digging, he said he drove down 9 metres, finally reaching his
own apartment, which had been on the ground floor.
Mr Hammad said he was now focused on clearing rubble from the eastern side because his wife was there in her last moments.
"They were eating rice pudding in the living room,"
he said.
Mr
Hammad said he shared images of the bones through the online messaging
service, WhatsApp, with a doctor who said the fragments, which included a
jawbone, appeared to be for a small baby.
Fragments of bone have been found in searching for the remains of Nema Hammad, whose home was destroyed in 2023. (AP: Jehad Alshrafi)
He believes it is the remains of their unborn child — the baby girl they had been waiting for.
Mr
Hammad said they had planned to name her Haifa, after one of his
sisters-in-law who was killed by an Israeli strike just a few weeks
before the one on their home.
"All the baby's clothes, a crib, and a room were prepared, and everyone at home was waiting for her arrival," he said.
He said discovering the bone fragments had brought him hope.
"There's a clue that I'm reaching my wife and other children,"
Mr Hammad said.
He said once he collected enough remains, he would give them a proper burial.
61 million tonnes of rubble
More
than 700 bodies have been recovered from under buildings since the
ceasefire began, Zaher al-Waheidi, head of the Health Ministry's records
department, told The Associated Press.
Each
is added to a list of the dead from the war — now more than 72,000,
according to the ministry, part of the Hamas-led government that
maintains detailed casualty records seen as generally reliable by UN
agencies and independent experts, although it does not give a breakdown
of civilians and militants.
Israeli bombardment
destroyed or damaged 81 per cent of the strip's 250,000 buildings,
including schools, hospitals and private houses, according to the UN's
satellite imagery analysis unit.
It
has left Gaza as one of the most devastated places on earth with 61
million tons of rubble — about as much as 15 Great Pyramids of Giza or
25 Eiffel Towers by volume, according to the UN.
Digging
out has been made more difficult by the lack of bulldozers and heavy
equipment, which Israel often bans from entering Gaza.
Gaza is a nightmare, but once it was a dream.
Rescue work remains impossible in the more than 50 per cent of the Gaza Strip that remains under Israeli military control.
There,
the military has been systematically blowing up and bulldozing
buildings, further reducing the possibility of finding any bodies lost
inside.
About two months ago,
the UN and the Red Cross coordinated the entry of an excavator for the
civil defence, said Karem al-Dalu, a worker for the group.
"But that's not enough," Mr al-Dalu said.
He
spoke as he and other rescue workers cleared the rubble of a building
in Gaza City's Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood, using the new excavator.
Gaza's civil defence teams have been working to recover the remains of the Abu Nada family.
(AP: Jehad Alshrafi)
The
building was levelled by an air strike on December 11, 2023, with about
120 people inside, said Rafiq Abdel-Khaleq Salem, whose immediate
family was among those sheltering there.
"Their only crime was that they didn't leave, so they flattened the building over them,"
he said.
In the days following the strike, 66 bodies were recovered, he said. Another 54 people remained buried under the rubble.
Rescue
workers were finally able to come back to the site over the weekend.
They managed to find 27 more bodies, but the rest remain missing,
including Salem's wife and their four children.
"It is a painful feeling," he said. "I hoped to find my wife and children to bury them in graves and visit them."
Dendrochronology involves the use of drills to look at the growth rings in trees. (Supplied: DCCEEW)
In short:
A study provides a record of how a changing climate has shaped the Gwydir Wetlands over centuries.
The oldest tree discovered on the site is a 566-year-old coolabah.
What's next?
A
researcher says the project could pave the way for similar studies
across other major river systems and contribute to conversations about
environmental water management.
Scientists
are drilling into the bark of trees that have survived for hundreds of
years to discover the secrets that lie beneath.
A
new study has found some of the coolabahs and river red gums that stand
in the Gwydir Wetlands in northern NSW are 500 years old.
Researchers
from the NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and
Water (DCCEEW) and the University of Newcastle have used a combination
of dendrochronology and radiocarbon "bomb-pulse" dating to analyse the
age and growth history of floodplain eucalypts.
Kathryn
Taffs, from the DCCEEW's surface water science team, said the oldest
tree so far analysed was a coolabah with a diameter of 176 centimetres.
Some trees in the Gwydir Wetlands are estimated to be hundreds of years old. (Supplied: DCCEEW)
"This is a really old, very magnificent tree … dated to be 566 years old, so what a matriarch for the community,"
Dr Taffs said.
"That was really outstanding that it's been surviving on that floodplain for five centuries."
Dr Taffs said the species had been considered too complex for reliable aging.
"Eucalypt
wood is really tough, and this technique, what it does, it takes a
reinforced steel core about the size of a pencil and we attach it to a
drill and drill it into the trunk of a tree," she said.
"It doesn't harm them in any way, and what we end up with is … a pencil-sized slither from that tree that we can then analyse."
The study looks at how previous drought and flooding events have affected the wetlands. (Supplied: DCCEEW)
The key findings
While
the age of the coolabah and red river gums is significant, the research
has also revealed previously unknown climate history affecting the
Gwydir Wetlands.
Ms Taffs said the growth ring patterns revealed past droughts, floods and water availability.
"We're
very interested in how this can inform our management of water and one
thing we've already found is the reproduction of the trees isn't a
regular cycle," she said.
"We've
found that there've been six pulses where the trees have been able to
successfully produce seeds, that seed germinates into saplings and the
saplings grow up into mature trees."
One of the study's findings is that coolabahs and river red gums can live for 500 years in the Gwydir Wetlands. (Supplied: DCCEEW)
Dr Taffs said those "pulses" resulted in sudden, large influxes of new trees called "mass recruitment events".
She
said the research showed pulses in the 1500s, 1600s, 1800s and early
1900s corresponding to major environmental and hydrological changes.
"We
now know it's really important to deliver water onto these floodplains
to support those trees maturing and being able to reproduce in the next
pulse,"
Dr Taffs said.
University of Newcastle climate scientist Danielle Verdon-Kidd said the importance of the research should not be underestimated.
"This
groundbreaking project has shown that floodplain eucalypts hold
tremendous potential for understanding past climate and water conditions
in parts of Australia where long-term records don't exist," Associate
Professor Verdon-Kidd said.
Coolabahs and river red gums are a common sight across the wetlands. (Supplied: DCCEEW)
Richard
Kingsford AO, director of Centre for Ecosystem Science at UNSW in
Sydney, said while he was aware of similar research in other areas with
red river gums, he had not seen it done with coolabahs.
Professor Kingsford said the research could have beneficial impacts for other wetland areas.
"It's
potentially really exciting because one of the things that's difficult
to understand is where the systems have come from in terms of their
flooding and their history," Professor Kingsford said.
"I
think one of the things we're always trying to understand is what is
the natural rhythm of a river … so being able to reconstruct that
history tells us so much."
Environmental water impact
The results of the study will form part of the NSW government's Environmental Outcomes Monitoring and Research Program report.
Dr
Taffs said the project could pave the way for similar studies across
other major river systems and contribute to conversations about
environmental water management.
Changes in water flows and climate have helped alter Gwydir floodplains over hundreds of years. (Supplied: DCCEEW)
"We
really want to tease apart what these mature floodplain trees' water
needs are throughout all of its lifecycle to make sure the delivery of
environmental water occurs to support that community to survive into the
future," she said.
Under normal conditions, no one notices the
air they breathe. In peace, we are unaware of peace. Just life—ordinary
life, nothing more. How precious it can seem when it is under threat.
During blackouts, you acutely lack light and heat. What you have in abundance is time. Darkness is made for reflection.
You’re not drawn to a book because
reading doesn’t help. It’s hard to slip from reality into fiction when
your fingers are numb and your breath turns to steam. Reality wins.
Reality wins, even when it looks like a surreal spectacle.
There are producers, directors and
leading stars. And there are billions of extras and spectators. If all
the world’s a stage, as Shakespeare put it, there aren’t that many real
actors.
According to the screenwriters,
there is a war raging in Ukraine right now. There used to be about forty
million people there; now only a little over twenty million remain. The
sets are burned and destroyed, the landscape is scarred, lives are
ruined.
War is something that should never have happened. It has. It’s here. And it isn’t going to stop.
In the spring of 2022, my nephews
appeared on my phone screen, calling me from Kremenchuk while I was in
Kyiv. These were the days when Russia was retreating from Putin’s failed
blitzkrieg. News of the Bucha massacre had not yet surfaced, and
Ukrainian cities had not yet been reduced to rubble. The country was
celebrating what felt like an imminent victory over the world’s
second-largest army.
"I
had stepped into the other room when one of the balloons burst with a
loud bang. When I returned, I didn’t see my granddaughter right away.
She was lying under the blanket, her head covered. She stayed there for
several minutes—the sound had felt like an explosion to her."
Three of my nephews, aged between
thirty and forty-five, had gathered at a summer cottage for a barbecue.
Passing the phone from hand to hand, they shared childhood memories with
me, laughed, and invited me to join them. In their high spirits, the
three hundred kilometres between us did not seem insurmountable.
Distracted by work, I replied
rather drily. About ten minutes later, we said goodbye. I did not know
then that this would be the last time I would see all three of them
alive, together — the men I still remembered as boys.
The youngest, a fuel truck driver,
was shell-shocked during a Russian drone strike on an oil refinery. The
second, a police officer, went to the front. The eldest, my nephew
Slavik — a father of three girls — went missing in action in eastern
Ukraine.
The last report about him said he
had been seen trying to apply a tourniquet to what was left of his leg
after it was blown off by an explosion. It was 2024. Russian forces were
advancing, the fighting was brutal, and the retreat was chaotic. Slavik
had no real chance of survival.
Trying to imagine what he must have
felt, lying alone on the ground amid explosions and confusion, I
remembered him as a small boy with a splinter in his foot. He was
terrified of pain and of the sight of blood. As I carried him home on my
back, he kept asking whether he might die from blood loss. I told him
no. I would have made a poor fortune-teller.
Slavik never came home. His mother
and his wife still believe he is a prisoner and continue to wait for
him. Do armies take severely wounded, bleeding soldiers prisoner in war?
I have an answer to that question, but I keep it to myself when I speak
with Slavik’s mother. I think she knows it too. But who would want to
put their child’s photograph into a mourning frame?
A couple of years ago, Kyiv was
covered with billboards bearing enormous portraits of fallen soldiers.
Beneath their faces were slogans promising that their names would be
forever inscribed in the history of Ukraine. I haven’t seen those
billboards for a long time now. They’ve vanished—just like the soldiers
themselves. They are gone.
If their names were recorded even once, simply listed in a history textbook, how many pages would that take?
Donald Trump once mentioned 400,000
Ukrainians killed. Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently cited a figure of
55,000. It is unlikely anyone knows the real number, or ever will. No
one will produce a definitive statistic.
Historians are still arguing about
how many people the Soviet Union lost in World War II. Twenty million?
Thirty? The overwhelming majority of the dead never found their way into
chronicles or textbooks. Many did not even receive a grave. They gave
their lives for a country that no longer exists on the map of the world.
Alas, history has seen this before.
Will Ukraine survive?
This is what I turn over in my mind
at night, listening to the drones and the distant thud of explosions
beyond the windows. These thoughts return as I scan the brief reports on
the latest airstrike, sparse lines, bare numbers. How long can this
continue? And how will it end?
Many years ago, when Crimea was
still Ukrainian, I wandered deep into a vast, deserted park and sat down
on a bench. Everything around me was beautiful, breathing an almost
exaggerated calm, until a strange, rhythmic rustling reached my ears.
I leaned down and looked beneath
the bench. A cat was tearing at a pigeon. One wing was beating
convulsively against the ground. That frantic sound was what had
unsettled me. The other wing was already broken.
I chased the cat away and lifted
the bird into my hands. It was mangled, but still alive. I could feel
the rapid beating of its heart, the warmth of its blood.
The cat sat a short distance away,
watching, licking its lips. I had taken its prey, but I could not save
it. It was already too late. All I could do was hold the pigeon and
watch it die.
I think of this every time another
Western leader addresses Ukraine with words of encouragement and
promises of help. I want to shout at them: don’t be late.
The West is helping. There are aid
packages, votes, summits, negotiations. But the rhythm of diplomacy is
measured in weeks — if not months — while the rhythm of war is measured
differently.
Bullets and artillery shells travel
at speeds approaching 800 metres per second, several times faster than a
jet-powered drone or a glide bomb. A ballistic missile moves faster
still, reaching up to seven kilometres per second.
When a night-time warning arrives
that Russian MiG-31s have taken off for launch positions, few people
rush to shelters. To do so, you would have to dress warmly, wake and
calm your children, gather your things, and make your way down from the
fifth, tenth, or twenty-fifth floor. Even if you are young and quick,
this would likely take longer than the missile’s flight time.
All that remains is to stay where
you are, wait, and trust the thickness of your apartment walls. They
will not save you from a direct hit. At best, they might stop shrapnel
and debris. In theory.
Two rounds of peace talks in Abu
Dhabi lasted four days and led nowhere. How many bullets, shells,
drones, and missiles were launched during that time and how many of them
reached their targets?
The other day, I brought my little
granddaughter a set of balloons. While her parents were at work, we blew
them up and spent some time tossing them back and forth, laughing.
I had stepped into the other room
when one of the balloons burst with a loud bang. When I returned, I
didn’t see my granddaughter right away. She was lying under the blanket,
her head covered. She stayed there for several minutes—the sound had
felt like an explosion to her.
I hugged her and told her that everything was all right.
“You mean the war is over?” she asked, hopefully.
I had to tell her no.
“Then how can it be good,” my granddaughter asked, “if everything is bad?”
She is seven now. She was three when the war began. What stories from her childhood will she one day tell her own grandchildren?
Sergey Maidukov is a Ukrainian writer, author of Life on the run and Deadly bonds,
written for US publishing house Rowman & Littlefield (Bloomsbury).
Both were written in English in the midst of war. His journalism has appeared in numerous Western publications.
I was greatly saddened when I heard the story of Lama Dalloul, a Palestinian peace activist from Gaza:
I transcribed this video (originally from Builders of the Middle East) in case you want to read it, rather than listen to it.
Lama says:
I’m Palestinian. I’m an activist, and I
love animals. For the past two years, I fought to find a way out. Some
people called it betrayal, but I was simply looking for a better, safer
future. I spent my whole life in Gaza, growing up there, I saw people
lose their job, their security, their future, just for saying what they
thought.
Then October 7 happened and changed
everything… Not only was I living in fear of bombardment or attacks, but
I was also seeing injustice every day. I couldn’t be part of that
silence. So I turned to TikTok and started documenting my life, the war,
the fear. It was my way to escape reality.
I also spoke about peace, about not
choosing hate, although I got some support, it didn’t take long before I
started getting hateful DMs, comments and even threats of my life.
And I honestly got scared I had to leave behind my family, my friends, my country, even my cats…
I believe that the people of Gaza
shouldn’t have to live in fear just to speak their truth. I believe that
the people of Gaza deserve dignity and freedom.
I have my own experiences of this phenomenon, too.
After October 7th, when I started talking about my belief in peace
and coexistence, I immediately received an outpouring of support from
some people. I remain grateful for that. But there were also vast
quantities of anger, condemnation and — yes — threats, accusations of
treachery, accusations that I am a traitor, or a Mossad agent, or some
other nonsense.
At first, I found it bewildering. Peace and coexistence are not
extremist positions. They are really quite a logical position. Neither
side is going to disappear. Israelis and Palestinians must learn to
share this land together. However long that takes.
'Once you’ve been recast
as an enemy or a traitor, there’s less need to engage with your words.
The focus shifts to punishing you for speaking, to try and push you
down. They will lie, misinterpret, distort, try to hack into your social
media accounts, threaten your family, anything.'
So why let grief curdle into dehumanisation, hate, and the perpetuation or worsening of conflict?
Dehumanisation and hate are poisonous. They are brain-rotting. They
convince people to commit themselves to causes of destruction and death.
They convince people to commit unspeakable acts of barbarity.
Why continue with this miserable reality? When peace comes, things
get better. Economies grow. Cities flourish. Trade soars. People gain
back the time and space to complete their education, get a job, start a
family without worrying about bombs dropping on their heads, or having
to evacuate. You get a post-war boom. You get a chance for normality.
And yet for some people, peace is treated as an intolerable idea.
It took me a while to realise that threats are rarely about what you
actually said (or even the twisted misrepresentations that people
misinterpreted you to say). They’re about what your existence
represents. When you insist that Israelis and Palestinians are both
human, that both deserve safety, that neither side has a monopoly on
pain or innocence, you disrupt the core story where one side is wholly
innocent, and the other wholly guilty. And if someone’s identity has
become welded to that story then your ideas feel like an attack.
Once you’ve been recast as an enemy or a traitor, there’s less need
to engage with your words. The focus shifts to punishing you for
speaking, to try and push you down. They will lie, misinterpret,
distort, try to hack into your social media accounts, threaten your
family, anything.
There is also a darker truth: peace threatens power.
In every long conflict, there are individuals and groups — some
organised, some informal — who benefit from permanent hostility. They
benefit socially, because common hatreds are used as a kind of group
identity. They benefit psychologically, because hatred offers certainty
and direction. And sometimes they benefit materially or politically,
because outrage is an engine that can be harnessed for money.
In other words, there are a lot of groups making a lot of money, and
gaining a lot of power from perpetuating the conflict. Not least Hamas,
who have made billions from siphoning aid, and acting like a protection
racket.
A person speaking about coexistence is a problem for that nefarious
ecosystem. A person speaking about coexistence threatens those who are
getting rich from war, and from dehumanising propaganda.
The internet intensifies all of this. It amplifies the worst
impulses. It allows people to perform righteousness for applause, to
attack strangers with little or no consequence. Political causes —
especially deeply divisive and entrenched ones — are used by bullies and
trolls as an excuse to be extravagantly mean in ways that they would
not otherwise be able to get away with.
But I refuse to back down. I refuse to bend or apologise. As I said,
neither side is going to disappear. There is no solution without a
resolution.
No matter how long it takes to get there, the ideologies of endless
conquest and counterpunching will be consigned to the scrap heap of
history.
