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To: naturalman1975
One could get the impression from the excellent Australian movies Gallipoli and Breaker Morant that there was some lingering resentment about the price Australia paid to support bungled British imperial adventures.
4 posted on 04/20/2009 11:59:48 PM PDT by RJR_fan (Winners and lovers shape the future. Whiners and losers TRY TO PREDICT IT.)
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To: RJR_fan
Both Gallipoli and Breaker Morant are products of the Australian left. And yes, the left does have a great deal of resentment about most things British.

In the case of Gallipoli, I think it's somewhat justified - the campaign was a disaster. But that was hardly unique in British campaigns of the early to mid-war.

Breaker Morant, on the other hand, was a war criminal - I have some sympathy for Handcock and Witton who were probably not educated enough to understand they'd been given an order contrary to the rules of war - but Morant was. He killed out of revenge, pure and simple and while that is understandable, it's not acceptable in an officer. Should he have been shot? Probably not, but the fault for that lies with the Australian government - Australia had just become an independent nation at that stage, and it failed to make any representation on his behalf. If it had, he and Handcock would have probably been treated as British officers had in similar circumstances - cashiered and sent home.

5 posted on 04/21/2009 12:11:33 AM PDT by naturalman1975 ("America was under attack. Australia was immediately there to help." - John Winston Howard)
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