John Tognolini | Author
John Tognolini
Reviews
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25.01.2022 The Sydney Morning Herald tomorrow
25.01.2022 With Tim Gooden after he won Victoria's Unionist of the Year Award at this year's John Cummins Dinner.
25.01.2022 Can we just become the West Island Nidge?
16.01.2022 Once we Australians had led the world in democratic reform. Once it seemed possible that we might overcome the violence of our wars of invasion and reconcile with our Indigenous brothers and sisters. Once it seemed that we might make of ourselves a beacon for freedom and tolerance, a country of many peoples that welcomed the newly dispossessed as we had in turn once been welcomed. We were a nation born out of the evils of invasion and convictism. It was not that we saw oursel...ves as infinitely perfectible. It was rather that we were aware of what the alternatives were. Police entering the Manus Island detention centre on Thursday Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Risking starvation, dysentery, cholera and violence, some hundreds of refugees asserted with their flesh the one thing which Australia could not steal: their human dignity.’ Photograph: Abdul/EPA Now we are seen globally as the inventors of a particularly vile form of 21st century repression, in which the innocent are subjected to suffering in a prison where the crime is never named, no sentence is ever passed, and punishment is assured. For this achievement Australia now enjoys the praise of European neo-fascists and American white supremacists. Some praise. Some achievement.
15.01.2022 I've reactivated my blog Togs's Place.Com and I read this comment. Aaron Day said... Thank you for posting this John. My father passed away on 24 June 2015. It ...is very touching to read this interview. Brian Day was a great man. I used his definition of Anzac at high school Anzac services many times and have just finished using parts of our interview in 1992 in teaching year 10 history. Brian did amazing work: helping to set up the Australian Vietnam Veterans Association, being the AVA's first Welfare Officer, work in the Toowoomba RSL and his medical and educational aid work to Vietnam during the American embargo after the War, taking fellow Veterans back to Vietnam, the Australian work around Agent Orange. and the Australia Vietnam Friendship Society. I remember him telling me that he was in Hanoi when rebel Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett died and the entire city stopped. This is from the interview, click on the link to read the whole lot of it, it's also in my History Man Part One: Other People's Wars -------------------------------- John: How far do you think Australia has to go in actually coming to grips with Vietnam and the war in Indochina? Brian: Jesus! I don't really think that sections of Australian society, political, military and otherwise will ever admit Vietnam was a mistake. They just won't. There is too many people who still believe in the so called ANZAC tradition. Now I have a great belief in certain parts of the ANZAC tradition because the ANZAC tradition was a very hard won honour. For example if you look at our casualties in World War One where the ANZAC tradition was formed and if you look at Australia and New Zealand, they suffered the highest casualties of any nations in World War One, per percentage of those put in the field and the ANZAC tradition after World War One. Although a lot of people have tried to put it down; the facts of battle, the things that occurred in battle, the amounts of times the Australians actually did heroic things in battle is well documented and can't be taken away. Where other armies lost places, the Australians took them back and that happened on a couple of occasions. So, the ANZAC tradition was there and the ANZAC tradition should always remain. What I don't like about it is that people tend to use the ANZAC tradition as a form of propaganda to brainwash people into believing that war is good. So, the ANZAC tradition should be kept within its' correct perspective. The ANZAC tradition is the gallantry of men. The mateship of men. The ability to fight. The ability to stay together and do a job under terrible adverse conditions. Nowhere should the ANZAC tradition say that war is good. Some good comes out of war. It must because the Japanese and the Germans were defeated in World War Two and that was good. So, good does come out of war if the war is just. But I don't think the ANZAC tradition should be used for political or for propaganda purposes to affect the minds of young people. So that they believe one, that we are the best soldiers in the world and all the other soldiers, the Asian soldiers and all these German soldiers and all these others are no good because that's not so. That is not so. The ANZAC tradition should make our youth aware of war. It shouldn't make them want to go to war. ANZAC Day shouldn't make people want to go to war. ANZAC Day should make people aware of war and what war does. That's the part that upsets me. Is the way that it is used. And the way it was used in the Australian Army to make people believe when they went to Vietnam that what they were doing was correct. See for example, I just could not believe and found it very difficult in the end to believe that the Australian Army had been used for political and military gain in South East Asia. I always thought the Australian Army would be used for good things. I just didn't believe that our government would have used the Australian Army as a cheap mercenary outfit to run around the world killing people to make politicians happy or more powerful and this security of Australia. That the Vietnamese could ever come down and invade us, you know, the Domino Theory. That was all crap. But people actually used the ANZAC tradition in conjunction with these theories to convince people like myself and thousands of others that by going to Vietnam we were serving our country and we weren't. We were serving the politicians. We were serving the Americans and we were there basically doing in Vietnam what the Japanese did in Asia and what the Germans did in Europe. We invaded a foreign country to stop those people from having the government they wanted, whether we agree with it or not, surely the first thing is democracy. By going there we were actually killing democracy. We weren't helping people to become democratic. John: There was one documentary that was sponsored by Veteran Affairs and the Returned Services League. Brian: The Sharp End, that was political. John: Can you explain a bit about that? Brian: Well, you've only got to look at people that appeared. What happened, it originally came out in the RSL papers and the Veteran Affairs paper. They wanted people to volunteer to be interviewed about Vietnam and of course many thousands of people volunteered to be interviewed and I think it was a half hour show. From that they did their selections and interviewed 400 people. So, they cut the numbers down dramatically then. Firstly, they selected who they wanted then out of that 400 people. They then selected enough people to speak in a thirty minute period which bought it down then I think to twelve, fourteen people. So, they picked those that they wanted to hear speak. They picked those that spoke favourably as to the war. I think if you look at rank structure of those who spoke, and from memory most of the speakers were very, very senior Army, Navy, Air Force officers with a very pro-Vietnam theme and pro-Vietnam attitude. People don't like to admit they've been conned and I would say the higher you were up the ladder the less you want to admit that you were conned. And of course, there are people who like to believe and many of these people would probably sincerely believe from what they did was correct, that the communist bogey was there. "I would rather be Dead than Red", is an actual reality and one that all things socialist, communist or whatever are bad. And they're also some racist overtones in that too. Australia can be a very racist society and I remember people saying, "Oh they are all the same and they're all tarred with the same brush." And they see a Vietnamese, a Laotian or a Cambodian or Chinese or Japanese or Korean and they wouldn't know the difference. They would not have a slick where they come from. http://togsplace.blogspot.com.au//brian-day-australian-vie
14.01.2022 Mike Carlton is absolutely right. #Walkley4Behrouz
13.01.2022 Back in the days when sex was safe and football was dangerous.
13.01.2022 I went to Melbs for the John Cummins Dinner and met Eddie Halsall. One of 18 survivors from the Westgate Bridge Disaster that killed 34 workersnand the engineer... who said the job was safe on October 15 1970. It's 50thAnniversry is the year after next and Mark Seymour wrote this song about Eddie. John Setka’s father who our prime minister Hobbit had a go at yesterday, was also a survivor. Hobbit is a reference to Shire of Sutherland. Even before the Cronulla Riot it was known as the Insular Pennisula this is Morrison's seat.
12.01.2022 On the NSW election result, I'm not moving. I've lived in this state since 1981. I've seen filth elected to the upper house before like Mark Latham with the One Nation freak before him. I've seen people vote for the LNP with Griener twice. In my native state, Victoria I saw people vote again and again for Kennett. I worked with fellow teachers in the bush who voted for Tony Abbott. I'm not moving. The problem for us all is the ALP is not an alternative. It is a lesser evil and it is sad as well as bad. We need to build a real alternative. As an ecosocialist and unionist, I ready for the fights that are coming.
09.01.2022 At the age of 60, a year after I endured a stroke that nearly killed me on June 28th 2018. I’ve decided to reactivate my blog Togs’s Place.Com. I’ll also get back into producing books. I write in a style that can be described as Henry Lawson meets Hunter S.Thompson, it’s Gonzo meets Faces in the Street. It’s like the way I play some Johnny Cash songs like the Lenard Cohen, that so upset the Wellington Country and Western Club, when I lived out in the bush town of Wellington, ...near Dubbo in Central West New South Wales for eight years. Henry had his faults. He suffered from the racism that afflicted the union movement of his time in the Nineteenth Century Australia, the Worker’s Paradise of British White Australia. Yet when a strong Aboriginal/First Nations Goa Gunggari Wakkawakka Murri Dgin Woman actor and director such as Leah Purcell, adapted his classic moving story, of a women’s isolation in the bush, The Drover’s Wife to the stage. It’s time to take stock of the man’s writing, especially when her adaption of her play has been described Quentin Tarrintino meets Henry Lawson.
07.01.2022 Fireside vox pop at the Family! John Togs...who rates Lulo as a top worldwide 15 guitarist.... reminiscing about hosting a gig in 2011.
03.01.2022 It was great to be at the Refugee Rally in Sydney with Trish today. It was a good NSW Teachers Federation contingent with a lot of us wearing our Teachers For R...efugees t-shirts. Trish introduced me to Craig Foster, who she worked with on Hakeem al-Araibi's campaign. The pic is NSWTF Comrade Julie Ross and I on the march in Broadway. See more
01.01.2022 Let us not forget that whatever we may think of Assange or the deeds he is suspected of, this is about much more. It is about freedom of speech and the rule of law principles. It is ultimately about the right and the moral obligation to expose war crimes. Assange and Wikileaks did it. The revelations about US abuse were necessary and particularly important. Should we extradite to Germany’s Hitler someone who has revealed the existence of concentration camps and genocide, regardless to how that information was obtained? I don’t think so.
