Patriot Realm

Today would have been my late sister-in-law’s birthday. This is my tribute to a woman I loved, and our family adored.

She came to New Zealand for love, and walked straight into a milk cart prank. But in the way she handled it - with grace, humour, and a winning way . She passed the only test that really matters in our family: could she laugh with us?

This story isn’t just about a joke. It’s about belonging.
And it's for her.

In a world increasingly anxious about saying the wrong thing, where humour is policed and offence is taken before intent is understood, I find myself thinking back to a simpler moment...  one that says more than it first appears.

It’s just a family story, really. A harmless prank involving a horse, a milk cart, and a wide-eyed English girl who thought she was becoming a milkmaid.

They say wisdom often arrives wearing old boots, sipping strong coffee, and wielding a spanner. Well, maybe they don't and I just made that up.

But my Uncle Pete was that kind of man.

A bewhiskered, big-hearted farmer who skydived despite chronic illness, helped us teenagers fix clapped-out cars, and somehow made life’s hardest truths sound like plain old common sense.

Today, of all days....his birthday...I remember a story he told that now rings louder than ever, in an age when governments dodge responsibility by hiring 'experts' and hiding behind consultants.

A lesson in responsibility from a man who never needed a whiteboard consultant.

I wonder how many people realise that Australia’s concept of a minimum wage began with the landmark Harvester Judgment of 1907, a case that forever changed industrial relations in the country?

Fewer still might know that the man at the heart of that case was also behind one of the most significant agricultural inventions to come out of Australia; the combine harvester. Alongside the stump jump plough, the combine harvester was one of two inventions I learned about from a young age as being quintessentially Australian. Yet the origins of this groundbreaking machine, now used by the thousands worldwide, are largely forgotten.

Here is the story of the machine that revolutionised farming around the world,  and the forgotten legal legacy it left in its wake. 

If you grew up in Australia, chances are you’ve heard the name Henry Lawson. Maybe it was in a dusty old classroom, or maybe someone quoted The Drover’s Wife around a camp fire.

But Lawson isn’t just some long-dead poet tucked away in schoolbooks.....he’s the voice of the bush, the battler, the bloke trudging through drought and dust with a swag on his back and a story in his heart.

There’s something timeless about a billy boiling over a campfire, smoke curling into a pink sky, the tin crackling, the smell of eucalyptus and damp earth. Henry Lawson didn’t just write about that scene...he lived it. And in While the Billy Boils and Joe Wilson and His Mates, he brought it to life so vividly, it’s as if you’re there beside him and waiting for your cuppa.

As the sun sets on tired so called Conservative parties like the Liberals and Nationals, how about something different .... OUR Voice from the Heart.

To the people of the bush, the paddocks, the backstreets, and the wide horizons:

Australia's cities have grown tall, bright, and loud. But in all their noise, they forgot the quiet strength that built this country. While bureaucrats sip lattes in glass towers, the bush swelters, floods, burns, and perseveres. We carry the weight of droughts and bad harvests, of crumbling roads and shrinking schools, while policies are written by people who've never set foot in a sheep yard.

They talk about progress, but it's a one-way road out of the bush. Hospitals are closing. Rail lines are rusting. Kids are leaving. And what's replacing them? Mega-farms owned by offshore shareholders. Decisions shaped by algorithms. Rural voices drowned by imported ideology.

Delivered by people who’ve never watched a bore run dry. They came for the land. They came for our water. And they do not care about us.