Word: australian
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...ought to have sent them." In a swank Pall Mall club, an elderly gentle man turned from the ticker mumbling: "Damn bad luck." All England knew and feared the name of Australia's great batsman, a wiry stockbroker, Don Bradman. With his help, last week, the Australian eleven held the British to a draw. The Australians had already won two and tied one, so (though there was a fifth match to play) the English had no chance of coming out even. London's sensitive press complained about Australia's Turkish-bath weather, "fit only for Nubian slaves...
Strict immigration curbs keep Australia rather empty, but safe for seven million inhabitants who prefer kangaroos to competition. Even when it came to picking the King's Governor General for the Dominion, the Australian Labor Party wanted no "foreigners" to succeed the Duke of Gloucester (whose chief of staff had been charged with an unfair labor practice after a row with his valet). So Prime Minister Joseph B. Chifley, an ex-locomotive engineer, produced from the Labor Party's own marsupial pouch the new Governor General, William John McKell, Prime Minister of New South Wales...
Colonel Masao Kusunose, 58, was about to be tried by the Allies. On New Britain, in 1942, he had authorized the bayoneting of 140 Australian prisoners. But the Colonel, according to his peculiar code, was a man of honor; for him there was only one possible course: suicide. He could not commit hara-kiri because his samurai saber had been confiscated by the enemy. Death by drowning or jumping in front of a train would be improper. He decided to end his life by starvation and exposure (the weather was sub-zero...
...cave paintings are among the oldest art known. The reason they looked so fresh was that every year, for centuries, Australian aborigines had retouched them with red and yellow ocher and pipeclay white. The aborigines believe that wond'ina-the strong, gentle spirits of rain and fertility-made the pictures originally, by casting their shadows on the rocks...
Last week the chance came. Wagnerian Soprano Marjorie Lawrence (Australian-born, but a U.S. star) turned up in Berlin to sing for U.S. troops. With her as the attraction, the U.S. Military Government hastily sponsored its first concert for a mixed Allied-German audience. She agreed to perform without pay; so did the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and a Rumanian conductor named Sergiu Celibidache. The audience was mostly U.S. brasshats and diplomatic high-hats, along with some carefully screened Germans...