The PR Blog

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. 

On the moonlit night of May 16, 1943, a squadron of young RAF pilots flew into the jaws of Nazi Germany on a mission so audacious it bordered on madness.

Armed with a revolutionary "bouncing bomb" and led by the unflinching Wing Commander Guy Gibson, the men of 617 Squadron, soon to be immortalised as the Dam Busters, took to the skies in lumbering Lancasters, tasked with shattering the great dams of the Ruhr Valley and crippling the industrial engine of Hitler’s war machine.

What followed was a feat of precision flying, raw courage, and tragic sacrifice - etched forever into the history books of wartime legend.

Not all wartime heroes wore uniforms. In the heart of WWII, in 1942,  my great uncle, a metallurgist, was working in the jungles of Papua New Guinea as Japanese bombs fell on goldfields and airstrips. 

Unable to fight, due to deafness, he carried on his duty in the shadows...until the order came to flee. What followed was a gruelling jungle escape on foot, a rice bowl in his pack and enemy planes overhead.

This is a piece of family history long buried and largely forgotten. It's a story of endurance, of quiet courage, and of the forgotten Battle of Wau....a turning point that helped swing the Pacific war.