Ben Roberts-Smith, Shah Wali Kot, honour, and the war Australians barely know

I wore my Blokes Advice Big Choky ‘I stand with BRS’ T-shirt to the local pub recently.

Aaron Patrick spoke at the Gallipoli Memorial Club’s inaugural Lone Pine Dinner. At the event, he signed copies of his book on Australia’s war in Afghanistan, and in particular, accounts of Ben Robert-Smith’s actions that earned him the Victoria Cross. The book is entitled The Last Battle. If you are a patriot like me, you’ll read it in one sitting. I wrote about it previously.

Aaron’s speech was not just about the book, but about the Battle of Shah Wali Kot in June 2010, and about what Australians do and do not know of the war in Afghanistan.

What follows is a written question-and-answer. The questions are as put to him. The answers are as he returned them.

The Last Battle: Australian SAS, Commandos and our Greatest Victory in our Longest War is published by Pan Macmillan. Patrick is chief writer at The Nightly and a former senior correspondent and deputy editor of the Australian Financial Review. He has written for the Washington Post and the New York Times.

You can read my article in The Spectator Australia, Ben Roberts-Smith, Shah Wali Kot, honour, and the war Australians barely know.

Classy, biased bigotry, brought to you by your ABC

Barnaby Joyce still speaks to the ABC, but they don’t deserve the privilege.

If you don’t know Vikki Campion, she is a journalist and former media staffer to Joyce. They are now married and have children together. She manages the family and the farm while he tries to fix a broken country. If she were a radical leftie, she would be upheld as a legend. The woman who left the Canberra bubble, raised children off the grid, and kept a household standing through public humiliation. Instead, she is target practice for everyone from former colleagues to the ABC’s running gallery of Joyce-hunters.

As Jesus put it, take the plank out of your own eye before pointing to the speck in your brother’s. Or, in this case, your sister’s.

My article in The Spectator Australia, Classy, biased bigotry, brought to you by your ABC.

Woke hasn’t killed Australia’s adventurer spirit

With Waren Brown at his book launch in Goulburn.

Brown brings back Boy’s Own Birtles and the Bean

I was brought up on Boy’s Own adventures. I remember pacing up and down with Sir Douglas Bader’s Reach for the Sky, at the scene where his grandmother crowns a would-be thief in the night. I read Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven to my kindergarten class in 1976. If you know Robert Westall’s The Machine Gunners, that is the ilk.

The point is that Australian men and boys were raised on a diet of toughness. Not the street-fighting meanness of Fast Eddy. More the ethic of the other bloke in Rose Tattoo’s The Butcher and Fast Eddy. Sport did some of the same work. Football, hockey, and cricket were, among other things, training for a harder world. Try catching a cricket ball in the outfield now. With or without spectacles, the trajectory will bewilder you. You will probably shite yourself when it hits you, or when you miss it completely.

We have lost something. Mention Boy’s Own today and you will be branded – yes, see Rose Tattoo – a misogynist or a coloniser. It is that stupid.

A century ago, the real thing was still walking around. Francis Birtles set long-distance and speed records as a cyclist and a driver. In October 1927 he left Australia House in London in a 1924 Bean 14, later called Sundowner, and became the first man to drive from England to Australia. The run took nine months and some 26,000 kilometres through Europe, Egypt, Persia, India, the Naga Hills, with ships and a bamboo punt where the road ran out. When he reached Darwin in 1928, customs seized the car for import duty. It was released only at the insistence of Prime Minister Stanley Melbourne Bruce. Imagine that happening today? The Prime Minister intervening, I mean.

That car now sits in the National Museum of Australia. I thought the type of man who would take it any further was extinct.

Enter Daily Telegraph cartoonist Warren Brown.

Warren lives in the Southern Tablelands, draws some of the best political cartoons in the country, and is a decent bloke. He had already written Francis Birtles: Australian Adventurer in 2012. Then he bought a 1925 Bean 14 and, as far as roads, ferries, and officials would allow, ran Birtles’ route again. His co-driver was the Tele’s editor-at-large, Matthew Benns. Their mechanical saviour was Tony Jordan.

They left London in September 2024 and rolled into Melbourne on January 30, 2025, after some 130 days and 17 countries. With the same mad idea in an open car. Along the way they raised money for the Royal Flying Doctor Service. That is not nostalgia. That is useful.

I followed the trip as it happened. The book of it is called Chance It! Buy that for the yarn, the photographs, and the bits no column should steal. I am not going to attempt to recreate the Hindu Kush or the Top End here.

I did get the next best thing. Last week, at the Goulburn launch, Warren, Matthew, and Tony spoke about the journey with Ray Hadley as MC. Hadley started his career in Goulburn. The Southern Tablelands remains, on the available evidence, the centre of the universe. The event was first-class. They signed my copy. The house white was Lerida Estate’s 2024 Chardonnay. (Which is also my house white in Gunning. As it happens, my federation cottage ‘Keswick’ was built 100 years ago this month.)

There is also a Chance It Ale from a Goulburn brewery that people persist in calling Bean Beer. It is bloody good.

So, the record stands. Birtles did it in a Bean. Brown brought the Bean back. How very Australian. If the adventuring habit has thinned out, this is the cure. Get a car, get a bike, take the long way. Drive. Ride. Chance it.

Thanks to Warren, Matthew, Tony and the team for putting the thing back on the road. It was quite the adventure.