Poets and depression

As I don't care for poetry, I didn't know much about the late Les Murray, but heard on the radio this morning that he had suffered from depression for a long time as a younger man. Which made me think:  are my less-than-positive feelings about this art form because it seems to be the preferred artistic outlet  of angsty teens and (later) adults with depression? 

I don't know that I have really thought about this much before, but I see that the matter has been studied, particularly in relation to female poets.  From the Wikipedia entry on "The Sylvia Plath effect":

The Sylvia Plath effect is the phenomenon that poets are more susceptible to mental illness than other creative writers. The term was coined in 2001 by psychologist James C. Kaufman. This early finding has been dubbed "the Sylvia Plath effect", and implications and possibilities for future research are discussed...

In one study, 1,629 writers were analyzed for signs of mental illness. Female poets were found to be significantly more likely to experience mental illness than female fiction writers or male writers of any type. Another study extended the analysis to 520 eminent women (poets, fiction writers, non-fiction writers, visual artists, politicians, and actresses), and again found the poets to be significantly more likely to experience mental illness.^[1]
 
In another study performed by the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Kentucky Medical Center, female writers were found to be more likely to suffer not only from mood disorders, but also from panic attacks, general anxiety, drug abuse, and eating disorders. The rates of multiple mental disorders were also higher among these writers. Although it was not explored in depth, abuse during childhood (physical or sexual) also loomed as a possible contributor to psychological issues in adulthood. The cumulative psychopathology scores of subjects, their reported exposure to abuse during childhood, mental difficulties in their mothers, and the combined creativity scores of their parents represented significant predictors of their illnesses. The high rates of certain emotional disorders in female writers suggested a direct relationship between creativity and psychopathology, but the relationships were not clear-cut. As the results of the predictive analysis indicated, familial and environmental factors also appeared to play a role.^[5]

I see at Quora someone asks:

Do poets get depression or do depressed people write poetry?

Anyway,  Tim, you seem a jolly enough fellow whose poetry is not a downer.  But has anyone done a study on how much published poetry could be categorised as "cheerful" as opposed to "deals with a depressing subject" or at best "melancholic"?  

Drug problem in Bangladesh

A detailed article here from the BBC about a large drug problem in Bangladesh with something called Yaba:

Hundreds of thousands of people in Bangladesh have become hooked on yaba - a mixture of methamphetamine and caffeine sold as cheap red or pink pills. The official response has been harsh, with hundreds of people killed in alleged incidents of "crossfire"....

"In the early stages of using yaba it has a lot of positive effects. Everything is enhanced with yaba," says Dr Ashique Selim, a consultant psychiatrist specialising in addiction.

"You become more sociable… You enjoy music, cigarettes and sex more. In Bangladesh there's a very unhealthy association between yaba and sex - you're awake longer, you've got more energy, you feel more confident. If you stop using yaba, there are no withdrawal symptoms, it's not like alcohol or heroin. But it's the effects of yaba that are really addictive. It's a very, very dangerous drug."

Yaba first appeared in Bangladesh in 2002 and its use, and abuse, has steadily risen since then. Manufactured illicitly in industrial quantities in Myanmar, it is smuggled into Bangladesh in the far south-east of the country, where the border partly follows the River Naf.

It was across this river that hundreds of thousands of desperate Rohingya refugees fled into Bangladesh in 2017, to escape from the Burmese military. Now nearly a million destitute refugees live in makeshift camps in the region and dealers have succeeded in turning some of them into mules - often women, who smuggle packages of pills inside their vaginas.

Experts believe the dealers see an unmissable business opportunity. At a time of rapid growth - Bangladesh has one of the world's fastest growing economies - traffickers are dumping huge quantities of yaba, and selling it cheaply to create a captive market. Anecdotally, it seems its use is becoming more prevalent among go-getters riding the economic boom.

As usual, the story behind how certain types of drugs get a hold in different countries and societies is often interesting, and a bit surprising.

Am I a bad person...

...for being somewhat amused that it seems quite a lot of people, after having devoted so many hours for so many years to Game of Thrones, found that (what I gather was) the climatic battle of the entire series was so poorly lit that they often couldn't tell what was going on?

Or perhaps I should instead feel a little sorry for them, but happy for myself that I was didn't suffer the same fate.

Update:   I have noticed comments about the too fast editing too - something that drives me nuts, but many people these days have become acclimatised to.  I can safely predict I would have hated this episode.  I mean, even though it seems this BBC reviewer overall thought it was good, he freely admits to a lot of negatives:

The direction and cutting makes events frenzied, scrappy and yes, due to the lack of lighting, difficult to follow – a clever visual articulation of how this fight would really feel. This is an admirable artistic choice in theory, but after a while it starts to translate as tiresome, incomprehensible noise. In interviews leading up to the episode, Sapochnik cited The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers’ Battle of Helm’s Deep as his main inspiration. But The Battle of Winterfell never quite achieves the elegance or clarity of Peter Jackson’s sequence – nor matches its remarkable balance of character and action. This is not to say that The Battle of Winterfell is bad. It is not. But based on first viewing, it is perhaps not impressive enough to live up to its own hype.

 Update 2:  continuing to sound like a Redditor, I will assert my unpopular opinion that the only decent cinematic fantasy character based battles that took place on a field were those in the first two Narnia movies.   They were well directed, not overly choppy editting, and were thrilling without obvious blood letting.   (Marvel also does it without blood, but the editing often leaves a lot to be desired.)

Unpopular opinion No 2:   the climatic battle in Avengers: Endgame was a little too reminiscent of that in Reader Player One.

Unpopular opinion No 3:   Dr Strange is the most important Marvel Universe character, and deserves at least two more movies.   (Although it seems I often do not care much for the follow up movie for a Marvel movie that I liked.)

Some sordid history

Today I learned that Tolkien's eldest son became a Catholic priest who was accused of sexually molesting boys in at least the 1950's.   Said son died in 2003, but claimed in 1994 that he had been sexually assaulted by more than one of Dad's Oxford academic friends, who would sometimes sleep over in the son's bed.  Given that they probably all stank of pipe tobacco (but then again, I bet the whole house did), this was likely an unpleasant experience for a child even without the sexual assault.   

Poor old CS Lewis gets a mention as one of Tolkien's friends, but I think he was likely too busy having an affair with his deceased mate's mother (and later, his wife to be) to be interested in molesting boys.   I sure hope so, anyway.  

Australian politics

Here's my current gut feeling:

*   I have read on Twitter some analysis showing that today's Newspoll showing TPP at 51/49 in favour of Labor (but with a worrying small swing towards the Coalition) is a specific result of a change in how they were handling Clive Palmer's dumbass support.   In other words, if they had left him grouped with "other", it would still have been 52/48.   Sounds plausible to me.

*  Perceived campaign performance is such a fickle thing, isn't it?   It's so much a question of "the vibe" over content, and looking positive and cheerful is simply enough to sway some, regardless of being an inch deep on actual policy.   This is why I think both Morrison (groan)  and Palmer (rending of shirt sound at the goldfish like memory of the Australian - especially Queensland - electorate) have had better than expected campaigns, and Shorten has been the victim of some momentary crankiness that has to be avoided at all costs in the next two weeks.

*  I don't think the Labor TV ads have been very good either.   Isn't the public a bit skeptical of statements about how much money has been taken from health, and schools, etc, unless it has happened really recently and had an obvious, direct effect on services?   I don't think the advertising agency they are using is doing a great job.

*  I think everyone expects that seat by seat plays are going to be unusually important this time,  and not in favour of the Coalition, what with so many Liberals having jumped ship before the election.  I therefore remain relatively confident of a substantial enough majority government for Labor.

* It's good to see One Nation support down, and if history is any guide, any Senate wins by Palmer will just mean we have more independents soon enough, and they didn't work out too bad last time.   But is he attracting a nuttier group of candidates this time around?   I mean, the advertising about the Chinese airstrip in WA indicates that he is, so perhaps we'll end up with nutty independents of the ex-One Nation kind.   I just hope he gets none up.

Time for the Endgame (review)

It was...OK-ish.

I don't think it deserves a lot of analysis, really.  Remembering that I wasn't invested in Avengers or Ironman  movies anyway, it was perhaps a bit of a fluke that I liked Infinity War, which set me up as keen to see its resolution.

I was somewhat underwhelmed.  While it does have humour, I seem to recall finding Infinity War funnier.  It took a while to build up momentum, and to be honest, to my mind, it was a lazy sort of script generally speaking.  For example, there are at least two key plot points (I won't say them here - it's a bit spoiler-ish too early after its release) which just happen, without any real foreshadowing or explanation as to how they could just fall in place as they do.   And (while my son disagrees), I think the whole explanation of the way this movie's version of time travel works is quite confusingly done:  I didn't expect it to be plausible, but I just wanted it to have some clearer exposition than it got.

I suppose fan boys (and girls) might argue that it's a really complicated and intricate script, the way it ties certain things together from past movies. I suppose I can see that - I assumed it was revisiting the past movies accurately in a somewhat Back to the Future 2 sort of way.  But given my lack of familiarity with the past movies, any pleasure in that went over my head.  (I have read one or two reviewers saying that it works as a stand alone movie, and I think that's a silly suggestion.)

Oh dear, I am doing more analysis than I said I would, but I'll just note that I actually thought at least one more role would be retired than what we got.   It needed more in the way of good guy deaths.  

I hope things pick up in the next Marvel outing - although I don't think the trailer for the next Spiderman movie looks all that enticing.  We shall see...

Update:   I make the point in comments that there is at least one Youtube video up noting some inconsistencies in this movie compared to previous ones.   (Although it also points out some foreshadowing from them too.)

I just wanted to note something else, too:   in my comments on Infinity War, I noted that Thanos's Malthusian justification for killing half of all life struck me as possibly appealing to the nutty Right that thinks all environmentalism is semi-religious, inaccurate panic mongering that actually hates humanity (the kind of people who think you can ignore climate change because Hitler was a vegetarian greenie, dontcha know?)

In this movie, I had the feeling that the vibe was swinging a bit too obviously in the politically correct direction, with the role of the female good guys played up pretty explicitly: not as extraordinarily blatantly as in the last Star Wars movie, but still with a distinctly "this is Disney, we respect and encourage female empowerment" vibe.

Sure, most of the heroic characters remain male, but the effort to increase the female importance seemed a touch too obvious to me.

Guess I'm hard to please, hey?
  
Update 2:   hey, Jason.   I feel somewhat vindicated in my complaint about the time travel explanation being poorly handled when I read this guy's very lengthy piece trying to justify how what a lot of people have started to argue is a lack of internal consistency is not really a "plot hole" at all.   I kind of can't be bothered following the argument as to whether he is or isn't right:   the simple length he has to go to make the argument I think justifies my take.

An attack of humourlessness at The Atlantic

Red warning lights should be flashing whenever you read someone who says "but late night comedy shows just aren't funny anymore", especially when we know that shows like Stephen Colbert's have been rating very well.

I say this after looking at a piece by one Andrew Ferguson at The Atlantic, the headline of which suggested it was going to make a very plausible argument that America is too deeply politically divided under Trump for the White House Correspondents Dinner to continue as a form of political roast.   (I would agree with that.)

But instead, the argument is really  a broad whinge that he does not find any humour in late night television comedy anymore.  He even references in passing Conan O'Brien,  who is not intensely political, has always done some very funny, often somewhat absurdist, material and who appears happier and revived in a new half hour format.   His complaint seems to be that the humour is not much in traditional "joke" punch line format anymore - it's more a case of stating the facts as they are and the audience finding it hilarious.

This seems a ridiculously tin-earred complaint to me.  Presumably, he longs for the day of the relatively non-political humour and joke structure of Bob Hope and Jimmy Carson.  The latter, in particular, always struck me as bland and not particularly funny.  If I recall correctly,  even in his heyday some found his sidekick lame: today, at least the sidekick is usually with their own talent (often the bandleader, or someone like Andy Richter who has a genuine comedy gift).  By contrast, I remember an old sarcastic complaint that Ed McMahon's only talent other than forced sounding guffaws was doing dog food advertisements.

Ferguson's take was, of course, taken up enthusiastically by Hot Air because it lets them say "see, it's not just us conservatives, our complaint for the last 5 years must be right!"

But honestly, no one in their right mind can deny that Trump is the most absurdly non-Presidential acting President we have ever seen, who lies and bullshits continually and has a barely functioning administration with extreme turnover and leaks against the boss.  Even without the Mueller investigation, he is the biggest and easiest target for political humour that has ever existed.

Trump is intrinsically absurd - that might be the explanation as to why humour about him does not need much construction as a old time-y "joke".   But I'm even skeptical of his take on that - I still think if you watch enough, there is a joke structure to their delivery that Ferguson just can't really see anymore.

I doubt that Ferguson is a conservative politically, but generally speaking, provided you aren't a conservative fretting about having lost the culture wars, the late night show humour about Trump has often been hilarious.

Whatever the explanation, there is something definitely "off" with Ferguson's sense of humour - and I expect most readers of The Atlantic will be saying the same.  

UFOs back again?

In a report which seems to take too unskeptically the comments of someone from the dubious "To the Stars Academy", the Washington Post nonetheless reports on the Navy setting up a more detailed scheme for its pilots to report UFOs (my bold):

A recent uptick in sightings of unidentified flying objects — or as the military calls them, “unexplained aerial phenomena” — prompted the Navy to draft formal procedures for pilots to document encounters, a corrective measure that former officials say is long overdue.

As first reported by POLITICO, these intrusions have been happening on a regular basis since 2014. Recently, unidentified aircraft have entered military-designated airspace as often as multiple times per month, Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for office of the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, told The Washington Post on Wednesday.

Citing safety and security concerns, Gradisher vowed to “investigate each and every report.”

He said, “We want to get to the bottom of this. We need to determine who’s doing it, where it’s coming from and what their intent is. We need to try to find ways to prevent it from happening again.”

I'm not sure of the source of that claim of recent numbers of unidentified aircraft - but I also note that if something seems to be moving just like an aircraft, it probably is one. 

Is it a case that the Navy is concerned about unidentified aircraft only, and this report conflates that with UFO's?

Transgender health

Nature has an article about a larger than usual European study on the on-going health and effects of transgender treatment.   It certainly supports the criticism that hormonal treatments have been readily offered without knowing the long term consequences.   Look at this, for example:

In 2017, the NIH launched a prospective study of 400 transgender adolescents. It will be the first study to examine the effects of drugs that block puberty until a teenager’s body and mind is mature enough to begin cross-sex hormone treatment.

Questions of how — and when — to allow transgender youth to transition medically and socially are among the stickiest in the field.

I hadn't heard of this surprising figure before, either:

Mental health tends to rank highly among health concerns, along with HIV. According to some studies, 25% of transgender women and 56% of African American transgender women in the United States are living with HIV, although this estimate could be high because it is based on people seeking treatment.

This is such a complicated area....

Beyond Meat going public

That's a co-incidence:  after having just tried one of their burgers and finding it pretty satisfying, Vox says that the US company is going public and has had good growth in the last few years.  Not profitably yet, but it seems everyone expects it to be:

Now, the company has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO, scheduled for next week. They’ll sell shares in the company for between $19 and $21 per share, allowing them to raise $183 million for additional manufacturing facilities, research and development, and sales. If their stock sells at the high end of that, the company would be valued at $1.2 billion. They’ll be listed on NASDAQ as BYND.

Founded in 2009 by CEO Ethan Brown, the Los Angeles-based company’s products first hit supermarket shelves in 2013. Its rapid rise — food is not an easy industry to break into — reflects intense consumer demand and investor interest in meat alternatives. The company has never been profitable, and lost $29 million in 2018, but its rapidly growing revenues made it a good bet to many investors — as did its positioning on the frontier of a transformation of our food system.

Unusual economic idea

From Axios:

How depreciating money could save the global economy

Some explanation:

Central banks have unloaded trillions of dollars of stimulus in efforts to push inflation above 2% in countries from the U.S. to Japan and across the eurozone, but nothing seems to be working.

Driving the news: One radical idea that could boost spending and help resuscitate moribund economies is Silvio Gessell's proposal for depreciating money, writes Stephen Mihm, an associate professor at the University of Georgia, in an editorial for Bloomberg.

What it means: Money, if not spent, would lose its value by 5% a year. That would encourage people to spend, rather than hold onto it. Such a plan would radically boost the "velocity" of money, giving a major boost to developed economies where services account for a hefty majority of economic growth.

• "In Gesell's formulation, money became a 'hot potato' that note holders tried to use before it lost value," Mihm writes. "As far-fetched as they seem, his writings had practical implications because they pointed a way out of the impasse the world confronted in the Great Depression."

Context: The idea has been tried before. The mayor of Wörgl, Austria, used the town’s funds to put Gesell's depreciating currency into rotation and managed to stimulate a minor boom in the midst of the Great Depression.

Um, not sure how you make money depreciate by a set figure in the current system...

Incompetence results in slightly better news

Gee, the Sri Lankan government is looking pretty spectacularly inept:

Sri Lankan authorities have revised the death toll from Easter Sunday’s string of bombings down to 253 people from the previous estimate of 359.

At least the ineptitude on this means better news, of sorts.

The downfall of capitalism, by George Monbiot

While skeptical of the need to "declare capitalism dead", perpetual pessimist George Monbiot's piece in The Guardian is actually pretty well argued, and there are parts I think sound right.  Like this:

There is no going back: the alternative to capitalism is neither feudalism nor state communism. Soviet communism had more in common with capitalism than the advocates of either system would care to admit. Both systems are (or were) obsessed with generating economic growth. Both are willing to inflict astonishing levels of harm in pursuit of this and other ends. Both promised a future in which we would need to work for only a few hours a week, but instead demand endless, brutal labour. Both are dehumanising. Both are absolutist, insisting that theirs and theirs alone is the one true God.

I guess I don't mind his previous points before this one, too:  in which he notes that it is not really useful just to argue that because capitalism worked spectacularly well in the past that it must continue in the same way in the future:

Economic growth, intrinsically linked to the increasing use of material resources, means seizing natural wealth from both living systems and future generations.

To point to such problems is to invite a barrage of accusations, many of which are based on this premise: capitalism has rescued hundreds of millions of people from poverty – now you want to impoverish them again. It is true that capitalism, and the economic growth it drives, has radically improved the prosperity of vast numbers of people, while simultaneously destroying the prosperity of many others: those whose land, labour and resources were seized to fuel growth elsewhere. Much of the wealth of the rich nations was – and is – built on slavery and colonial expropriation.

Like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good. Just as we have found means of generating useful energy that are better and less damaging than coal, so we need to find means of generating human wellbeing that are better and less damaging than capitalism.

But he is a bit light on where we move forward from here:

So what does a better system look like? I don’t have a complete answer, and I don’t believe any one person does. But I think I see a rough framework emerging. Part of it is provided by the ecological civilisation proposed by Jeremy Lent, one of the greatest thinkers of our age. Other elements come from Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics and the environmental thinking of Naomi Klein, Amitav Ghosh, Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq, Raj Patel and Bill McKibben. Part of the answer lies in the notion of “private sufficiency, public luxury”. Another part arises from the creation of a new conception of justice based on this simple principle: every generation, everywhere, shall have an equal right to the enjoyment of natural wealth.

I believe our task is to identify the best proposals from many different thinkers and shape them into a coherent alternative. Because no economic system is only an economic system but intrudes into every aspect of our lives, we need many minds from various disciplines – economic, environmental, political, cultural, social and logistical – working collaboratively to create a better way of organising ourselves that meets our needs without destroying our home.

But yeah, on the whole, a reasonably argued take on the matter.   I think perhaps all it really amounts to is saying that capitalism as a system needs greater shaping by government intervention, but need not be abandoned in its entirety.
 

Local wildlife continues to surprise

Over the years, I've posted photos of a kangaroo in my street (twice), possums under the deck (here's one example, but there are many more), cockatoos, corellas and more unusual birds.   Of course we get more wildlife that I haven't photographed:  brush turkeys, blue tongued lizards, as well as your lorikeets, flying foxes, kookaburras, etc.   Lots of Australian wildlife, all within 18 km of the heart of the city, but it's not as if my house borders bushland, although it is within a couple of kilometres of patches of it.

Anyhow, last night the dog was doing its job of unnecessarily guarding our house by looking out the front window and barking at passing humans and their canines, when she obviously spotted something walking past closer to the house.  I couldn't see anything, but she was highly excited, and I eventually went out the front to find this:

Yes, a bundle of spikes* that is an echidna, with its head buried in the corner, I suspect in order to eat ants which are always in that area.   It was breathing and scraping, but we just let it be.  I checked half an hour later and it had moved on.

I had once seen one of these on a footpath near the bushy riverbank a couple of kilometres from me, but never really expected to see one in my street.

If only I ever spot a koala in the gum trees in the small park in front of the house (very unlikely, but the way things are going, seems I shouldn't rule it out entirely) I'll have some sort of Australian wildlife bingo game triumph that I never have expected to when I moved into this suburb.



*  now that I think of it, looks a tad like a bicycle helmet as designed for Mad Max; or one for a severe swooping magpie deterrent.

Chinese Australians and ANZAC Day

I'm starting to think it must be quite a onerous task for news services to come up with some fresh historical aspect of Australian war time service for each ANZAC Day.  But they usually do manage something of interest, and this year I choose to highlight the ABC stories on Chinese Australians who served in the World Wars.

There were at least 213 Chinese-Australians who enlisted in World War I, and potentially many more in World War II — however nobody knows exactly how many there were, due to Australia's race-based enlistment policies at the time.

"There were race requirements for entering the armed services during the World Wars," historian Meleah Hampton from the Australian War Memorial told the ABC.

The enforcement of these rules came down to how "European" a would-be soldier appeared in the eyes of the man taking down his enlistment — but Dr Hampton said their assessments became more lax as the need for soldiers grew.

"When they started getting very desperate for men, they started seeing whiter and whiter people I guess," she said.

The article supports this with a photo of someone who tried to enlist in World War 1 but was rejected:

The article notes the story of Billy Sing, of mixed Chinese Caucasian heritage, who was a crack sniper at Gallipoli and served in France too:

He does look quite the badass dude in the next photo

Moving forward to WW2, and Wellington Lee, later a deputy mayor in Melbourne, said he was rejected by the Navy (on pure racial grounds, he believes) but did get to enlist in the Air Force.  (Ahem, always the best service to be in, I say with some direct knowledge.)  Here's a photo of Lee from the article:

I see from another story from 2018 on the ABC, the Air Force again features as the service a Chinese Australian was able to join in WW2:

The White Australia policy treated her father as a "foreigner and enemy" and resulted in her mother's citizenship being revoked.

But despite that, in 1945 — at the age of just 18 — Kathleen Quan Mane enlisted as a decoder in Australia's Air Force for what would be the final year of World War II.

Ms Quan Mane and her sister Doreen, the youngest of five girls in their family, were among the first 21 Chinese-Australian servicewomen to join the war effort.

Here she is in uniform:

Cool.

Good on these people for giving service to our country even when, with its policies, you could argue it didn't really deserve their help.  

Update:   I just found via Twitter that someone writing in the South China Morning Post has an article about his great Uncle, Fred Goon, who did this:

Eight times Goon tried to sign up, and eight times he was rejected. But on his ninth try, on January 12, 1917, he succeeded. The medical officer noted the 23-year-old recruit’s dark complexion and hair, but not his Chinese heritage.

A little over a year later, Goon was gulping down German drift gas in the trenches of the Western Front, and he was hospitalised for months. He returned to the Belgian front in time to take part in the last battle of the war involving Australian troops.

The persistence of Goon, my great-uncle, may be some kind of record.

Here's his photo:

The image on the right is how he appeared in the Bendigo Advertiser when it reported news of his gassing.

Goon had a Chinese father but Irish descended mother.  This combination was not that unusual around Bendigo, oddly enough:

Goon was the son of Louey Fong Goon, a merchant from Taishan in Guangdong who joined the 19th century Australian gold rush. In Bendigo, he married Elizabeth Johnson, daughter of Irish immigrants, in 1896 – three years after she had given birth to their son, Fred.

My great-grandparents’ pairing was not unique; there were 28 marriages between Chinese men and Irish-born women in Victoria in a five-year period at the height of the gold rush, and many others involved Australian-born Irishwomen like Johnson.

But Fred was born into an Australia where racism was already endemic – anger about Chinese men marrying white women had helped trigger violent unrest, including the infamous 1861 Lambing Flat riot, in which Chinese miners were expelled from goldfields by white diggers. By 1901, the White Australia Policy was enshrined in law and would prevent most Chinese immigration for almost 50 years.

The article explains the discretionary nature of the racial criteria for enlistment:

Cheah Ah-Qune said the racism faced by ethnic Chinese would-be recruits was institutionalised, but application of the European-origin rule was up to individual recruitment medics. Some were sticklers. Others would bend the rules.

“One might say, well, you’re Sino in appearance, you have an olive complexion, but your heart is in the right place, so let’s put you in. It was discretionary … especially as the war progressed and more and more men were needed,” she said.

Some Chinese-Australians went to great lengths to enlist, said Cheah Ah-Qune, citing one recruit who travelled from Melbourne to Queensland to sign up, at least 1,700km north.

Interesting stuff.