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World War II hero Jack Sue has died in Perth at the age of 84.

Mr Sue was a member of Z Special Unit, a special forces reconnaissance unit which operated behind enemy lines in South-East Asia during World War II.

Z Special Unit was the predecessor to the Special Air Service Regiment.

Mr Sue spent months behind enemy lines in Borneo and in his memoirs claimed Z Special Unit commandos in Borneo killed 1,700 Japanese and trained 6,000 guerrillas.

Allied forces later invaded Borneo.

Mr Sue was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal and rose to the rank of Sergeant during his army career.

He was awarded the Order of Australia in 2006.

His son Barry Sue confirmed he died today.

In 2006, The West Australians' Rod Moran wrote of Mr Sue's war-time exploits.

Head-hunting Dyaks, murderous Japanese infantry and the tragedy of the Sandakan Death Marches in the fetid jungle of what was then British North Borneo provided the grim backdrop to teenage warrior Jack Wong Sue's experience of World War II in the South-West Pacific, Moran wrote.

His award of the Order of Australia Medal was partly for his recording of those experiences in Blood on Borneo, a remarkable memoir of his nine months behind enemy lines in 1944-45. Published in 2001, more than 17,000 copies of the book have been sold in WA alone.

But Mr Sue's trajectory to war began when he was merely 16 years old. After receiving a white feather in the mail - a symbol of cowardice - he joined the merchant navy, sailing the submarine-infested high seas on a Norwegian oil tanker.

En route, he rubbed shoulders with nazi sailors on shore leave in pro-German neutral ports, and witnessed the fiery death by torpedo of an Allied merchantman at night.

On returning to Fremantle he attempted to enlist in the Royal Australian Navy, but was rejected because of his Chinese background. The fact that he was Australian-born and that China was a wartime ally made no difference.

Ironically, it was precisely his oriental appearance and connections - as well as his fluency in Chinese and Malay - that led to Mr Sue's recruitment into Z Special Unit, an ultra-secret organisation that infiltrated agents behind Japanese lines throughout the South-West Pacific for sabotage, guerilla warfare, and intelligence gathering.

After extensive training in the ruthless methods and technologies of clandestine warfare, Mr Sue was sent into the field as agent AKR 13. Leaving Fremantle on the USS Tuna, he was inserted into Borneo to conduct operation Agas 1. He had been issued with “L-tablets”, lethal capsules to be ingested if captured. At the time, Borneo was occupied by 37,000 troops of the Japanese Imperial Army.

The aim was to gather intelligence on Japanese troop movements as a prelude to the Australian invasion of Borneo. It was during this operation that Mr Sue won the Distinguished Conduct Medal for his actions in securing intelligence at Bongawan railway station.

Mr Sue was also involved in Operation Kingfisher, a plan to rescue the PoWs at the brutal Sandakan prison camp in northern Borneo. With nearly 2000 Japanese troops in the area, Mr Sue had to reconnoitre the camp and its hinterland.

All but six of the 2400 prisoners at the camp died on the subsequent Sandakan Death Marches, or were murdered at the camp itself. Mr Sue is the last living witness to the third and final march.

Historian Lynette Silver, author of Sandakan: A Conspiracy of Silence, describes his predicament: “Into their line of vision came a contingent of Japanese guards, followed by four skeletal creatures, so starved and emaciated they looked more like mummified corpses than human beings.” They were Australian PoWs.

Mr Sue's instincts told him to kill the guards and free the prisoners. But his training told him to stay under cover. The image of his countrymen as the living dead haunted Mr Sue.

In 1945, at the age of just 19, Mr Sue emerged from the jungle emaciated, psychologically haunted and a decorated war hero. With great fortitude, he began the process of building a new life in civvy street.

Meet Janice and Sonya, or JS as they're known, twins who hail from Sydney.  They've been posting cover songs on Youtube since 2008 and have steadily gained a loyal following.  They sing a mixture of songs, sometimes in Korean too, accompanied by an acoustic guitar. They have super s w e e t voices.

They've uploaded 22 songs so far but my favourite, and by the looks of it, everyone elses, is Officially Missing You by Tamia.  Keep it up girls!



Looking through some of the comments, Janice seems to be more attention than Sonya, even though they're twins.

Their official channel is here.

Graham Perrett and the Sunnybank RSL are working with the Chinese community on Brisbane's southside to establish an Australian-Chinese War Memorial to honour the service and sacrifice of Australian-Chinese who have served in the Australian Defence Forces.

The memorial will be erected in the Veterans Memorial Garden at the Sunnybank Sub Branch RSL in Gager Street, Sunnybank.

The Competition Organising Committee is seeking designs from 16 to 25 year-olds. The winning designer will be awarded $1,000.

Lee is part Thai and part Vietnamese and keeps to himself a lot. Before the war, lee played the Violin, Piano and was good at Visual arts at school. Lee, like Ellie, becomes more violent as the war progresses and because he keeps to himself, he sometimes causes a few problems. Lee tends to kill soldiers directly (with knives and guns for example) and becomes more left out when he finds everyone's parents are okay except for his. But Lee, also like Ellie, finds his lighter side with the "feral" children.

Perthnow (Perth branch of news.com.au) have been running a competition to select some amateur newsreaders.  People send in a video of themselves talking about an issue that they would like read and each week a winner is selected.  The winner then gets to film a short segment of them newsreading.  The winner of the third week is Joshua Tan, who briefly discusses the issue of asylum seekers.  It's not available on youtube so you'll have to visit the site here. 

Good job Josh.

Being greeted with a simple "How are you today?" is now only one of the options at Auckland's central police station.

Chances are, it will also include "namaste", "nihao" or even "annyeong-haseyo".

Yesterday, police started a project under which they have engaged 23 volunteers who between them speak 14 languages including Mandarin, Hindi, Tamil, Korean, Tagalog and Russian.

They will man the reception counter at the central police station in an effort to foster trust among migrants.

"We can't say for sure if there is under-reporting of crime from ethnic communities, but we are certain that many do not have the same level of trust in our police because their views are shaped by what they think of police back where they came from," said police Asian liaison officer Jessica Phuang.

"Language is the biggest barrier, but there's also culture and background. We hope to build that trust and make them less nervous when dealing with the police."

It was also an attempt to make the station less intimidating for immigrants and visitors.

Volunteers were trained in customer services skills, and were taken on a tour of prison cells and given an insight into police work.

Catherine Gardner, who is in charge of the file management centre, said the secondary objective was to give people from ethnic communities an opportunity to experience police work, and perhaps consider a career with the force.

The Auckland region had 97 Asian police officers, but needed hundreds more to be representative of the diverse communities, she said.

"It has been a challenge to look for people from ethnic communities to become sworn officers, and this is one way we are hoping to enlarge our pool," Ms Gardner said.

"We know that in the Auckland City district, we have large numbers of people from Asia and Southeast Asia, and it is good for them to be able to speak in their own language."

Although police did not record the ethnicities of those making reports, they believed that among the immigrant groups, refugees were most likely to be reluctant to come forward because of the hard time they had faced with police back home, she said.

Speakers of foreign languages have to use Language Line - a service managed by the Office of Ethnic Affairs - to get translations over the telephone when making a report to police.

Police customer services manager Tony Geldenhuys said that although the telephone service served its purpose, it was impersonal.

"If you've got someone speaking your language in person, it personalises your whole experience with the police."

It would help to put at ease ease a person who had been affected by an incident, said Mr Geldenhuys.

Ethnic volunteers will be at the station from Monday to Saturday between 10am and 6pm.

Sarah Malik wanders into the Friend in Hand hotel one Tuesday night and finds a young rapper weaving his rhymes to a packed crowd.

Omar Musa is rapping to a small but appreciative audience at the Word in Hand poetry slam in Glebe.

"I'm less Osama and more Obama

I stare at the sky

Pupils dilate black

Stereotypes they can bury your life

I'm on your stereo hoping I'll change that

The hour is soon, a flower will bloom

The power is yours to say now were on tune

I stay stuck to the bottom hoping to rise

We share the same Earth so open your eyes"

The 25-year-old Malaysian-Australian has the audience rapt, listening to his mixture of brash hip hop and wordplay as he unravels stories of growing up in the rural NSW town Queanbeyan, navigating issues of race and identity, artistic inspiration, politics and family.

After winning the Australian Poetry Slam in 2008 and the British Council's Realise your Dreams competition the year before, it has been a hectic journey for the young artist.

The recognition has given him the opportunity to live in London and record his first album in Seattle, as well as to play to packed houses.

Musa recognises it's a long way from his childhood, growing up in sleepy Queanbeyan.

“It's been really crazy and I've really enjoyed it because I started rapping really late compared to a lot of people,” he says.

Musa considers himself a poet first but the medium of hip hop attracted him because of its fluid nature.

“I was always into poetry since I was a young kid but I wanted to use a form of poetry that was more accessible to people," he says.

“I think that was what hip hop was for me. I didn't approach it for the musical side or the fashion side. I just wanted to tell my stories and do it in a poetic way.”

For an artist who draws his inspiration from sources as diverse as rappers Common, Andre 3000 and Nas, and poets such as T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and Robert Browning, Musa is annoyed at the negative stereotypes associated with hip hop.

“There is a certain image of hip hop that is portrayed, the gun-slinging gangster etc. The thing that attracts me to hip hop is that there are a myriad voices you can hear. I think it's important that people get a voice no matter where they come from,” he says.

It was the accessibility of the medium that inspired him to do hip hop workshops with Aboriginal children in Cape York, where he was confronted with the reality of indigenous disadvantage.

“It made me believe even more fervently that hip hop is a very important form of art, music and poetry that could help Aboriginal kids express themselves. The good thing about hip hop is that it is cool and accessible,” he says.

However, he is wary of being regarded as a political rapper.

“Often rappers and poets have this political agenda and it just force-feeds people ... I try and just tell my own stories and, if it happens to have something to do with social justice, then so be it,” he says.

Playing with issues of identity and contradiction and of the complexities of everyday life are what inspires Musa.

He refers to his poem about buying into the capitalistic urge for expensive sneakers while feeling guilty about his less affluent extended family in Malaysia.

“That's something I go through every day. Should I be so materialistic? Should I be spending my money on this? I like to point the finger at myself as well. Because a lot of people get up there and preach ... I try to get to the complexities of my own moral compass.”

Omar Musa's debut CD The Massive EP is out now.

THREE Indian nationals who sparked a police investigation by claiming they were victims of a racist fire bombing attack have been charged with staging the incident.

Police told the court the complainants had staged the fire at Punjabi supermarket at Quakers Hill, near Blacktown, for insurance money.

Harpal Singh-Arora, 33, had told police in September he was closing up the Punjabi supermarket in Quakers Hill about 9pm on September 7 when three armed men entered the store hurling racial insults before stealing $2400 and setting off a huge explosion which blasted him out of the shop and onto the footpath, he was rushed to hospital.

The store owner, his brother-in-law Abhinaz Khurana and Pankaj Sadana, 27 also rushed to Blacktown hospital to see Singh-Arora.

However, all three were taken into custody yesterday after a police investigation decided the account was fabricated. In particular, detectives said, there were large holes in Singh-Arora’s signed statement which said he was "picked up and blown out of the front door by a hot wind".

"He says that the force of the explosion was enough to blow him through the door and knock him to the ground" a police fax sheet said.

A police fax said shop records reveal the shop had been listed for sale for two months and the sale had been slow since a larger Indian supermarket had opened nearby.

The three men had recently taken out an insurance policy after leaving the shop uninsured for a year.

"Investigators believe that the motive for lightning the fire was purely for financial reasons," a police fax said.

"This matter is of a serious nature in which there has been a degree of planning and preparation.

"It was noted that there were a number of loose leaflets on the front counter which had not moved as a result of the explosion, furthermore the fax sheet said there were traces of petrol on Singh-Arora’s clothes and shoes suggesting that he stood or walked through the petrol rather than being blown out of the shop."

The fax sheet was tendered at Kogarah local court today where Sing-Arora and Sadana were both granted bail after spending the night in custody.

Khurana was granted immediate police bail after the arrest yesterday.

All three are due to appear in Burwood local court on December 3.

VICTORIA might be an ethnic melting pot, but as it turns out, its blood supply is not as richly diverse.

As part of its campaign to recruit more donors this year, the Australian Red Cross Blood Service is trying to obtain more blood from different ethnic groups to ensure the state's blood supply represents community needs.

Transfusion specialist Erica Wood said that aside from commonly known blood types like A, B, O and Rhesus, many other groups were found in varying frequency among people from different parts of the world.

As Victoria had become more multicultural, she said demand for these types had increased, prompting the service to encourage more people from Arab, Asian, African, Pacific Island and some European backgrounds to donate.

''We have a very diverse patient group now with all sorts of conditions that are more common among people from particular ethnic backgrounds,'' she said.

''However, our donors have primarily come from a European background.

''We've always had good support from a range of community groups, but we would like to increase that so we've got really good representation.''

The need for rare blood types was felt this year when the service had to import blood products from New Zealand and interstate to help four pregnant Polynesian women because there were no matching donors in Victoria.

''It's an ongoing issue for us. We've had a lot of people with rare blood types that could not be easily found among Victorian donors,'' Dr Wood said.

She said it was important to provide compatible blood to people with special needs to ensure their condition was properly treated and to minimise potentially fatal adverse reactions.

Harkirat Singh, from the Sikh Federation of Australia, said he started mobilising his community to donate this year to boost supplies not only for his own people, but also for the broader community. ''Our religion says that we should do these sorts of things so there is equality in the world,'' he said before giving blood yesterday.

''We are organising for people to come in every three months. We're very proud to be part of it.''

Dr Wood encouraged Victorians to donate, especially over Christmas when donations tend to drop.

''We all hope and expect that blood will be available when we or our family and friends need it, but we might not give much thought to how it gets there,'' she said.

''We really need a blood supply that will help everyone.''

To donate blood visit donateblood. com.au or call 131 495.

Food fight erupts over long lunch in Chinatown

Chinese author endured torture by communists - Obituary of Nien Chieng

Doc's 'skull heard to crack' during attack  - The trial begins of the attackers of former AMA boss Mukesh Haikerwal, and also other victims who were of Asian and Indian origin.

Student charged in $20k heroin bust - Robert Tran iis charged with six offences, including trafficking heroin to children.  Police found 38.5g of heroin which has a street value of $15,000 to $20,000.

Police investigate people-smuggling link to Lin murder - A case of mistaken identity?  Police claim a possibility.

Paulo Miranda 'bounty hunters' murder trial to proceed

Class opens after Mandarin jam

Geisha ad bound to offend - Using a geisha to sell tiles and boat people to sell boats/.  Who comes up with these crappy ad ideas?

Man accused of 'killing' his wife by inaction

The Dance of Destiny - A personal journey

Muck-up day prank puts boy's hearing at risk

The list of nominations for the AFI awards has been released.

AFI AWARD FOR BEST TELEVISION COMEDY SERIES
Lawrence Leung’s Choose Your Own Adventure.

Some of the other category nominations are (I really should have thought more before I named this thread):

AFI MEMBERS’ CHOICE AWARD
Mao’s Last Dancer.

SAMSUNG MOBILE AFI AWARD FOR BEST FILM
Mao’s Last Dancer.

AFI AWARD FOR BEST DIRECTION
Mao’s Last Dancer.

MACQUARIE AFI AWARD FOR BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Mao’s Last Dancer.

AFI AWARD FOR BEST EDITING
Mao’s Last Dancer.

AFI AWARD FOR BEST SOUND
Mao’s Last Dancer.


AFI AWARD FOR BEST ORIGINAL MUSIC SCORE
Mao’s Last Dancer. 

A story from China about a Chinese husband's fight for extra compensation after his wife, a Chinese-Australian, died during an operation at the hospital where she worked.  The wife, Xiong Zhuowei, died whilst receiving orthopedic surgery at Peking University First Hospital.

Wang Jianguo (the husband) is appealing the decision of the High Court to award him 700,000 RMB (~AUD$110,000) and is demanding 5 Million RMB (~AUD$786,000).

His main reason for demanding more compensation? "His wife was a Chinese-Australian so the compensation amount should reflect sums paid for the death of a foreigner, which are higher than that for Chinese".

I am totally disgusted with this.  It's a very bad reflection on modern Chinese society and court system, always putting foreigners (whites) in high esteem, or in another view lowering the value of their own people.  Yes, there are other factors which may have contributed to the large sum he is demanding, but by this estimate (using my asian maths skills, which apparently I was born with), a distasteful way of looking at it, one dead foreigner = seven dead Chinese.

Now, compare this to happenings in Australia.

Cornelia Rau, a white, permanent resident, who was held in detention for 10 months, received $2.4 million dollars compensation.  This amount was exorbitant but the Immigration department agreed to pay it.

Van Phuc Nguyen, an asian, permanent resident, who was wrongly detained for three years, was awarded $58,000 compensation.  A measly $58,000??? For three years of imprisonment and trauma??? 

Sounds fair hey?



Read more about Van's experience here.

The following is a piece by Ming-Zhu Hii about the lack of diversity in the performing arts and was printed in The Age earlier this year.

One of the main reasons that I started this site was because of the lack of Asian representation on Australian TV aside from the stereotypical depictions, and during my search of online material I also came across some forums where Asian Australian actors/actresses voiced their discontent with the state of affairs in the performing arts sector.  I previously posted one of the rants here - Frustrated! Where's the colour-blind casting in this bloody country!!!.  It shouldn't come as a surprise that TV shows and Plays are affected in similar ways as the writers and casting agents are always white.

I am working on a piece that summarises the state of affairs in the TV industry but in the meantime I hope you enjoy the following by Ming-Zhu Hii.  (Note, the article was a jpeg and I couldn't ffind the online article so I typed it all out for the search engines.  I have a shocking typing accuracy so if something doesn't make sense, read the jpeg version)