Brew and Chew

Ian Phillips 0428 858 272

As Easter has passed, our thoughts have to turn to the next celebration - this Anzac-day, and so, to the first Anzac day.

That campaign in 1915 began by an attempt to bring about “regime change” by forcing open a strait, in that case Ottoman Turkey and the Dardanelles. That didn’t end well!

The similarities then and now are well explored in an essay, late March, from the Australian Naval Institute entitled “Mines lessons from the Dardanelles 1915”. It is responsible and well put together and generally a rewarding Google search.The essay draws on strategic wisdom for the time of Nelson (“A ship is a fool to fight a fort.”). In essence, well-defended and mined straits can only be forced at considerable cost, if at all. Naval attempts in 1915 failed with the loss of a number of British warships, (despite the success of an Australian submarine in inflicting some damage), leading to the alternative disaster of attempting a land-based victory by landing at Gallipoli.

But, of course, it will all be very different now (irony intended)!

So faced with the prospect of on-going constrained oil supplies, various worthies have agitated for oil exploration here, presuming, not unreasonably, that the normal life will be so slow in returning that we will have time to fill our bowsers from wild-cats.

Desperate times lead to desperate measures – in dire straits (pun intended), from 1942, a joint Federal and State enterprise dug a shaft (!) twelve feet in diameter and twelve hundred feet deep to the layers that seeped oil at Lakes Entrance (where oil traces had been observed for years), and then drilled laterally – the recovered crude was then hauled to the surface in buckets!

As it unlikely we can extract a toll on ships passing through our Bass Strait, we had better get back to securing our own supply of oil somehow – we will have time to do this so long as oil can pass from the Gulf of Mexico (sorry, Gulf of America) via Panama, assuming that doesn’t blow up too. But, by the time Brew & Chew meets at the Camberwell library (the fourth Wednesday of each month), the “war” will be over we are told, so there will be something else to talk about – the football perhaps.

Ian Phillips – irp@alphalink.com.au 7 April 2026

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