Friends, Romans, countrymen & Cockatoos as Romans -John Tognolini
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John/Togs Tognolini
All my views expressed here are my own. I’m 64. Before I became a teacher in 2000. I worked in a variety of blue collar jobs since 1975 as, a labourer including working for two years in General Motors Holden’s Melbourne car plants at Fisherman’s Bend and Dandenong. I've also been a scaffolder, rigger, dogman, railway fettler (track worker) on Sydney's railways, and a ship's painter and docker at Sydney's Cockatoo Island Dockyard. I've been a life long unionist since I was 16. I'm a proud and active member of the New South Wales Teachers Federation Union/Australian Education Union, & a member of the Greens. I'm a historian, geographer, teacher, writer, actor, musician & poet. I’ve decided to reactivate my blog named after the house built by my Italian grandfather/nonno Antonio Tognolini from Tirano, Sondria, Lombardia, Italy. He came to Australia as a passenger on the ‘Northumberland’ when it docked in Naarm/Melbourne in1874. Antonio built it with my Uncle Henry Phillips and it was called Togs’s Place, they finished building it in 1906, in Yandoit, Central Victoria, in Dja Dja Wurrung Country. It served as Cobb & Co way-station, which was immediately adjacent to the main coach route from Yandoit to Castlemaine. It delivered mail to the mainly American Gold Miners of American Gully. It’s where my father Vic was born in 1910, the youngest of 12 children between Antonio and my grandmother Annie Batt/Phillips. Annie was a widow with 3 children when her and Antonio got together. Annie was the granddaughter of an English Convict Thomas Batt who landed in Hobart/Nipaluna in 1830 and Irish woman Mary McCarthy, who arrived in 1830’s to Hobart. I've produced four radio documentaries for ABC Radio National/RN: Bush Fires, Ups and Downs of Scaffolding, The Last Ship Built in the Dockyard, the HMAS Success built in Sydney’s Cockatoo Island Dockyard, the navy gave a me a sea ride on it from Hobart to Sydney. Underground about Lithgow Mine Rescue in New South Wales's Western Coal fields. I've made the films The Occupation of Cockatoo Island Dockyard 1989. I made this film with Frances Kelly. As well as my film The Deregistration of the Builders Labourers Federation-the Victorian Story 1986-1992. They were both disputes I was directly involved in and these films are on Youtube. I've also been involved in community radio since 1987 and worked as a journalist for the ABC Radio’s Double J and Triple J. I have a First Class Honours Degree in Communications from the University of Technology, Sydney where I also majored in Journalism and Social and Political Theory and a Diploma of Secondary Education from the University of Western Sydney. I've also been a marker for the NSW Higher School Certificate’s Ancient History Examination, three times. I've been a high school teacher for over twenty-four years. I completed the TAFE Certificate Two in Fire Fighting Operations and was a volunteer bush fire fighter for seventeen years and retired from this after I joined the Zipper Club when I had a mechanical heart valve inserted in 2011. I'm originally from Naarm/Melbourne’s Brunswick, Wurundjeri Country and lived in Sydney on Gadigal and Darug Lands and the Central Coast on Darkinjung Country at Long Jetty & Umina Beach before moving back to Sydney and then to the Blue Mountain’s town of Katoomba on Darug and Gundungurra Lands in 1992 and was there for sixteen years before moving to Wellington Wiradjuri Country in Central West, New South Wales near Dubbo in 2008. The Mountain City Murders, my first book was published by Adelaide’s Ginninderra Press in 2010. My autobiographical account of heart disease Singing Johnny Cash in Cardiac Ward, A Personal Story of Heart Disease and Music was published in 2013. My first historical novel Brothers Part One: Gallipoli 1915 was published in 2014. I'm updating this book and my 2015 book A History Man’s Past & Other People’s Stories: A Shared Memoir. Part One: Other People’s Wars is a shared history in many ways. It’s where part of my story reflects the people I’ve interviewed with my media work over thirty five years. My interview with retired Australian SAS Warrant Officer Dr Brian Day, who served with the US Special Forces in Vietnam and Cambodia. He was also a founding member of the Australian Vietnam Veterans Association. I interviewed him in 1992 on Anzac, Racism, and the Madness of the Vietnam War. My interview with Stan Goff, a retired US Army Special Forces Master Sergeant and Vietnam Veteran who served in the US Army up until Haiti in 1996. He became involved in Military Families Against War that was formed when George W.Bush invaded Iraq in 2003. My question to Veteran Journalist, Writer and Filmmaker John Pilger, at a public meeting in Katoomba's Gearins Hotel, in the Blue Mountains about history being memory in 2008. My question to Activist, Academic, Writer and Linguist Noam Chomsky, and coverage of his Sydney Press Conference, when he visited Australia in 1995, campaigning for an independent East Timor, then under the murderous Indonesian Occupation. A shared history in another way too, I argue here that Australia’s Frontier Wars against our Indigenous Peoples should be recognised in the Australian War Memorial. I also argued against former prime minister Tony Abbott’s $90 million dollar John Monash Centre at Villers-Bretonneux, France and highlight the $400 million spent on the Centenary of Australia’s involvement in World War One as a major act of hypocrisy, when one in ten of our nation’s homeless are War Veterans. I'm updating this book in light of the AUKUS Alliance and Nuclear Submarine purchase. Prime minister Anthony Albanese has signed away Australian Sovereignty to be part of the United States containment of China. This book is an attempt to answer that big question, why has Australia been at War so much in so many places normally as junior partner to Britain or the United States? I'm currently completing the Brothers historical novel series with the following three parts concentrating on the Western Front in France and Belgium from 1916 to 1918. In late April 2016, I moved back to Katoomba and I'm on the New South Wales Teachers Federation’s State Council for the Blue Mountains and secretary of the Blue Mountains Teachers Association. In 2018 I endured a stroke that nearly killed me. After recovering I decided to take a break from writing for five and half years. On May 11th 2023, I was awarded Life Membership of the Mighty NSW Teachers Federation by then NSWTF Senior President Angelo Gavrielatos.
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