Only a week ago I would never have imagined Mitchell Nadin attending the event but hey, new positions call for new attitudes ... well one would hope so anyway.

I do wonder though whether the fantastic crew of First Nations musicians and those in the crowd realised our new deputy mayor only a week ago had voted against a motion to increase the employment prospects of the original owner community by opposing an extra weighting for council contract tenderers who employ Indigenous people.

A nice simple way to help our community you would have thought. But not for Deputy Nadin, who described the increased emphasis on Indigenous employment as a “ball and chain on small business”.

Both metaphorically and realistically, that’s a pretty inappropriate way to treat the Indigenous community in our shire, many of whom are actually desperate to find work but are fighting an uphill battle due to entrenched racism and an “out of sight out of mind” attitude in the broader community.

Mr Nadin has done nothing to help this situation with what seems to be politically motivated insensitivity and just a little hypocrisy to boot

Does anybody here remember “The World at War”?

The epic documentary series about World War 2 was on Australian TV in the mid-1970s and had a powerful impact on me as a young boy.

My parents let us watch the horrific episode “Genocide”, with its gruesome scenes from Nazi concentration camps.

In another episode there were scenes of the liberation of the camps at the end of the war which included the awful work of a British soldier, handkerchief clutched to his mouth, driving an open cab bulldozer and pushing hundreds of Jewish bodies into a burial pit.

In another sequence an SS guard is marched away at gun point and given a few kicks in the backside by his captor.

I remember vividly Dad jumping out of his chair, enraged, shouting “KICK HIM, KICK HIM”!

It was a very intense moment that I didn’t quite understand at the time, I was too young, but Dad was clearly not fond of Nazis!

In 1992 my dad was admitted to Concord Veterans Repat Hospital. Suffering from Parkinson’s and dementia, he was only 66 years old.

The view from his ward window was dominated by the large, disused gasometer at Mortlake, that for many years was a prominent inner-west landmark.

There must have been a similar structure in Germany because Dad, in his confused state asked if he was in Bremen.

Remarkably, he then started reeling off the names of all the railway stations between Hamburg and Bremen. Dad’s brain could remember those details while not being able to recognise his own family.

The references to Bremen were a clue to his military service with the British Army (Gordon Highlanders) in Europe at the end of the Second World War.

I don’t know exactly when and where he served but I suspect he could have seen direct evidence of Nazi atrocities - he was only 19. 

Looking back now, I can understand better why he got so upset watching a TV documentary. 

The swastika stickers that have appeared in Bega, and the disgusting assault on Mike Kelly’s office in Queanbeyan, are a reminder that we need to actively reject the repulsive agenda of deluded Hitler worshippers.

It is the best way we can honor the sacrifice of previous generations.