Biden Introduces Rep. Deb Haaland — His Interior Secretary Nominee — to the Nation
BY LEVI RICKERT DECEMBER 19, 2020
WILMINGTON, Del. — President-elect Joe Biden on Saturday afternoon introduced his administration’s environment team to the nation. Included on the environment team is Rep. Deb Haaland (D-NM), the first American Indian ever nominated to be in a presidential cabinet.
In his opening remarks, Biden said he would introduce the first Native American to a cabinet post. “It is long overdue,” Biden said as he turned to recognize Haaland and said “welcome, welcome, welcome!”
Haaland is a tribal citizen of the Pueblo of Laguna, located in New Mexico. She represents the New Mexico's first congressional district that covers a major portion of the Albuquerque, N.M.
"As the first Native American cabinet secretary, Rep. Haaland will be a true steward," Biden said.
Haaland currently serves as vice chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources. Her experience there will enable her to be ready on day one to protect our environment and fight for a clean energy future.
"I am proud to stand here on the ancestral grounds of the Lenape Tribal Nation. The President-elect and Vice President-elect are committed to a diverse cabinet and I am honored and humbled to accept their nomination for secretary of the Interior," Haaland said.
Rep. Haaland held back a tear for a second as she talked about the hurdles she faced of once being homeless and living on food stamps as a single mom.
In her remarks, Haaland referenced her grandparents who were taken from their family and put in boarding schools in an effort to destroy their traditions and identity.
"This moment is profound when we consider the fact that one former secretary of the Interior once proclaimed his goal, to quote 'to civilize or exterminate us.' I am a living testament of the failure of that horrific ideology," Haaland said. "I also stand on the shoulder of my ancestors and all the people who sacrificed so that I can be here."
As he introduced Haaland, Biden said:
"For Secretary of the Interior, I nominate Congresswoman Deb Haaland.
She’s of the Pueblo people. A 35th-generation New Mexican.
She’s from a military family. Her mom, also Pueblo, served in the United States Navy. Her dad, Norwegian American, a Marine now buried in Arlington.
A single mom, she raised her child while running a small business.
When times were tough, they relied on food stamps.
Congresswoman Haaland graduated from law school and got involved in politics.
Two years ago, she became one of the first Native American women to serve in Congress.
She serves on the Armed Services Committee, and Committee on Natural Resources, and Chairs the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands, where she’s earned the respect of a broad coalition of people — from tribal leaders to environmental groups to labor.
As the first Native American Cabinet Secretary in the history of the United States of America, she will be a true steward of our national parks, natural resources, and all of our lands.
The federal government has long broken promises to Native American tribes who have been on this land since time immemorial.
With her appointment, Congresswoman Haaland will help me strengthen the nation-to-nation relationship, and I am honored she accepted this critical role."
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Introducing CNB: A Korean answer to the Colonel is coming to Norwood
Korean fried chicken is having a moment in Adelaide, and now the Plus 82 team is entering the fray, opening burger shop CNB at Norwood’s Parade Central in early January.
Words and pictures: Johnny von Einem
Above L—R: CNB owners Steven Lee, Kelsey O'Riley, Terry Hwang and Hyunwoo Kang
Multinational fried chicken conglomerate KFC has really gone downhill of late, says chef Terry Hwang.
REMARKS
Chicken and Burger Parade Central 177-193 The Parade, Norwood 5067
CNB is opening early January 2021.
“KFC doesn’t taste as good. It’s dry and pretty boring sauces. I want to shake it up,” he says.
For the last two years, a better KFC – Korean fried chicken – has been garnering a reputation for itself in Adelaide’s eating scene, with Ban Ban, K-Pub, Gunbae and Kokko, among others, building a significant swell of hype behind the deep-fried foodstuff.
It was only a matter of time before the Plus 82 group – whose four existing venues celebrate the food and culture of South Korea – decided to join the party.
In January 2021, the group will launch Chicken and Burger (aka CNB) into the Plus 82 family, headed up by chef Terry, front-of-house manager Kelsey O’Riley, and the group’s founders Steven Lee and Hyunwoo Kang
Unlike most Korean fried chicken restaurants, CNB will have a focus on burgers and will operate predominantly as a takeaway fast-food outlet, much the same as the global franchise that has inspired it. But there will be dine-in space for around 20 people, and a selection of local beers to match.
Burgers will be around the $10 mark, and will feature a range of sauces developed by the team, such as those that can be found at the group’s Pocha restaurant.
“It’s going to be similar to KFC, but slightly more expensive, because we want to focus on quality a little bit more,” Terry says.
The project has been almost two years in the works, with the team developing recipes and trialling a fried chicken pop-up at RCC Fringe and the Cluck Yeah! Fried Chicken Festival in 2019.
Steven was interested in bringing the concept to Norwood as he feels the locale is “a lot more alive than any other suburb.”
“Because it’s always busy, there are a lot of other new restaurants here as well,” he says.
“We wanted to find a popular location. Not necessarily in the city, but in the suburb as well. We were looking at Henley Beach and all that. We found this was the best fit, with the clientele that we have here, the crowd.”
By December last year, the CNB ownership group came upon a space in Norwood befitting of the concept – the Parade Central shopping centre.
The lease was signed in February, but the project stalled in March at the advent of the pandemic.
With a large percentage of Plus 82’s workforce across its multiple venues made up of international students, many of the staff at Pocha, Pocha Lite, MiMi and GoGi were not eligible for the Federal Government’s JobKeeper program.
In order to keep the businesses running, the Plus 82 groups’ directors picked up shifts inside the businesses, leaving little time for them to spend bringing this new concept into being.
“We wanted to focus on the current businesses as well, because they all got hit very badly,” Steven tells CityMag.
Thankfully, Steven’s new landlord at the Norwood site, Mario Boscaini, allowed he and his business partners time to get their other businesses running smoothly before having to worry about their new space.
This is the first hospitality project FOH manager Kelsey has embarked on as an owner. She joined the Plus 82 team at MiMi around 18 months ago, having worked with Steven and Hyunwoo years ago in hotel management.
“It’s always been my plan to be able to branch off away from the hotel sector and go into small business, and so they’ve given me the opportunity to be part of that ownership,” Kelsey says.
“It was very comfortable, purely because I’d worked with these guys before, so that familiarity was always there. But in terms of what I was looking for [this is] a lot better personally for my lifestyle, working for a small business, working for individuals that are almost like a family.”
CNB will launch in early January 2021, and if all goes well, you’ll likely see a few more CNB stores pop up around Adelaide in the months and years following.
The Surafend massacre shows that the core business of good history must always be the preservation of memory
Surafend, Palestine circa 1918. An Australian soldier with some locals inside the ruins of an ancient building site. Photograph: Australian War Memorial
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One winter’s morning a decade ago while in the late stages of archival research for a book about the Australian Light Horse in the Middle East during the first world war, I came across a file that would forever alter my perspective on Anzac mythology.
In the Australian War Memorial that morning I read an anodyne description of a voice file – a recording of Private Edward “Ted” Harold O’Brien from C Squadron of the 3rd Light Horse Regiment, most of whose members hailed, like him, from Tasmania.
A summary said that O’Brien talked about horses, his work after the war, his time as a linesman in Palestine and of his visits to the pyramids in Egypt. Interesting - but nothing extraordinary, given all I’d already read about the battlefield experiences of his fellow horsemen.
I was about to look elsewhere when another sentence caught my eye: “New Zealanders and Australians went to Bedouin village and killed the men with bayonet and broke up the buildings.”
My book was at that point LARGELY about the remarkable achievements of the light horsemen (who were for all their agility, stealth, bush-craft and warrior skill, effectively the Special Air Service of their day) as they helped drive the Ottoman troops from the Suez canal in early 1916 across Palestine and to final defeat at Damascus and beyond in late 1918.
O’Brien’s words, recorded in 1988 when a very old man, described how the Australian horsemen, based on the coastal plain of Palestine after war’s end in December 1918, “went out to this village and they went through it with a bayonet”.
Oh yes, our squadron was there. I was down there. I don’t know what I did with it, I was cranky and that. But they had a good issue of rum and they did their blocks.”
Just how badly the Anzacs did their blocks when it came to murdering all of the males older than 16 in the Arab village of Surafend 100 years ago would become evident to the British, Australian and New Zealand military officials in the days and months afterwards during a series of secretive inquiries that swept the truth into the corners of history.
This event was to me starkly at odds with the heroic reputation of the light horsemen as I’d known it, based on most of the official – and many unofficial – records I’d come across to that point.
While the Surafend massacre had been relegated to the furthest edge of the Anzac record, including in Henry Gullett’s official history of Australian troops in the Middle East, it naturally caused me to rethink the book, Beersheba, and, not least, to re-examine the primary sources and literature I’d already read.
Surafend, Palestine. c. 1917. Members of the 5th Light Horse Field Ambulance on parade. (Donor I. Smith) Photograph: Australian War Memorial
I spent more months in the Australian and British archives trawling through patchy accounts of private military inquiries and the letters and diaries of government and military officials. At the 100th anniversary of the massacre, it’s worth recalling – given the $600m worth of remembering Australia had dedicated to the bravery and “sacrifice” of the Anzacs – just how they behaved, and what apparently inspired them, at Surafend.
It helps to understand the Anzac attitude to the nomadic Bedouin and the town Arabs of Palestine. The Australians did not distinguish between them. The letters and diaries of the Australian horseman are replete with critical impressions of both.
Gullett wrote how the Bedouin “prowled round [sic] the edge of the battlegrounds ready to tear uniforms and boots from the fallen and even to dig up and strip the dead”.
They were, he wrote, “Scarcely higher in civilisation than the Australian blacks – these wretched tribes presented a miserable and starved appearance.”
I found Gullett’s racially-charged comparison of the Bedouin to Indigenous people from Australia echoed everywhere in the private writings of the soldiers and their Australian commanders. In the context of Surafend they would later point me to a homegrown attitude, especially in rural Australia (from where the earliest light horse regiments were drawn and where massacres proliferated throughout the 19th and well into the 20th centuries) that rendered the dark-skinned inferior and easily dispensable.
The warrior wordsmith Ion Idriess, a member of the 5th Light Horse Regiment, wrote: “They snip our wounded and dig up our dead, and steal everything they can lay their hands on. But far worse than this they are spies ... And yet we are warned to leave the Bedouins strictly alone.”
After the 1918 armistice the Australians and New Zealanders from the three brigades of the Anzac Mounted Division were camped near the Jewish settlement of Richon le Zion, close to the Mediterranean and Tel Aviv. The Australians particularly were well known and liked by the Jews, if not the local Arabs. There was plentiful food and alcohol and while the men waited to repatriate, they were kept busy with drill, horse racing, football and cricket games.
The Bedouin were on the outskirts of the camp, which was also near the Arab village Surafend whose residents, it was said, stole where they could from the Anzacs.
On the night of 9 December 1918, 21-year-old New Zealand Trooper Leslie Lowry chased a thief who’d tried to steal his kitbag. He caught the robber who shot Lowry through the chest. Lowry died.
According to a letter written in 1936, Trooper Ambrose Stephen Mulhall of the 1st Australian Light Horse Regiment, reckoned Lowry “told his comrades before he died the thief and his murderer was a Bedouin and that he had gone to the Bedouin [Arab] village”.
Patsy Adam-Smith, who in her seminal book The Anzacs perhaps did more than any other mid-late 20th century Australian writer to lionise and mythologise the “diggers”, deals with what happened next perfunctorily, with questionable accuracy and in prose that searches for equivalence.
The troops, a mixed bunch of Australians, New Zealanders and Scots, raided the village in their anger and undoubtedly killed men there. One report states that they threw villagers down a well and rolled a large grindstone down on top of them. Their excuse was that they were sick of the natives stealing; for five years they’d put up with their small private possessions from home being stolen as well as their uniforms and gear, were weary of their men being ambushed and killed while the authorities did nothing.”
The revered Australian bush bard, Banjo Paterson – who served the 1st Australian Imperial Force remounts in Egypt – brought more light and shade to his description than Adam-Smith could summons. Yet he still sought to diminish the role of the Australians in his account of how the New Zealanders “and their blood brothers the [Scottish] Highlanders organised a revenge party”.
A few Australians went along with them – there couldn’t be any trouble on any front without an Australian being in it – and the revenge party followed the thief to his village, recovered the stolen goods and killed every able-bodied man in the village. Then they threw the bodies down the well, filled the well up, burnt the village, and retired in good order …”
Paterson fails to capture the premeditated nature of the revenge attack that was planned after the Arab chiefs refused to surrender the thief/murderer on the day of the 10th. The reprisal was carefully planned for 7pm on the evening of the 10th, and the men – including a good many Australians – determined to arm themselves with bayonets, axe handles and sharpened sticks, to get all of the women and children out of the village, to kill all males over 16 and to burn the village.
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Afterwards they also killed men at the nearby Bedouin camp and torched it.
Surafend, Palestine. Australians from the Palestine recruit training depot marching. (Negative by Parer). Photograph: Australian War Memorial
The Scots blamed the New Zealanders. The New Zealanders blamed the Australians. The Australians blamed the New Zealanders and the Scots.
The official inquiries were a whitewash, so comprehensively did most of the men lie to protect one another. Accounts vary as to the death toll. The evidence suggests it was between about 40 and 100. No Anzac or Scottish soldier was ever held responsible for the murders at Surafend or the Bedouin camp, or for the destruction of the village. The Empire did not, however, let the matter go, insisting Australia and New Zealand compensate the British (which had the mandate on Palestine) for the cost of replacing the village (£2060.11.3) if not for the actual killings.
In 1921 Australia (which never contested its liability) got in early with a successful compensation offer of £515.2.9. New Zealand, which had insisted it should pay no more than an equal share, eventually paid £858.11.5 (a tacit admission in covert diplomatic terms at least, that New Zealand had played a greater part in the massacre). It was blood money.
The issue lingered on the edge of the public sphere well into the 1930s when the former light horseman, Mulhall, badgered a raft of MPs (among them Robert Menzies, Gullett, and the former commanders of the 1st and 3rd Light Horse Regiments, Charlie Cox, by then a senator, and George Bell, speaker of the house) in a deluded attempt to prove the Australians had played no part in the massacre. The politicians knew the truth and fobbed Mulhall off.
A few days after the massacre the British commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, Edmund Allenby, addressed the Anzac Mounted Division. He was whistled at and counted down as he stood in his stirrups atop his black stallion, Hindenburg, to declare that they were a bunch of murderers. He wiped his hands of them for good.
Harry Chauvel, the Australian cavalryman and commander of the Desert Mounted Corps (the biggest mounted column of men and beasts to traverse the Middle East since Alexander the Great) leant on Gullett to omit the massacre from the official history. Gullett, to his credit, having sought guidance from the chief war historian Charles Bean, included a four-page account in his 848-page official history.
Chauvel later wrote, “There are a few ‘incidents’ in the Australian official history. I would miss out anything about the Surafend affair. It should never have been mentioned in the Australian Official History and has been long forgotten in Australia.”
But good history can never be preoccupied with forgetting. Its core business must always be the preservation of memory.
Australian crimes against humanity such as Surafend (it would have been a war crime had it not occurred after the armistice) rated no mention in the $600m commemoration of the first world war. The war memorial does not feature what happened in its displays.
But its archive does hold part of the truth, in its archival documents and recorded voices.
Not least that of old Ted O’Brien, who said, “They all went for the men with the bayonet and they got it.”
BY LEVI RICKERT DECEMBER 19, 2020
