Before I Forget Quotes

“Calwell impressed me partly because of his deep affection for his country and his willingness to see the good in other countries, especially the United States, from which his grandfather had emigrated to the Victorian goldfields. The Aboriginal peoples, as Australians, also came within his affection, and he as much as any public figure of that time tried to help them. Forty years on I came to think just as highly of B.A. Santamaria, the leading Catholic intellectual, as I did of Arthur Calwell, though they were bitter enemies. When you admire people you sometimes do so for the person they are, more than the viewpoint they represent.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, Before I Forget

“For a time the phrase tyranny of distance was anchored rather than airborne. There was only an occasional sign that it would acquire a life of its own, independent of the book. In March 1968 it was officially used to describe an event that in a dramatic way was to weaken that tyranny. A satellite, stationed far above the earth, could now transmit television news and programs between the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern. And on the day when the first images were transmitted between Japan and Australia, a speaker proclaimed that this was another blow against ‘what an Australian historian has called the tyranny of distance’ – or words to that effect. I felt secretly pleased.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, Before I Forget

“In the history of warfare, a succession of bold ideas and weapons had promised to curb the tyranny of distance. The horse and the cavalry had revolutionised warfare and tamed distance; but the Boer War, where more than 300,000 horses were killed in the fighting, foreshadowed the declining role of the horse. In the First World War the flimsy aircraft flourished high above the trenches without seeming likely to conquer distance; and yet in the Second World War the Japanese launched their devastating aerial attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the huge American aircraft dropped the first atomic bombs on two distant Japanese cities in 1945. In various other phases of the war, however, distance was still a powerful obstacle. In the following decades the latest American and Soviet missiles covered vast distances, but many military leaders in the nuclear era believed that ‘the tyranny of distance’ was far from ended.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, Before I Forget