SIGHTS AND SOUNDS FROM A DIFFERENT TIME

Most Australians have never heard Prime Minister John Curtin speak. Here’s a quick grab from Pathe’s excellent archives, in which the PM addresses a certain mid-century territorial dispute.

John Curtin

Most Australians have never heard Prime Minister John Curtin speak. Here’s a quick grab from Pathe’s excellent archives, in which the PM addresses a certain mid-century territorial dispute:

And here’s Sir Robert Menzies in some unedited Pathe footage:

UPDATE. Curtin was a smoker, which may explain his intellectual superiority over more recent Labor politicians:

“I understand that smoking is bad,” said Maryka Quik, director of the Neurodegenerative Diseases Program at SRI International, a nonprofit research institute based in California’s Silicon Valley. “My father died of lung cancer. I totally get it.

“The whole problem with nicotine is that it happens to be found in cigarettes,” she told me. “People can’t disassociate the two in their mind, nicotine and smoking. It’s not the general public that annoys me, it’s the scientists. When I tell them about the studies, they should say, ‘Wow.’ But they say, ‘Oh well, that might be true, but I don’t see the point.’ It’s not even ignorance. It’s their preconceived ideas and inflexibility.”

Scientists inflexible? I’ve never heard of such a thing.

“To my knowledge, nicotine is the most reliable cognitive enhancer that we currently have, bizarrely,” said Jennifer Rusted, professor of experimental psychology at Sussex University in Britain when we spoke. “The cognitive-enhancing effects of nicotine in a normal population are more robust than you get with any other agent.”

“Cognitive Enhancers” would be a great cigarette brand.