Latest news with #Kulin
Yahoo
23-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Ausgold signs farm-in deal with Critica for WA licence
Australian gold explorer Ausgold has signed a farm-in agreement with Critica concerning exploration licence E70/5077, adjacent to Ausgold's Kulin gold project in Western Australia (WA). This agreement allows Ausgold to earn up to a 70% interest in the licence over three and a half years. Under the farm-in terms, Ausgold can secure a 51% interest by investing A$250,000 ($161,130) within 18 months, and an additional 19% interest with a further investment of A$360,000 over the subsequent 24 months. Once the earn-in is complete, Critica will maintain a 30% contributing interest or opt for the right to convert to a 1.5% net smelter royalty upon a decision to mine. The licence spans approximately 106km² and is situated along the eastern margin of the Katanning Greenstone Belt. The tenement, E70/5077, is located on the northern extension of the Yandina Thrust, known for hosting the Griffins Find and Tampia gold mines. The area's gold prospectivity is further underscored by a coherent gold-in-soil anomaly extending over 3km of strike. Within this zone, two high-grade anomalies have been identified, each extending approximately 600m. Ausgold executive chairman John Dorward said: 'The farm-in to E70/5077 is a strategic step in expanding our regional footprint across the eastern Katanning Greenstone Belt. This new tenement complements our strong regional landholding surrounding our flagship Katanning Gold Project, which includes the Kulin Project as well as other advanced exploration prospects such as Duggan and Nanicup Bridge–Zinger. 'This agreement directly aligns with our strategy to establish a regional production hub at the Katanning Gold Project, by discovering and developing high-quality, near-surface satellite deposits that can leverage our existing infrastructure and scale.' Ausgold plans to submit the required programme of work in the first quarter of fiscal year 2026 (Q1 FY26) and anticipates launching its maiden drilling campaign between Q2 and Q3 of FY26. The upcoming work programme will focus on high-priority gold-in-soil and trenching anomalies to capitalise on the project's discovery potential. In June 2024, the company secured firm commitments to garner A$38m through a placement to further the development of its Katanning gold project in WA. "Ausgold signs farm-in deal with Critica for WA licence" was originally created and published by Mining Technology, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site.
The Australian
23-06-2025
- Business
- The Australian
AUC expands Kulin exploration ground
Ausgold expands Kulin landholding with farm-in to adjacent exploration licence E70/5077 Licence covers northern extension of the Yandina Thrust with exploration defining +3km gold anomaly Upcoming drilling will test high high-priority gold-in-soil and trenching anomalies Special Report: Ausgold has expanded the footprint of its Kulin project in WA after reaching a farm-in agreement to acquire a majority stake in an adjacent exploration licence highly prospective for gold. The 106km2 E70/5077 exploration licence covers the northern extension of the Yandina Thrust – a fertile structure hosting the nearby Griffins Find and Tampia gold mines. Geochemical sampling has defined a +3km long coherent +10ppb gold-in-soil anomaly with two central +50ppb 'bullseye' targets that have strike lengths of 600m each. Trenching over these bullseye targets returned results of 31m at 1g/t gold and 20m at 0.6g/t gold. Deep diamond holes drilled to test a 300m down-dip continuation of surface mineralisation returned up to 3m grading 2.37g/t gold from a down-hole depth of 341m. Mapping and auger sampling by Ausgold (ASX:AUC) within its wholly-owned tenure at Kulin, which is 75km north of the flagship Katanning gold project, identified a mineralised trend hosted within greenstone stratigraphy northeast and east of E70/5077. This newly defined trend represents a compelling exploration opportunity and will be the focus of further auger sampling in Q1 FY26, with the aim of delineating additional drill-ready targets across the broader region. Regional geological map highlighting the Critica farm-in tenure. Pic: Ausgold Farm-in agreement Under the farm-in agreement, the company can earn up to 70% in the exploration licence by first spending $250,000 within 18 months to earn an initial 51%. It can increase this to 70% by spending another $360,000 over the following 24 months. Once completed, the vendor Critica (ASX:CRI) will retain a 30% interest with the right to convert it into a 1.5% net smelter royalty at a decision to mine. 'The farm-in to E70/5077 is a strategic step in expanding our regional footprint across the eastern Katanning Greenstone Belt,' executive chairman John Dorward said. 'This new tenement complements our strong regional landholding surrounding our flagship Katanning gold project, which includes the Kulin project as well as other advanced exploration prospects such as Duggan and Nanicup Bridge-Zinger. 'This agreement directly aligns with our strategy to establish a regional production hub at the Katanning gold project, by discovering and developing high-quality, near-surface satellite deposits that can leverage our existing infrastructure and scale.' AUC will lodge the Program of Work in Q1 FY2026 and expects to start maiden drilling on the new licence in Q2 or Q3 FY2026. This will target high-priority gold-in-soil and trenching anomalies to unlock the project's discovery potential. This article was developed in collaboration with Ausgold, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing. This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.
The Age
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
This show changes everything you think you know about Indigenous art
Have you ever walked the streets of Melbourne and wondered what it was like before the roads, the skyscrapers, the cement-covered creeks? How the land of the Kulin people appeared in pre-colonial times? Artist Brett Leavy, a Kooma man from Queensland, has gone beyond wondering. Raking through sources old and new – colonial diaries, historic artworks, archival records, CSIRO soil maps, Geoscience Australia data – he has re-imagined the pre-colonial landscape, resurrected the trees, the streams, the waterfalls, the rocks, the animals and people. The result is Virtual Narrm, a nine-hour, photo-realistic animation, which follows a day in the life of traditional owners the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung, from sunrise to sunset. The timeframe draws attention to how the Wurunjderi saw the land, orienting themselves in relation to the sun. Using cutting-edge technology, Leavy winds back the centuries – 'I'm building a time machine,' he tells me when we meet. Watching Leavy's animation stirred mixed emotions; on the one hand, the thrill of seeing the beauty of the land in its original state, on the other, a deep sense of loss. Leavy has captured the moment before the Wurundjeri's world was catastrophically changed. He has set his work in 1834, the year before British settlers landed on the north bank of the Yarra. Leavy's is the first artwork people will see when they enter the momentous exhibition 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, which relaunches the University of Melbourne's Potter Museum of Art after a six-year closure and extensive redevelopment. Leavy's 32-screen animation, commissioned for the exhibition and created with the input of Wurundjeri elders, extends 11 metres across the Potter's new foyer. The only other artwork in the space is Mandy Nicholson's Possum Skin Cloak (2012). 'We start from Narrm,' says Indigenous art specialist Judith Ryan when we meet at the Potter. 'We begin by establishing the traditional custodians and their rightful place and honouring them and taking Narrm back to how it was in 1834.' With Ryan are her co-curators, the formidable Indigenous leader and academic Marcia Langton, and their younger colleague, Eastern Arrernte woman Shanysa McConville, who is working on her first exhibition with what she describes as the 'dream team'. Years in the planning, this vast exhibition features more than 400 artworks, extending geographically from Lutruwita/Tasmania to Zenadeth Kes/Torres Strait, and spanning in time from the 1800s, when anthropologist Walter Baldwin Spencer was collecting bark paintings in Western Arnhem Land amid the frontier wars, to the present, with high-tech works such as Leavy's. The exhibition's ironic title points to its avowedly 'anti-colonial' stance; its central idea is that 'this is art', and has been for some 65,000 years. In the accompanying book, Langton points to archaeological digs that took place at Madjedbebe, a remote rock shelter in Kakadu, in 2012 and 2015; paint created from ochre mixed with reflective powders made from ground mica was dated to about 65,000 years ago. 'So that's how long there has been art in this country,' Langton says. 'And yet not recognised as art, classified as 'primitive', classified as 'material culture' by anthropologists and archaeologists'. Emphasising that 'this is art' may seem strange or even redundant at a time when Indigenous art is celebrated nationally and internationally. In Victoria alone right now, it is the focus of exhibitions at the TarraWarra Biennial (We Are Eagles), and the Heide Museum of Modern Art (Blak In-Justice). Such recognition is 'very recent', says Langton. 'When James Mollison [founding director of the National Gallery of Australia] went to Arnhem Land in 1981, and declared 'this is art', it was the first time that anybody from the world of fine art recognised our design traditions as 'art'.' Langton began working on the exhibition a decade ago, after the Potter's chair, Peter Jopling, asked her to curate an exhibition of the University of Melbourne's collection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander works. 'And I immediately said yes, not realising that I was dedicating the next 10 years of my life to this,' she says. She started by searching the university's large and dispersed archive of Indigenous art, which includes important collections such as those of Baldwin Spencer, the university's foundation chair of biology; ethnologist Leonhard Adams, who collected Anindilyakwa bark paintings from Groote Eylandt in the 1940s; and anthropologist Donald Thomson, who collected artworks, weavings and cultural objects from north-east Arnhem Land in the 1930s and '40s. But Langton also found that there were major gaps in the university's holdings – no contemporary works from Arnhem Land or the Kimberley, no Western Desert paintings, nothing from the Torres Strait or Tasmania. 'It had been collected randomly, by anthropologists or private collectors … so you have a bit of this and a bit of that, and nothing of that, and notably, apart from woven works in the Thomson collection, no works by women. Nothing! Nothing!' Langton says, showing her trademark passion. (Thomson did not list the names of the women weavers.) Langton set about filling the gaps, increasing the representation of women artists and trying to find a 'masterwork' from each genre, movement, period, approaching her art curator friends to help build an exhibition worthy of its title. 'And at some point I'd heard that Judith had retired from the NGV,' Langton says. 'So I thought, beauty, this is what I need. I need Judith, because the job was becoming too massive and really required an expert curator who knows how to borrow works from institutions, public galleries, private lenders and there isn't anybody else in the country who has the knowledge of Indigenous art that Judith has… and we've been a team ever since.' Ryan, previously the NGV's senior curator of Indigenous art, is now Senior Curator, Art Museums, at the University of Melbourne. The many Indigenous artists she has worked with over the years include Swan Hill-born sculptor Lorraine Connelly-Northey, one of seven artists commissioned to create new works for this exhibition. 'Of course you're going to go in when Judith's asking you,' says Connelly-Northey by phone from her home just outside of Albury, on Waradgerie country, her mother's traditional land. 'Nobody says no to Judith. Well, I don't.' Connelly-Northey is known for her contemporary interpretations of traditional bush bags, which she makes from scrap metal scavenged from around Swan Hill. For this exhibition, she's shaped rusted bits of discarded farm equipment – a cone-shaped seed harvester, a studded water pipe, a circular piece of dimpled tin – into three large bush-bags, almost two metres high. Scouting for the right material can mean travelling thousands of kilometres, but this time she 'got lucky' and found what she needed in a matter of months. 'Things fell into my hands when I was travelling … so that was really exciting,' she says. Connelly-Northey's sculptures will be shown in the museum's new atrium alongside other contemporary and cultural objects made by women, including the Tjanpi Desert Weavers' large-scale installation of the Seven Sisters ancestral story, on loan from the NGA. Loading The exhibition spans the beautiful to the brutal; from wondrous linocuts, dance machines, and paintings about cultural astronomy, such as Nyapanyapa Yunupiŋu's Garak – night sky (2020), to the horrors of the Australian wars and dark chapters of the university's own past. A section of the exhibition, off-limits to children, exposes the scientific racism (eugenics) that occurred at the university during the early 20th century under the direction of Richard Berry, professor of anatomy, who readily accepted Indigenous remains from infamous grave robber George Murray Black. Photographs, letters, instruments, receipts and other documents from this time will be displayed alongside works by contemporary artists responding to these distressing acts, including Brook Garru Andrew, Julie Dowling, Yhonnie Scarce and Judy Watson. Colonial paintings by non-Indigenous artists are also included, such as E. Phillips Fox's Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770, on loan from the NGV. 'The moment I saw it, I said: 'What are we doing with that ugly thing?'' Langton says. Ryan persuaded her that it was important to include the painting, which depicts the British firing at Gweagal men defending their country with spears. 'This was the beginning of the Australian wars,' Ryan says. 'We want people to look at the truth of it, because it happened, and the fact that [the painting] was commissioned by the NGV from an artist who was living in London to celebrate Federation in which there was no consultation with the First People of this land. So it is an important work. It is particularly ugly, but its truth is undeniable.' 'I gave in because I saw the point,' says Langton. 'I think it's regrettable that the point has to be made, that there are now, more than ever, people who deny that there was an invasion.' Some of the most poignant works in the exhibition are those by Indigenous artists documenting the frontier wars as they were happening, such as the drawings of Oscar, a Kuku Yalanji man born in north-eastern Queensland in 1878, who was taken from his community aged nine by a cattle station manager. The manager, A.H. Glissan, preserved and captioned 40 drawings Oscar made in the 1890s. They are quietly gruesome, with disturbing titles such as No. 26 Dispersing the usual way. Some good shooting. Loading I ask Langton what she would like people to take away from the exhibition. 'I want people to grapple with that immense antiquity and short colonial and post-colonial period and the tragedy that has befallen Aboriginal people and yet even so producing the major artworks of this country,' she says. 'And I don't care if people don't like it and want to contest it. Fine. Go ahead. But this is an historically important event, not just an exhibition.' 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is at The Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, from May 30 to November 23. Marcia Langton and Judith Ryan take part in Tradition and Innovation: 65,000 Years of Indigenous Art at the State Library (sold out) as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival. The Age is a festival partner.
Sydney Morning Herald
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
This show changes everything you think you know about Indigenous art
Have you ever walked the streets of Melbourne and wondered what it was like before the roads, the skyscrapers, the cement-covered creeks? How the land of the Kulin people appeared in pre-colonial times? Artist Brett Leavy, a Kooma man from Queensland, has gone beyond wondering. Raking through sources old and new – colonial diaries, historic artworks, archival records, CSIRO soil maps, Geoscience Australia data – he has re-imagined the pre-colonial landscape, resurrected the trees, the streams, the waterfalls, the rocks, the animals and people. The result is Virtual Narrm, a nine-hour, photo-realistic animation, which follows a day in the life of traditional owners the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung, from sunrise to sunset. The timeframe draws attention to how the Wurunjderi saw the land, orienting themselves in relation to the sun. Using cutting-edge technology, Leavy winds back the centuries – 'I'm building a time machine,' he tells me when we meet. Watching Leavy's animation stirred mixed emotions; on the one hand, the thrill of seeing the beauty of the land in its original state, on the other, a deep sense of loss. Leavy has captured the moment before the Wurundjeri's world was catastrophically changed. He has set his work in 1834, the year before British settlers landed on the north bank of the Yarra. Leavy's is the first artwork people will see when they enter the momentous exhibition 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, which relaunches the University of Melbourne's Potter Museum of Art after a six-year closure and extensive redevelopment. Leavy's 32-screen animation, commissioned for the exhibition and created with the input of Wurundjeri elders, extends 11 metres across the Potter's new foyer. The only other artwork in the space is Mandy Nicholson's Possum Skin Cloak (2012). 'We start from Narrm,' says Indigenous art specialist Judith Ryan when we meet at the Potter. 'We begin by establishing the traditional custodians and their rightful place and honouring them and taking Narrm back to how it was in 1834.' With Ryan are her co-curators, the formidable Indigenous leader and academic Marcia Langton, and their younger colleague, Eastern Arrernte woman Shanysa McConville, who is working on her first exhibition with what she describes as the 'dream team'. Years in the planning, this vast exhibition features more than 400 artworks, extending geographically from Lutruwita/Tasmania to Zenadeth Kes/Torres Strait, and spanning in time from the 1800s, when anthropologist Walter Baldwin Spencer was collecting bark paintings in Western Arnhem Land amid the frontier wars, to the present, with high-tech works such as Leavy's. The exhibition's ironic title points to its avowedly 'anti-colonial' stance; its central idea is that 'this is art', and has been for some 65,000 years. In the accompanying book, Langton points to archaeological digs that took place at Madjedbebe, a remote rock shelter in Kakadu, in 2012 and 2015; paint created from ochre mixed with reflective powders made from ground mica was dated to about 65,000 years ago. 'So that's how long there has been art in this country,' Langton says. 'And yet not recognised as art, classified as 'primitive', classified as 'material culture' by anthropologists and archaeologists'. Emphasising that 'this is art' may seem strange or even redundant at a time when Indigenous art is celebrated nationally and internationally. In Victoria alone right now, it is the focus of exhibitions at the TarraWarra Biennial (We Are Eagles), and the Heide Museum of Modern Art (Blak In-Justice). Such recognition is 'very recent', says Langton. 'When James Mollison [founding director of the National Gallery of Australia] went to Arnhem Land in 1981, and declared 'this is art', it was the first time that anybody from the world of fine art recognised our design traditions as 'art'.' Langton began working on the exhibition a decade ago, after the Potter's chair, Peter Jopling, asked her to curate an exhibition of the University of Melbourne's collection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander works. 'And I immediately said yes, not realising that I was dedicating the next 10 years of my life to this,' she says. She started by searching the university's large and dispersed archive of Indigenous art, which includes important collections such as those of Baldwin Spencer, the university's foundation chair of biology; ethnologist Leonhard Adams, who collected Anindilyakwa bark paintings from Groote Eylandt in the 1940s; and anthropologist Donald Thomson, who collected artworks, weavings and cultural objects from north-east Arnhem Land in the 1930s and '40s. But Langton also found that there were major gaps in the university's holdings – no contemporary works from Arnhem Land or the Kimberley, no Western Desert paintings, nothing from the Torres Strait or Tasmania. 'It had been collected randomly, by anthropologists or private collectors … so you have a bit of this and a bit of that, and nothing of that, and notably, apart from woven works in the Thomson collection, no works by women. Nothing! Nothing!' Langton says, showing her trademark passion. (Thomson did not list the names of the women weavers.) Langton set about filling the gaps, increasing the representation of women artists and trying to find a 'masterwork' from each genre, movement, period, approaching her art curator friends to help build an exhibition worthy of its title. 'And at some point I'd heard that Judith had retired from the NGV,' Langton says. 'So I thought, beauty, this is what I need. I need Judith, because the job was becoming too massive and really required an expert curator who knows how to borrow works from institutions, public galleries, private lenders and there isn't anybody else in the country who has the knowledge of Indigenous art that Judith has… and we've been a team ever since.' Ryan, previously the NGV's senior curator of Indigenous art, is now Senior Curator, Art Museums, at the University of Melbourne. The many Indigenous artists she has worked with over the years include Swan Hill-born sculptor Lorraine Connelly-Northey, one of seven artists commissioned to create new works for this exhibition. 'Of course you're going to go in when Judith's asking you,' says Connelly-Northey by phone from her home just outside of Albury, on Waradgerie country, her mother's traditional land. 'Nobody says no to Judith. Well, I don't.' Connelly-Northey is known for her contemporary interpretations of traditional bush bags, which she makes from scrap metal scavenged from around Swan Hill. For this exhibition, she's shaped rusted bits of discarded farm equipment – a cone-shaped seed harvester, a studded water pipe, a circular piece of dimpled tin – into three large bush-bags, almost two metres high. Scouting for the right material can mean travelling thousands of kilometres, but this time she 'got lucky' and found what she needed in a matter of months. 'Things fell into my hands when I was travelling … so that was really exciting,' she says. Connelly-Northey's sculptures will be shown in the museum's new atrium alongside other contemporary and cultural objects made by women, including the Tjanpi Desert Weavers' large-scale installation of the Seven Sisters ancestral story, on loan from the NGA. Loading The exhibition spans the beautiful to the brutal; from wondrous linocuts, dance machines, and paintings about cultural astronomy, such as Nyapanyapa Yunupiŋu's Garak – night sky (2020), to the horrors of the Australian wars and dark chapters of the university's own past. A section of the exhibition, off-limits to children, exposes the scientific racism (eugenics) that occurred at the university during the early 20th century under the direction of Richard Berry, professor of anatomy, who readily accepted Indigenous remains from infamous grave robber George Murray Black. Photographs, letters, instruments, receipts and other documents from this time will be displayed alongside works by contemporary artists responding to these distressing acts, including Brook Garru Andrew, Julie Dowling, Yhonnie Scarce and Judy Watson. Colonial paintings by non-Indigenous artists are also included, such as E. Phillips Fox's Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770, on loan from the NGV. 'The moment I saw it, I said: 'What are we doing with that ugly thing?'' Langton says. Ryan persuaded her that it was important to include the painting, which depicts the British firing at Gweagal men defending their country with spears. 'This was the beginning of the Australian wars,' Ryan says. 'We want people to look at the truth of it, because it happened, and the fact that [the painting] was commissioned by the NGV from an artist who was living in London to celebrate Federation in which there was no consultation with the First People of this land. So it is an important work. It is particularly ugly, but its truth is undeniable.' 'I gave in because I saw the point,' says Langton. 'I think it's regrettable that the point has to be made, that there are now, more than ever, people who deny that there was an invasion.' Some of the most poignant works in the exhibition are those by Indigenous artists documenting the frontier wars as they were happening, such as the drawings of Oscar, a Kuku Yalanji man born in north-eastern Queensland in 1878, who was taken from his community aged nine by a cattle station manager. The manager, A.H. Glissan, preserved and captioned 40 drawings Oscar made in the 1890s. They are quietly gruesome, with disturbing titles such as No. 26 Dispersing the usual way. Some good shooting. Loading I ask Langton what she would like people to take away from the exhibition. 'I want people to grapple with that immense antiquity and short colonial and post-colonial period and the tragedy that has befallen Aboriginal people and yet even so producing the major artworks of this country,' she says. 'And I don't care if people don't like it and want to contest it. Fine. Go ahead. But this is an historically important event, not just an exhibition.' 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is at The Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, from May 30 to November 23. Marcia Langton and Judith Ryan take part in Tradition and Innovation: 65,000 Years of Indigenous Art at the State Library (sold out) as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival. The Age is a festival partner.
The Guardian
24-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘Disrespectful' booing of welcome to country at Melbourne Anzac Day dawn service condemned
Victorian police have interviewed a man for offensive behaviour after attenders at Melbourne's main Anzac day dawn service booed and heckled during a welcome to country. A small group of people booed and yelled throughout the welcome delivered by Bunurong elder Uncle Mark Brown at the 5:30 am service at the city's Shrine of Remembrance. 'This morning, I'm here to welcome everyone to my father's country,' Brown said, speaking over the shouts. 'We all gather in the spirit of respect and unity and this welcome is an opportunity … to honour and respect the deep cultural heritage of the Bunurong people of the Kulin nations.' Sign up for the Afternoon Update: Election 2025 email newsletter 'What about the Anzacs?' one man shouted, while others yelled: 'It's our country … We don't have to be welcomed.' Others in the crowd shouted 'always was, always will be' and clapped and cheered over the top of the hecklers, who again booed and shouted as Victoria's governor, Margaret Gardner, delivered an acknowledgment of country. The veterans' affairs minister, Matt Keogh, says the booing heard in Melbourne was 'disgraceful' and was allegedly led by 'a known neo-Nazi'. 'When we come together to commemorate on Anzac Day, we're commemorating some of those soldiers who fell in a war that was fought against that sort of hateful ideology,' Keogh told ABC radio. RSL Victoria's president, Robert Webster also condemned the hecklers. 'The actions of that very small minority were completely disrespectful to veterans and the spirit of Anzac Day [but] the applause of everybody else attending drowned it out and showed the respect befitting of the occasion,' he said. Victoria police said they interviewed a 26-year-old Kensington man for offensive behaviour and directed him to leave the Shrine of Remembrance. They intend to proceed with a summons and expect the man will be charged over the offensive behaviour, a spokesperson said. Sign up to Afternoon Update: Election 2025 Our Australian afternoon update breaks down the key election campaign stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion Victoria police declined to confirm reports of the man's identity. The Victorian premier, Jacinta Allan, told ABC radio the behaviour was 'beyond disappointing' while Barnaby Joyce, the shadow veterans' affairs minister, said it marred Australia's 'most sacred ceremony'. 'Any person who desecrates that in any way, shape or form, is a complete and utter disgrace,' he said. RSL Victoria said Friday morning's Melbourne service was attended by more than 50,000 people, up from the 40,000-strong crowd in 2024. Additional reporting by Krishani Dhanji
