WHO IS ‘FERGUS FAIRFAX’?
I don’t know who ‘Fergus Fairfax’ is.
All we know about him is that he is a man of means who does the dirty work of the military ‘establishment’ in Australia — shooting any messenger who dares make a negative utterance about army officers or military ‘history’.
No one knows the identity of ‘Fergus Fairfax’ — except for retired Australian Brigadier Neil Weekes MC, who certainly did. He made extensive enquiries into ‘Fergus’ identity over a period of months, drew the coward into lengthy email exchanges, and slowly but surely, gathered facts about him.
Weekes then passed those details onto others who were also in the hunt.
Unfortunately, Neil Weekes died before completely outing him by name.
Chinese hackers have also identified him. Unfortunately, information gained by unlawful hacking isn’t legal tender.
SO WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT HIM FOR CERTAIN?
These facts:
- he was born in 1939
- he was born in Scotland
- he was an officer in the Australian Defence Force
- he served in Vietnam for one year
- he was a ‘rear-echelon’ soldier who saw no action of any sort
- he served in Papua New Guinea as a ‘patrol officer’
- he was in the army for either ‘22’ or ‘30’ years
- he is a lover of military history, and early colonial history
- he is partial to growing, and showing orchids
- he likes to mingle with real men in veteran offices twice a week
He was a key figure in establishing the Australian Veteran Matters web site (AVM) — an off-shore web that looked (on the surface) to be a site designed to inform and assist veterans about various issues.
The AVM may have looked like a legitimate web site with veteran issues as its feature, but it soon changed direction. Instead, it became a star chamber that allowed shadowy cowards and thugs to vilify fellow veterans who dared make criticisms of the military, any which way they could.
I was their biggest target because I was calling the military to account over corruption of my service history, and the falsification of historical documents.
I was featured on the front page of Australia’s most respected news magazine in August 2006 in relation to my fight against the military corruption.
On the other hand, ‘Fergus Fairfax’ is the lowest of all veterans — a weak, cowardly excuse for a human.
With ‘Fergus’ at the helm, the AVM became a shit-pile of vilification by ‘men’ of the same ilk as ‘Fergus’ himself, ‘men’ best referred to as maggots — ‘men’ who would allege everything about a target, deride, vilify and abuse him from the safety of anonymity.
Such cowardice.
Because they had a coward’s heart, they would not use their real names. Instead, like ‘Fergus’, they used pseudonyms like ‘Sunray’; ‘Cassius’; Mowgli; Nuidat68; ‘Dingo’; ‘Shadow’; ‘Brat’; ‘80s’; ‘Spartakus’; ‘Akela’; ‘Theo’; ‘Gotchafella’; ‘D371’, and so on.
And they knew that none of their targets had the financial means to take them down. And the Australian Federal Police proved to be one of the laziest, most impotent police forces in Australia.
Some of ‘Fergus’’ acolytes were eventually outed though.
Like Garry Sloane (pictured) — a former infantryman of the 4th Battlion’s second tour of Vietnam so keen to make a name for himself he paraded around in a T-Shirt advertising the fact that he was a ‘FORWARD SCOUT’. (At one time or another, most infantrymen served as ‘forward scouts’ without boasting about it.)
He used the pseudonym ‘Phillip Marlowe’ and ‘Delta 412’) among others.
He was the chief recruiter of cowards to Fergus Fairfax’s ‘cowards castle’.
This email (below) reveals the depth of the depravity and deceit by ‘investigators’ on behalf of the puppet-masters of the AVM and ANZMI web sites, seeking to curry favour with Sloane and Fergus. Observe their willingness to destroy other men’s reputations, and their tactics.
This is just one small example, written by a Lt Jon Belmonte (a Salvation Army officer and wannabe war veteran) and exposes their practices:
From: belmonte@webone.com.au
Sent: Friday, 9 May 2003 11:31 AM
To: mailto:garry.scott1@bigpond.com.au
Cc: petermcnamara@hotkey.net.au; birdshome@bigpond.com
Subject: Re: STAT DEC
Hi Just completed the stat dec, it’s a real pisser, I have made up some really good shit, this should hang him. I signed off as Delta two AKA Jon Belmonte.
I have been advised by delta 412, the boss has said i will be ACT’s C.P.M.H investigations officer.
Jon.
(CPMH was a web site set up by another cowardly Australian Vietnam veteran, Bob Buick after he had been stripped of the LS&GC Medal he’d been inadvertently awarded until fellow veteran dobbed him in.)
Now is that email disgusting or not? A coward seeking to ingriate himself with Garry Sloane, prepared to destroy a fellow veteran’s reputation with a false Statutory Declaration.
(Incidentally, Jon Belmonte himself, is a military fraud who claims to have fought with some Sultan’s forces, among other embellishments? He also claims to have worked for two Australian government ministers?)
At least, that email reveals just how insidious and duplicitous the forces maintaining the ANZMI website and AVM really are.
Another was ‘Bomber’ Bob Gibson — a semi-literate excuse for a man who hid behind the pseudonym, ‘nuidat68".
Gibson never made the grade as an infantryman in Vietnam. He was removed from the 2nd Battalion just a month or so after arriving because he lacked the balls required for jungle fighting, and spent his entire tour of duty in the generic D&E Platoon which his Company commander — Major George Pratt — referred to as a platoon of men “best suited to kitchen duties”.
Gibson was unwanted by any other infantry battalion despite most being severely undermanned. He was a loudmouthed critic of those validating the 2nd D&E Platoon (and me in particular) — until the truth of the paucity of his own service record was revealed. Gibson is an Australian military fraud of the worst kind — a liar, and a fool.
And then, there is Alan Price — President of the 4RAR Association (Queensland) who fell over a log in Vietnam after just thre months and three small contacts ewith he enemy, and not only purchased a medal to add to his medal rack to look more impressive but used the efeminate pseudonym ‘BEEBEE’ to sprout his venom. He was unmasked as a medal fraud and placed on the ANZMI site himself.
And so on.
Ugly ‘men’. Cowardly men. And dangerous fools.
‘Fergus Fairfax’ was one of them. But when Brigadier Neil Weekes MC was about to expose him, ‘Fergus’ fled the scene and let others do his dirty work using the same alias.
His chief lieutenant was a convicted paedophile — Keith Joseph Tennent, a former Artilley sergeant — who had anally raped a young boy in Towsnville. Tennent managed to get his charge down-graded to a lesser offence thanks to interventions by army officers of the Artilley Corps to their eternal shame.
The Australian Federal Police are well aware of Keith Tennent. Interestingly, Tennent was not only on the mailing list of General Steve Gower of the Australian War Memorial, he managed to convince General Peter Cosgrove to allow ‘mitigating circumstances’ into his service record to allow him to claim veteran benefits — even though a previous Chief of Army, General Hickling had refused to allow him to so.
This is the letter from Lt General F.J. Hickling to Tennent via Brigadier Gordon:
And this is what General Peter Cosgrove — Chief of army — allowed:
Many veterans are appalled at how a convicted paedophile managed to have such high-powered connections.The list could go on.
Well..it actually does go on. Take Gregory Marheine, for example. (No one else would!)
Now, as little men go, Marheine takes the cake. He used to work for the Queensland Police Service as a ‘forensic document analyst’ until word got around that he was one of the cowards behind the AVM web site. He used the pseudonym ‘Ruger 357’ to vilify other veterans. He had manufactured a false resume for himself to obtain work — boasting of infantry exploits when, in fact, he was just an orderly room clerk who officially served with the 3rd Battalion, but never left the wire at the Australian base in Nui Dat other than on small TAOR patrols. Nevertheless, he boasted of great exploits, and later, adopted the persona of his company Commander in another fanciful life.
And then, there was the most serious coward of all — Robert ‘Bob’ Buick, the so-called ‘hero’ of Long Tan. He was at the forefront of the vilification for years until, one day, accidentally, he let slip that his attacks against us had been sanctioned ‘at the highest levels of the government and the military’.
Immediately, he was reined in by his military and political puppeteers, and went underground where cowards proliferate.
But once he’d been outed, veterans across Australia turned the blowtorch on him and found a rat’s nest of falsehood: he had run from the battle of Long tan like a frightened rabbit, leaving his fellow platoon members (including the wounded) behind; had hid in an APC during the night even as other soldiers from Charles Mollison’s ‘A’ Company had crawled into the battle site trying to locate Buick’s men still alive; who had returned the next day and murdered an unarmed wounded enemy soldier with two bullets through the heart; and finally, added a medal to his rack he had never earned — the Long Service and Good Conduct Medal and was forced to hand back to the government in disgrace.
And finally, there is Australia’s most reluctant conscript — the execrable Normie Rowe who served in the Armoured Corps. It was an outraged Normie Rowe who famously called for a Royal Commission into allegations that the Armoured Corps had had anything to do with the atrocities at Thua Tich in 1969, but who admitted he’d seen the bodies blown up in an interview many years later:
Rowe detested the army and his service in Vietnam, but wasn’t adverse to making a few dollars out of it at various times since. He was involved in organising the ‘Welcome Home Parade’ in 1987 in which he was given the privelege of leading the parade, and for which he was awarded a civilian medal (still a joke amonst other war veterans). He is also a convicted criminal who wasn’t man enough to use his fists against a young man he had a dispute with. Instead, he assaulted the man with a broomstick. Rowe is a coward who has preferred to make his anonymous posts using the pseudonym ‘CAVALRY’ — and the stupidity of it is, all he has done is muddy his own reputation and family life. He has every reason to stay out of the limelight.
These cowards got away with it for a long, long time. But the day of reckoning is fast approaching.
As for ‘Fergus Fairfax’, his identity still remains a mystery.
There are only two men in veteran circles who use the name ‘Fergus’.
One is an accomplished former Army General — Fergus McLachlan — a man of genuine integrity, who wrote to me in 2014 in his official capacity as Head of Modernisation and Strategic Planning Army, apologising on behalf of the army for errors relating to my service and the harm done to my reputation and the vilification I had received from cowards like ‘Fergus Fairfax’.
The $50,000 compensation I received evened the score a little.
And the other is a ‘Fergus Thomson’ who wrote the letter to The Weekend Australian at the top of this essay. I don’t know who that ‘Fergus Thomson’ is, but I’m sure its not the 80 year-old, former army officer, who was born in Scotland, never fired a shot in any conflict, loves orchids and early colonial history, and hangs around with real veterans twice a week trying to look like a man.
It couldn’t be. Surely.
But I’m intrigued that the AVM has never seen fit to make issue of ‘Fergusson Thomson’s claim in The Weekend Australian in August of 2000 that he was in Vietnam “just after” the battle of Long Tan.
A quick check of the records shows that Thomson served in Vietnam from June ’67 to June ’68 — as a legal officer. (That is, by the way, as far from the real action as it’s possible to get. Other than paper cuts, that is.)
Now, having been subjected to criticism myself for not bothering too much with precise detail, I find the words of a legal eagle — who should be very aware of the importance of detail — difficult to understand.
I mean, by my calculation, Thomson arrived in Vietnam some 10 months after the battle of Long Tan — and it’s a damn long bow to stretch to claim you were there “just after” an event, when the truth of the matter is that you didn’t turn up till amost a YEAR afterwards.
But then, we are talking about a former officer of the Australian Army and they see things differently to most.
Like not taking action against Buick. I mean, if he was an officer of the Court, didn’t he have a responsibility to pursue Buick for murder?
Or did he and Buick come to some mutual understanding…?
