Phew! Finally finished what I had planned to do. There are a few small to very small pieces that I plan to use as basing terrain for some SciFi models down the track,

Below is how they will look combined on the tabletop.

Now at some stage I will need to work on the SciFi “Necron style” terrain.

These have a rather unique tower shape that I quite like,

Last lot tomorrow.

initially I was a bit disappointed with these as the painted cracked when dry. However, a very liberal coat of gloss varnish stopped it from flaking off and produced a really cool “veined” effect. A pity it wasn’t deliberate.

In the home straight – two more lots to go.

This particular “Alien Forest” piece is my favourite.

I am gradually working my way through these. Alas a few more days to go.

More soon

The third instalment of the Mantic “Alien Forest” terrain.

M ore to come.

The second lot of Mantic”Alien Forest” terrain

This lot is slightly smaller than those pasted yesterday.

The terrain mat was also part of the Mantic kickstarter.

More Alien Forest to come.

A couple of years ago I picked up a mantic Alien Terrain Kickstarter with a couple of mats, an alien forest and a SciFi set. Given I was having a birthday bash at my place centred around the “Lost Forest of NoKandoo” it was about time I painted the alien forest. This is the first of quite a few posts on this amazing terrain.

I just wanted a quick and easy “rattle can” spary paint that looked OK on the table top.

More Alien Terrain tomorrow.

The Amazing SAS by Ian McPhedran sits somewhere between investigative journalism, institutional history, and popular military narrative. First published in 2005, the book arrived at a moment when the Australian SAS Regiment occupied a growing place in Australian public imagination following deployments to East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq, domestic counterterrorism duties, and the post 9/11 security environment.

The great strength of the book is access. McPhedran was one of Australia’s most connected defence journalists and clearly enjoyed substantial cooperation from senior officers, political figures, and serving SAS personnel. Interviews with figures such as Peter Cosgrove, Peter Leahy, Gus Gilmore, Tim McOwan, and serving soldiers provide immediacy and institutional perspective rarely available in Australian military publishing at the time.The result is a readable and often compelling account of selection, training culture, operational preparation, and the emotional pressures surrounding special operations service.

As narrative military journalism, the book works extremely well. McPhedran understands pacing and operational storytelling. The descriptions of selection courses, patrol preparation, small unit culture, and deployment cycles are engaging without collapsing entirely into sensationalism. The sections dealing with East Timor and the early Afghanistan deployments are particularly effective because they capture a transitional Australian Army moving from peacekeeping assumptions into the operational tempo of the War on Terror. Readers interested in the atmosphere and institutional mindset of the SAS during the early 2000s will find considerable value here.

The book also deserves credit for helping open Australian public discussion about special operations forces at a time when very little accessible material existed on the Australian SAS. Australian military publishing had often lagged behind British and American equivalents in presenting modern special forces history to a broader audience. Contemporary reviewers noted that little serious material had been written about the SAS before McPhedran’s work.

At the same time, the book’s greatest strength is also its greatest limitation. The access comes at a price. The narrative remains very close to the official perspective of the regiment and senior defence leadership. Even to frequently presenting the “official account” of controversial events and seldom subjects institutional claims to sustained critical analysis.

Another issue is the tone can occasionally drift toward admiration rather than examination. Operational failures, ambiguities, political complexities, and ethical tensions are generally softened or passed over quickly.

This means the book is best treated with some caution as it reflects the public image and institutional culture of the Australian SAS in the immediate post 9/11 era rather than as a definitive analytical history. It captures how the regiment wished to be seen and how defence journalism of the period framed Australian special operations capability. In that sense it is historically valuable even where it lacks critical distance and must be treated with a keen analytical eye.

The operational coverage is also constrained by timing. Published before later Afghanistan controversies and subsequent war crimes inquiries transformed public understanding of Australian special operations, the book now reads partly as a snapshot of an earlier phase of public perception. Modern readers approaching it after the Brereton Inquiry will inevitably notice the absence of the harder questions that later emerged regarding operational culture, accountability, and the psychological pressures of repeated deployments. That is not entirely McPhedran’s fault; the book belongs to a specific historical moment.

Stylistically, McPhedran writes in a direct journalistic voice rather than an academic one. The prose is fast moving, accessible, and occasionally dramatic. Some readers will appreciate the momentum while others may find the tone occasionally too celebratory. It is not a deeply footnoted scholarly work in the style of official histories or operational monographs. Instead, it functions as narrative reportage with strong insider access.

Overall, The Amazing SAS remains an important early popular account of the Australian SAS Regiment. It is readable, informative, and often gripping, but it should be approached with awareness of its institutional proximity and limited critical distance. As a piece of defence journalism and a cultural snapshot of the Australian military in the early War on Terror period, it remains highly worthwhile. Not my style but OK if it is something you are interested in.

Aboriginal Melbourne: The Lost Land of the Kulin People is one of those books that sits in an important transitional space within Australian historical writing. It is not simply a local history of Aboriginal people around Melbourne, nor is it purely an archaeological study. What Presland was really attempting to do was reconstruct an erased world and force readers to understand that Melbourne was not founded upon empty land but upon an already occupied, culturally shaped, economically productive landscape belonging to the Kulin nations.

That may sound obvious now, but when the book first appeared this was still a significant challenge to mainstream Victorian historical memory. Much earlier Melbourne history either ignored Aboriginal people almost entirely or treated them as a fading background presence who disappeared once settlement began. Presland pushed directly against this older settler narrative. He repositioned Aboriginal people and Country at the centre of Melbourne’s story rather than leaving them at its margins.

The strongest aspect of the book remains its reconstruction of landscape and environment. Presland understood that if readers were going to rethink Melbourne’s history they first needed to rethink the land itself. The city disappears in his narrative and is replaced with wetlands, grasslands, eel rich waterways, volcanic plains, hunting grounds, yam fields, travel corridors, ceremonial locations, and seasonal resource zones. One of the great achievements of the book is that after reading it many familiar parts of Melbourne no longer look historically neutral. Rivers stop being decorative urban features and become economic and cultural arteries. Swamps stop appearing as useless wasteland awaiting drainage and instead emerge as rich productive environments central to Aboriginal life.

This environmental reconstruction is where Presland was genuinely ahead of many historians of his generation. Long before works such as Dark Emu or The Biggest Estate on Earth became widely discussed, Presland was already arguing that Aboriginal people actively shaped and managed the Victorian landscape rather than merely existing within it passively. He presented the Kulin world as organised, structured, adaptive, and economically sophisticated.

Importantly, however, Presland’s work is generally more careful and restrained than some later popular interpretations. He does not overstate evidence or try to force grand continental conclusions from limited local material. His arguments are usually grounded in archaeology, ecology, early settler observations, and environmental evidence. That caution gives much of the book lasting credibility even where details have since been refined by later scholarship.

At the same time, the book clearly reflects the intellectual environment in which it was written. There are sections where Aboriginal people feel slightly distant within the narrative because the reconstruction is driven heavily through archaeology and environmental interpretation rather than Indigenous voice. Presland reconstructs systems, landscapes, food resources, movement patterns, and settlement logic extremely well, but modern readers may notice that Aboriginal perspectives themselves are not always foregrounded in the way contemporary scholarship now expects.

This creates one of the central tensions within the book. On one hand Presland is challenging settler erasure by demonstrating the depth and sophistication of Kulin occupation. On the other hand the language and methods sometimes still carry traces of older archaeological and anthropological traditions where Aboriginal societies are examined from outside rather than speaking directly within the historical narrative themselves.

The title itself reveals this tension. The phrase “Lost Land” works emotionally because it captures the enormous environmental and cultural destruction that accompanied colonisation. Presland is describing a landscape that was physically transformed almost beyond recognition. Wetlands disappeared. Water systems changed. Sacred and economically important areas were destroyed or built over. From that perspective the title is entirely understandable.

Yet modern readers may also feel some discomfort with the language of loss because it risks implying disappearance or finality. Contemporary Indigenous scholarship places far greater emphasis upon survival, continuity, sovereignty, and ongoing cultural connection to Country. The Kulin world was violently disrupted, but it was not extinguished. In that sense the title reflects a late twentieth century historical framework still moving away from older “vanishing race” assumptions without having fully reached the language of Indigenous continuity that dominates much current scholarship.

One of the more interesting aspects of the book is what it chooses not to focus on. Presland is primarily concerned with reconstructing the Aboriginal world before and during early settlement rather than producing a detailed study of frontier violence or colonial conflict. Violence and dispossession are acknowledged throughout the work, but they are not analysed with the same sustained intensity seen in later historians such as Henry Reynolds or Lyndall Ryan.

That absence is important because it reflects the historiographical moment in which the book was produced. Presland’s intervention was spatial and environmental. He was first trying to establish that Melbourne itself possessed a deep Aboriginal history embedded in Country. Later generations of historians increasingly shifted attention toward frontier violence, massacre studies, resistance, policing, and sovereignty. Presland was opening the door to that broader reassessment even if his own work stopped short of fully entering those debates.

The book is also important because it helped localise Aboriginal history for non Indigenous Victorians. Australian history has often treated Aboriginal history as something distant from urban life, something belonging to deserts, remote communities, or frontier regions far removed from major cities. Presland challenged that directly. He demonstrated that Melbourne itself is Aboriginal historical space. The modern city was constructed over a much older cultural landscape that remained partially visible if readers were willing to look carefully enough.

This is ultimately why the book remains significant. Even where later scholarship has revised or expanded upon Presland’s arguments, the central intellectual shift he encouraged still matters. He taught readers to see Melbourne differently. He challenged the assumption that urban Australia lacked deep Indigenous history. He forced the landscape itself back into historical discussion.

Stylistically the work sits somewhere between academic history and public history. Presland writes clearly and accessibly, which helped the book reach a broad audience beyond universities. In some respects that accessibility limits the analytical density of the work, but it also explains why the book became influential. It was readable, grounded, and persuasive without becoming trapped in academic jargon.

Looking back now, the book feels less like a final interpretation and more like an important turning point within Victorian historical writing. It belongs to that generation of scholarship that began dismantling terra nullius at the local level by reconstructing Aboriginal occupation, environmental management, and cultural geography in ways many Australians had simply never considered before. Its greatest achievement may not be that every conclusion remains current, but that it fundamentally changed how many readers understood Melbourne itself.

I have been trying to get a hold of this one for a while and glad I have been able to finally add to the collection. As indicated above it is an older work (this one printed in 1995) and reflects its time, which of itself make it an interesting read.

An added bonus was this newspaper cutting that I found between the pages.

The Cauldron of Blood is a Daemon Engine used by the forces of Chaos that is completely dedicated to the service of the Chaos God of war and bloodshed, Khorne.

The veins of Daemons flow not with mortal blood but the red-hot lava of Daemon blood. A huge, bubbling cauldron of Daemon blood is carried on top of the Daemon Engine to supply the great cannon which juts out of its front. Once targets are within range a great gout of blood is fired through the projecting nozzle, raining the foe with molten lava.

This profane liquid flows over and around cover, and can reduce whole buildings to rubble. Like all Daemon Engines of Khorne, the Cauldron of Blood also carries massive combat blades on its prow to slice through the opposition. Warhammer 40k Fandom

The “Khorne Cauldron of Blood” is one of the more obscure and visually striking Chaos war machines produced by Games Workshop during the late 1980s and early 1990s for the original Epic scale and early Warhammer 40,000 Chaos ranges. It belongs to the wider family of Khorne daemon engines that emerged during the formative expansion of Chaos lore in the late Rogue Trader era. The miniature first appeared in the era when Games Workshop and Citadel Miniatures were rapidly developing the visual identity of Chaos. During this period, Chaos was transformed from a relatively generic fantasy evil force into a highly developed mythology centred on the four Chaos Gods: Khorne, Nurgle, Tzeentch, and Slaanesh. The publication of Realm of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness was especially important in establishing Khorne’s imagery of brass, skulls, blood sacrifice, chain axes, and daemon infused machinery.

The Cauldron of Blood itself was not originally a mainstream plastic kit in the modern sense. It appeared as a specialist Chaos daemon engine in Epic scale and later in larger resin or metal forms associated with specialist Chaos collections and Armorcast era super heavy models.

According to later lore compilations, the engine carried boiling daemon ichor which functioned as ammunition for a grotesque cannon that projected molten blood across the battlefield. The miniature is significant historically because it represents a transitional period in Warhammer design. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Chaos vehicles were wildly experimental and often surreal. Before the cleaner visual consistency of later Warhammer 40,000 editions, Chaos machines resembled medieval torture devices fused with industrial machinery and daemonic possession.

Many collectors regard these early daemon engines as some of the purest expressions of old school Chaos design.

Unlike modern Warhammer kits, the Cauldron of Blood was never a central mass market release. As a result, original miniatures are comparatively rare and now mainly circulate through collector markets and specialist oldhammer communities. Surviving examples are usually metal Epic miniatures or resin Armorcast variants. The model also reflects how Chaos evolved across both Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer 40,000. Early Chaos ranges often blurred fantasy and science fiction aesthetics, so daemon engines could appear equally appropriate in either universe before the settings became more visually separated in later decades.

Among long time Khorne enthusiasts, like myself, it is remembered less for competitive gameplay and more for its outrageous design and the creativity of early Chaos miniature development.

This version was printed for me by Rob D for my birthday and he has done an outrageously good job and the 3D design and printing.

I will suitably adorn it with an appropriate number of Bloodletter attendees – eight of course!

Thanks Rob for the prezzie and excellent work!