The RAN commissioned a new auxiliary oiler replenishment (AOR) ship recently and celebrated it in a fine style:
NEW: The Royal Australian Navy commissioned HMAS Supply in Sydney today, and uh….. organised this dance to celebrate pic.twitter.com/OvCYlhhGZG
— Alex Bruce-Smith (@alexbrucesmith) April 10, 2021
Sorry. Not appropriate.
Doesn't matter who the girls are, this is not appropriate.
At a time when we are promoting the rights of women to not be objectified, there are other dance moves that would be fun and equally energetic.— Em Em 🐀 (@Em1945Em) April 11, 2021
Despite the spastic way of dancing they are apparently not trannies – we are not at that stage, yet – but what in some dark corners of the internet are referred to as ‘biocunts’ – twitterer Em Em would no doubt be further traumatised if she were aware of this awful term.
It’s certainly an auspicious way of commissioning a Royal Australian Navy vessel, but we should be mindful not to allow irony to devolve too much into wowserism here, though bearing in mind the Governor General and other bemused or non-plussed looking dignitaries were present. [UPDATE – the ABC video below was doctored (by the ABC), the dancing occurred before the official ceremony, and the Governor General missed out seeing these sort of sexy girls.]
‘Supply’ might seem a dull utilitarian name for a … supply ship, but the name has a long history, as there was an HMS Supply in the First Fleet in 1788, which was the first vessel to sail into Port Jackson, after Botany Bay was found to be a train wreck of a place for settlement purposes. Port Jackson wasn’t a whole lot more promising though, and the HMS Supply soon became a very important ship in this sleepwalking nation’s early history, as two years after settlement it made a desperate trip to the Dutch outpost at Batavia (Jakarta) to acquire food supplies for the near starving colonists.
The name was first used by the RAN from the early 1950s to 1980s, when an Ulster built ship was christened such and here she is betwixt a destroyer and troop transporter on the way to Vietnam, 1968:
The Navy’s page on this ship notes that during the Vietnam era it made many visits to south east Asian ports and:
These visits proved popular with her crew following many weeks at sea exercising and on passage.
It’s hard not to see this as some kind of joke, but it’s certain that the sailors did have a refreshing time in these south-east Asian ports of call.
In any case HMAS Supply Mark II has gotten off to a good start with the twerking dance ceremony and of course the Navy today is about 20% female so there’ll likely be some twerking, or twerking adjacent gyrations, going on in this new installment of the Supply for years to come, until, god forbid, we are required to defend the Taiwanese semi-conductor industry and it gets sunk by a Chinese missile or submarine, or Kaptain Karen becomes convinced that global warming has already destroyed the Great Barrier Reef and drives into it. Given that we are not America tier yet, this is probably too pessimistic, short term at least. Our children and grand-children do have a lot to look forward to though.
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