The column that has fun with the smaller mistakes and missteps of Australia’s mainstream mediocre; that pays homage to those sweet little fishes that individually don’t amount to a full meal but collectively can cause a tummy upset over the overall state of the once great and noble craft of journalism in this country.

What’s the first thing that comes into your mind when you think of the word “shelter”? For the compilers of this column, any word uttered generally means it’s Bundy Rum time but our guess is that you might be thinking about something more along the lines of these images …

Or … because this post is about a Nine News Queensland report by Garry Youngberry that does mention the word bomb several times this is the better example?

Let’s now roll the tape from Nine News Queensland’s 6pm last night (Thursday), starting with a Joel Dry run…

“Kept so secret from enemy intel that even locals didn’t discover it until almost 50 years later…”

And then this from Youngberry: “Alone in the outback surrounded by red sands and scrub sits a shelter with a secret…”

“Three thousand, five hundred men and women from the United States army airforce were hidden at this base throughout the war; their presence so tightly held that even they weren’t told where they were going.”

Oooh, Youngers. We think troops not having a clue to where they were going was a fairly common practice in wars. Loose lips sink ships and all that.

But seeing all the definitions of “shelter” we could find referred only to keeping living things alive – human beings and their animals – we’re now clued up to where the Berrymaster was heading with this yarn… hiding 1500 military folk would not have been easy just in case the enemy who didn’t know where they were might want to take them out!

But while the compilers of this column might be washed up and bitter old hacks, their logic is still partially intact and they worked out that this shelter must surely have had stairs leading down to a cavernous space for so many servicepeople?

Youngers again, putting us out of our misery: “And the reason for all this mystery in building 104 …

… we’re going to let that one go straight through to the keeper … “sat a prized US weapon, the Norden bomb sight.”

Here are Gazza and a local historian having a look over this piece of very secret wartime machine that helped allied bombers hit the right targets as the war progressed. It wasn’t always accurate and fairly easy to confuse and it has been rumoured that the one used to direct the Enola Gay to Hiroshima got a bit muddled by turbulence and flak and forgot the target was supposed to be Tokyo. True story, apparently.

The local lad explained that about two-thirds of the entire US atomic bomb program spend went to just developing these sights!

All in all our Mediocre Bytes summation: as a regular news reporter, Garry Youngberry makes an excellent weather expert.

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