Letters to the editor - July 25, 2026

The Empress of Australia

Alfred Conti Borda of Qawra writes:

The article ‘More early passenger ships in Malta’ (July 6) by the learned judge Giovanni Bonello, makes interesting reading indeed. One of the famous passenger liners mentioned was the The Empress of Australia.

I am very glad to say that my family, namely my late mother and my sister, then one-year old, and me at eight years of age, boarded this beautiful ship during the summer of 1951 from Valletta, destination Port Said.

The uniqueness of this liner was its mahogany-clad rooms. During the passage, I quite remember two things that impressed me most. These were: the lovely polished mahogany, creaking under the strain of a fairly choppy sea, and the queuing of passengers for a rock cake each.

After three days we reached Cyprus and, a day later, Port Said, Egypt.

The Empress of Australia in Malta in 1948. Photo: Giovanni Bonello’s collection

My mother, who had received a French education at College Saint Louis, in Tanta, Egypt before the war, met her parents and we all stayed at a flat in Heliopolis. My father, who had enlisted in the Royal Navy in 1935, could not join us in Egypt because he was on duty on board the cruiser HMS Gambia.

At the end of September, we embarked on a passenger plane, namely a two-engine Vickers Viking, from Cairo airport, destination: Malta. It was a long nine-hour journey, punctuated by two stops. The first one was by landing at Benghazi airport and the second at Tripoli airport, both in Libya.

Unfortunately, on the way back, the aeroplane was subjected to several air pockets, which were uncomfortable and made many passengers sick. Finally, thank God, the old plane landed safely at Luqa airport.

Conduct unbecoming

Eddy Privitera of Naxxar writes:

Andrew Borg Cardona has done it again.

This lawyer and prominent activist of Repubblika, has, in his desperate quest for attention, strayed from the dignity expected of a legal professional.

He has transformed himself into the most vitriolic anti-Labour opinionist, frequently going overboard in his criticism.

Borg Cardona’s relentless, hyperbolic antics serve only to alienate the public and embarrass the very legal profession he belongs to.

This stupid behaviour reached an entirely new low during the highly sensitive and followed, even internationally, ongoing jury trial of Yorgen Fenech, the alleged mastermind behind the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia.

For a practising lawyer to conduct himself in a manner so disruptive - continuing to use his mobile phone despite a number of warnings - that the presiding judge had to order him out of the courtroom is nothing short of a national disgrace.

Instead of allowing this crucially judicial process to proceed with the gravity it demands, he chose to prioritise his own theatrical agenda.

When a lawyer uses the court as a platform for petty partisan point-scoring, that lawyer erodes the public trust in both the legal community and our democratic institutions.

When will Borg Cardona realise that, besides demeaning himself through such antics, he keeps hurting politically his own Nationalist Party image, which he stupidly believes he is helping?