Touched

That remained the future, the game, having just read Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds, the ultimate sci-fi, published 2005, the last survivors of an extinct species cast millions of years into the future, a zoo. Everything collapsed into insignificance in the long time frame. There was a game as a kid, see how long I could go without speaking to anyone. If I made it to three days, much to my parents distraction, it was a major triumph. That was the mood now, gateways locked, outside either hostile or filled with melancholy of the most menacing kind, looking on in envy as normal people went about their business.

They were handsome, a lot of them, the boys, this being a student precinct near both Sydney University and the University of Technology, and the girls were healthy, in the prime of everything, while distancing prisms caught at everything he could no longer be, the colours contained




IRAQ WATCH:

From the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/24/world/middleeast/24cnd-iraq.html?hp&ex=1164430800&en=c730b65295d60b9f&ei=5094&partner=homepage


Iraq Toll Rises; Shiite Militia Retaliates By EDWARD WONGPublished: November 24, 2006BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 24 — Defying a government-imposed curfew, Shiite militiamen stormed Sunni mosques in central Iraq today, shooting guards and burning down buildings in apparent retaliation for a series of devastating car bombs that killed hundreds of people the previous day in a Shiite slum, residents and police officials said.
All day today, funeral processions wound through the crowded streets of the Sadr City section of Baghdad that is home to more than 1.5 million people, mostly Shiites.

An Iraqi wept over the coffin of his relative in Baghdad's impoverished district of Sadr City today.As the death toll from those bombings rose above 200, gunmen drove through several neighborhoods in Baghdad and the nearby provincial capital of Baquba, taking aim at mosques with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades on the Muslim holy day, when many Iraqis go to mosques to pray.The wreaking of vengeance unfolded while a powerful parliamentary bloc loyal to firebrand Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr threatened to boycott the government if Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki attends a meeting with President Bush scheduled for Wednesday in Jordan. The legislators said the American presence was the root cause of the spiraling violence in Iraq.But it was Mr. Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi Army, that Sunni residents blamed for the attacks today. From morning until afternoon, at least four mosques were attacked in a single mixed neighborhood in the capital. Two were completely destroyed, and at least five Sunnis were killed and 10 wounded, an Interior Ministry official said. Iraqi security forces were absent, unwilling or unable to stop the gunmen.“I live near Akbar al-Mustafa Mosque, which came under attack by gunmen around 7 this morning,” said a man who gave his name as Abu Ruqaiya and lives in Hurriya, the Baghdad neighborhood where violence raged all day. “Around 3 in the afternoon, those gunmen bombed this mosque and destroyed part of it. They left only after American and Iraqi soldiers arrived.”Some fighting continued into the evening, as gunmen in the neighborhood battled the invading fighters, the Interior Ministry official said. President Jalal Talabani urged calm at a news conference after an evening meeting of Iraq’s top leaders and said the defense minister had told him no mosques had been destroyed. Mr. Talabani also said he was postponing a weekend trip to Iran because the government had shut down Baghdad International Airport. In the far north, a suicide car bomber and a suicide belt bomber detonated their explosives at an outdoor car market in the insurgent-rife city of Tal Afar, killing at least 20 people and injuring at least 42.The bloodletting over the 24-hour period amounted to one of the worst spasms of violence since the Americans toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003. The wave of revenge attacks in Baghdad came despite a traffic ban the Iraqi government had imposed across the capital starting Thursday evening. Most of Baghdad remained quiet today, with children playing soccer in the empty streets, but the attacks nevertheless underscored the ineffectiveness of the Iraqi security forces in tamping down on violence that is widening the Sunni-Shiite sectarian divide and pushing the country toward full-scale civil war. The assaults against Sunnis today evoked the rampages by Shiite gunmen after a revered Shiite shrine was bombed by insurgents last February in Samarra, though this latest violence took place on a smaller scale. American troops stepped up patrols and operated checkpoints across Baghdad. An attack helicopter destroyed a rocket launcher seen firing from Sadr City into the nearby Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiya, the military said. An official from the Sadr office said at least three civilians were injured.The surge in violence comes at a politically fraught time for Prime Minister Maliki, particularly since he is preparing to meet President Bush in Amman. Both men face increasing pressure from their respective publics to come up with a successful strategy for stemming the growing carnage in Iraq, and both are navigating rising tensions between their two governments as they try to agree on a viable path forward.The announcement of a possible boycott by Mr. Sadr’s bloc further endangers Mr. Maliki’s political fortunes. Mr. Sadr controls Sadr City, and the attacks on Thursday appeared to have strengthened his standing and emboldened him. As long as Sunni Arab extremists massacre Shiites, Mr. Sadr can justify the existence of his militia and ignore entreaties by the Iraqi or American governments to disband it. “The occupation forces should shoulder the full responsibility for these deeds, and we call for them to end their rule in Iraq by withdrawing or at least setting a timetable for withdrawal,” Saleh al-Iqaili, a Sadr legislator, said at an afternoon conference. “If the security situation does not improve, as well as basic services, and if the prime minister does not retreat from his intent to meet the criminal Bush in Amman, we will suspend our membership in the Iraqi Parliament and the government.”

Tunnels Through Time

Haven't done this for awhile. To be very boring, I've been ill with a urinary tract infection that won't go away, on two different antibiotics, feeling drained, fantasing about living in the country, just wanted to escape the pressure of my own head, of feeling ill, of walking out the front door and not being able to cross the road because of the traffic. Financially nothing adds up in Sydney. The politicians, the commentators, they all talk about the boom times in Australia. But those boom times are poorly distributed, and for most people life is a struggle to pay bills, mortgages, credit cards, school fees. There's stunning amounts of money in Sydney, dripping wealth, but at the same time kilometre after kilometre of suburbs, of locked rooms, of staring voices and crazed eyes and introspective tunnels curling through the mud.

We don't know why things dived and escaped, why regular patterns suddenly became disrupted, why success vaulted into failure and why a longing for peace translated into disappearance. Sometimes I fantasise about sitting in a bar on the Amsterdam docks, the smoke curling through the morning cigarette, the weak European sunshine forming atmospheric patterns as the die hards settled into the first drink of the day. When intoxication took you into streams of knowing others. When he wrote not for others but for a deeper truth. Or if not Amsterdam, perhaps the streets of Calcutta. Hey, I remember you, the man who sold books would say. He did wierd things for personal gain, like taking us to the leper colony; as if it was a standard tourist site, outraging the doctors at the hospital.

We apologised, we left, he seemed nonplussed and wanted his 50 rupees anyway. What was that, a $1.50, we gave it to him, who cared. The cruelty of that city, the cruelty of his own torments and displaced brain, they didn't work except in streams of words and images and angst which portrayed a dislocated sensibility, nothing more, nothing less. Tears welled up and washed into headaches that wouldn't go away, he wasn't sure what this was about, what the past few weeks had been about. Sometimes he slumped into his chair at work, under flourescent lights, staring at a computer screen, reading crossed wires and other blogs, other lives; just wishing he wasn't 54 and heading into the dark, with old friends fizzling out, the ones that hadn't died young; and feeling in himself, too, the strands of hope and pessimism and resignation. It was good to be free.

NEWS:
DUBAI (Reuters) - An Iraqi militant group led by al Qaeda vowed a war against the "worshippers of the cross" in response to a recent speech by Pope Benedict on Islam that sparked anger across the Muslim world.
"We tell the worshipper of the cross (the Pope) that you and the West will be defeated, as is the case in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya," said an Internet statement by the Mujahideen Shura Council, an umbrella group led by Iraq's branch of al Qaeda.
"We shall break the cross and spill the wine. ... God will (help) Muslims to conquer Rome. ... God enable us to slit their throats, and make their money and descendants the bounty of the mujahideen," said the statement.
It was posted on Sunday on an Internet site often used by al Qaeda and other militant groups.
Pope Benedict said on Sunday he was deeply sorry Muslims had been offended by his use of a Medieval quotation on Islam and violence. The remarks outraged Muslims and triggered protests and attacks on churches in several Arab towns.
Another militant group in Iraq, Ansar al-Sunnah, also vowed to fight Christians in retaliation.
"You will only see our swords until you go back to God's true faith Islam," it said in a separate Internet statement.
Al Qaeda in Iraq and other militant groups have staged suicide bombings and killings of foreign forces and members of the U.S.-allied government and security forces.

ABC:
The Catholic Archbishop of Sydney has backed the controversial speech Pope Benedict XVI made in Germany last week that linked Islam to violence.
The Pontiff has apologised saying he is deeply sorry about angering so many Muslims, and that the 14th Century passages that he referred to in no way reflect his views.
Some Muslim groups have accepted the apology.
Cardinal George Pell says the Pope did nothing wrong in making the speech.
"I think he's trying to move the dialogue on a bit so that we can agree without resorting to the use of weapons," he said.
"I think what he feared has been established and that is that if there is some sort of criticisms, even mild, there are elements among the Muslims who will resort to violence or threaten violence."

AFP
DUBAI: Gulf newspapers continued to criticise Pope Benedict XVI on Monday, with one Saudi daily saying his remarks linking Islam to violence were beating the drum of war for the far right in the United States.

The Pope's comments, made Tuesday in a university address in his native Germany, were not "an ordinary blunder requiring an apology", the Saudi Arabian Al-Yom wrote in its Monday edition one day after the pontiff said he was "deeply sorry" for the outrage caused.

"These remarks belong in a current of thought that is in total accord with the ideas of the extreme right in the United States on the conflict between civilisations," it said.

"This ideology beats the drum of war even more."

Benedict had sought to mollify Muslim anger on Sunday, saying he was "deeply sorry" for the outrage sparked by his remarks on Islam and stressing that they did not reflect his personal opinion.

But the Qatari daily Ash-Sharq rejected his public statement of regrets and demanded that he issue a full apology.

Under the headline "Regrets... less than an apology", the paper said the pope "must absolutely apologise for his prejudiced remarks, thus soothing the anger of Muslims".

Father's Day

It was Father's Day yesterday in Australia. Funny the twists and turns life takes; and that because of the station I had suddenly become a public spokesman for fatherhood. Children weren't exactly on the cards in the early days. I was taunted in the playground, a hundred kids gathered around; hit me with your handbag, hit me with your handbag. These were some of the most awful, most shameful, most embarrassing days of my life. I was smashed to the ground. The kids kept chanting, hit me with your handbag, hit me with your handbag. They were capable of any cruelty. I squirmed on the ground. The leader of the pack was a handsome boy, Terry comes to mind but I don't think that was his name. The teachers were miles off and in no rush to interfere, those were the days before bullying became the latest fashionable no no to have propaganda and government resources thrown at it.

Later I was to discover that Terry was getting blow jobs after school from the same bloke I was. That was John Hay, who in a way was my first sugar daddy. Virtually the minute I could drive he gave me a smart little GST Torana, a sports version of the Torana which was very cool in its day. I whizzed around town like the it boy of the season. He was fat and rather plain looking, and that was why he was prepared to pay for it. Funny to think now that he died at the age of 26, and we had considered him enormously old; certainly old enough to demand cash for favours. How obsessive he was, how cruel I was. Perhaps this is the wrong post to dwell on these things; the beautiful house overlooking the bay, I would return only when it suited me; everything was done only when it suited me. He descended into a quagmire of pills and alcohols and suicided - all of 26. He had been a very talented businessman. I had worked in one of his reading colleges for a brief spell, a go at straight jobs. How sad it all was.

From all of this, I wandered out of the storm, well out of a detox anyway, and into the arms of Suzy; who was pregnant before we barely knew each other. I remember, I will always remember, standing on the balcony of that beautiful apartment in Victoria Street, overlooking Woolloomoolloo Bay with the city as a backdrop, and saying: "I've always wanted to have children". It was the following week, maybe ten days later, anyway it wasn't very long, when she declared she was pregnant. That baby miscarred, but by that time we were living together, the couple, and our paths were set. She miscarried, distressed, that anguished look on her face; not the same face you see today; and got pregnant again promptly, probably the next time we bonked. By that time I had moved from that wonderful apartment in Victoria Street; down to her more down to earth flat at Bondi Beach, and my life had taken a different course. In sickness and in health; through all the different paths.

In the course of work yesterday, a general reporting shift, I met the First Lady of East Timor, Kirsty Sword, who was completely charming, decent, intelligent and impressive and is much loved by the media who deal with her; and Jana Wendt, the first lady of Australian television, who was holding a farewell party at the Three Weeds Hotel in Rozelle. With thoughts turning to retirement, it's funny to think of long days when nobody could care less who you were or where you are from. I look forward to it, but will miss the casual drama and the easy access.

NEWS:

Australia, UN Hunt East Timor Rebel Leader After Jail Break
By Ed Johnson
Aug. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Australian-led peacekeepers and United Nations police are hunting for 57 escaped prisoners in East Timor, including rebel leader Major Alfredo Reinado, after a breakout that may further destabilize the Pacific Ocean state.
Forces were searching the nation's capital, Dili, and surrounding areas today after the escape from Becora Prison late yesterday, the UN's Acting Police Commissioner Antero Lopes said in a statement.
Reinado, an Australian-trained former military police commander, led a group of rebel soldiers who refused to lay down their arms after former Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri dismissed around a third of the country's armed forces for deserting.
The sackings in March provoked clashes between security forces and escalated into fighting between armed gangs. The violence resulted in the deployment of 2,500 peacekeepers from Australia, New Zealand, Portugal and Malaysia in May.

Disengaging From The Long Goodbye

These were the times to say goodbye, not just to old friends but old selves, gangs which had been so fraught with belief, who thought they mattered. We were slow on the uptake and dissolved as we aged. We moved from our twenties, slid through the thirties, still partying, still young enough to get away with it, survived through our forties, through long nights of introspection and discontent, and emerged as relics in our fifties. We were often saddened by the disappearance of hope; but there was no excuse. We had known better. Or to be more precise, we should have known better. We just didn't go down that path, into rectitude, self-righteousness, Christian beliefs, high moral and ethical standards. We just survived, and our hopes to write all those great novels, perform those great sympathies, paint in ways that nobody else had ever painted before, they all disappeared.

And now Ian has gone, too; and we're all left like shags on a rock, watching the sun set and even now disengaged from any true meaning; any normal depth, any normal way of thinking. What club was it anyway?

Ian, I want to say goodbye now, I want to thank you for the mysteries you showed me; I want to thank you for the good times we had; I want to apologise for the hurt I created. I didn't mean to hurt you, anymore than I meant to hurt so many others. I remember your kindness; I remember those few moments of intimacy, when tenderness and thrill was at the core of the moment; I want to thank you for the amused, ironical, kind view that you took - and imparted - and I want to thank you for the gift of creativity. You were always encouraging. You were never the one to say go get a job boy, work in an office, become a nine to fiver, have a normal career. You were always the one that thought our destinies were singular, that we could perform, write, paint, act, that there wasn't anything else in life worth pursuing. So thank you and goodbye, dear friend. See you on the other side.

NEWS:

Howard has sparked a furore by suggesting that muslims should learn English.
But I don't think he's going to lose any votes.

Here's a sample of the coverage:

DAILY TELEGRAPH:

Muslim free speech blackmail

ISLAMIC leaders are trying to gag Prime Minister John Howard from speaking out against Muslims who refuse to integrate, threatening that any criticism of their culture could lead to another race riot.
The head of Mr Howard's own Muslim advisory council, Dr Ameer Ali, yesterday tried to shut down debate on whether Muslims should learn English and treat women as equals by raising the spectre of the shameful Cronulla riots.
Dr Ali warned: "We have already witnessed one incident in Sydney, in Cronulla. I don't want these scenes to be repeated, because when you antagonise the younger generation they are bound to react.'' ....

John Howard's column in The Tele:

AUSTRALIA has been greatly enriched by immigration and most people who have come to this nation have happily integrated with the community.
They have willingly embraced the Australian way of life. They have become part of the fabric of the nation and have helped make Australia the great country it is today.
I have said many times that people who come to this country - no matter where they are from - should become part of the Australian community.
For new migrants, that means embracing Australian values, accepting our culture, being able to speak English if it's not their first language and understanding that men and women have equality. But it is an undeniable fact that some who have come here are resisting integration. There are pockets of this resistance in different migrant groups but it is perhaps most visible at this time in a small section of the Islamic community.
A small minority of this community, and other groups that reject integration, regard appeals for them to fully integrate into the Australian way of life as some kind of discrimination.
It is not. It is commonsense and, importantly, it is also a powerful symbol of a new migrant's willingness and enthusiasm about becoming an Australian.
It is difficult to get anywhere in this country without learning English. It's the common language of Australia and is, quite simply, a passport to the future.
Simple tasks like securing a job and making new friends would be so much harder in Australia without a working knowledge of English.
Treating women as equals is an Australian value that should be embraced. Australians generally do not tolerate women being treated in an inferior fashion to men.
There are some societies that do not treat women equally. Migrants from those societies must be fully prepared to embrace Australian attitudes towards women.
We are an egalitarian nation that prides itself on the concept of a fair go, our equal treatment of men and women, our parliamentary democracy and free speech...

ABC:

Prime Minister John Howard has restated his view that Australian Muslims need to learn English and treat women as equals, in order to fit in with Australian community values.
Mr Howard's comments on a talkback radio station made national headlines this morning, with the Prime Minister accused of singling out Muslims.
He was quoted as saying that Muslim migrants need to make a greater effort to embrace Australian values, treat women as equals and make a better attempt to learn English.
As he opened a new school building in his own Sydney electorate of Benelong this morning, Mr Howard said he stood by his comments.
"It's wrong, I haven't singled anybody out," he said.
"I said yesterday what I've previously said, that there is a section, a small section, of the Islamic population which is unwilling to integrate.
"And I've said generally of migrants who come to this country, no matter where they've come from, they have to integrate.
"That means speaking English as quickly as possible, it means embracing Australian values, and it also means making sure that no matter what the culture of the country from which they came might have been, Australia requires women to be treated fairly and decently and in the same fashion as men.
"If any migrants coming to this country have a different view, they'd better get rid of that view pretty quickly. "

SBS:

Comments spark fury

The prime minister’s comments sparked fury among some Muslim leaders who say they were offended by what the prime minister had said. The chairman of the government's new Islamic advisory committee, Dr Ameer Ali, has warned of more trouble unless Mr Howard tones down his rhetoric on Muslim migrants. "We have already witnessed one incident in Sydney recently in Cronulla, I don't want these scenes to be repeated because when you antagonise the younger generation, younger group, they are bound to react," Dr Ali told Macquarie Radio. But Mr Howard today stood by his comments. "I don't apologise," he told reporters."I think they are missing the point and the point is that I don't care and the Australian people don't care where people come from. "There's a small section of the Islamic population which is unwilling to integrate and I have said generally all migrants ... they have to integrate."

The Age:

THE Prime Minister's "divisive line" on Muslims was alienating and ostracising the Muslim community, according to one leader.
Sherene Hassan's comments followed an attack by men with crowbars on two cars belonging to another community leader on Thursday night.
Ms Hassan, an executive committee member of the Islamic Council of Victoria, said the council had received more abusive and threatening emails this week than at any time since the Cronulla riots.
One read: "F--k off back to where you came from and rape the women there."
She blamed John Howard's radio comments on Thursday, in which he urged Muslims to learn Australian values. The emails have been referred to Australian Federal Police.
The vandalised cars belonged to the council's past president, Yasser Soliman, who said the attacks were being investigated by local and federal police and ASIO.

Ian Farr Take Two

This is the moment when we stepped forward in time; from those days so long ago. I met Ian very early; 1969, 70, 71, something like that. I had left home but was living on the northern beaches, and would come into the city seeking adventure; at an age when conglomerations of the future held so many hints, of excitement, of promise. He was a friend of other people I had met, groups I was determinedly disentangling, or engaging with, at a time and age when everything was close to us and the world was shifting on its axis. He was living with Wayne Reeve, and in the grip of alternative lifestyles they were one of the first gay couples I had ever met. Wayne was always charismatic, lively, They would be sitting cross legged on the floor, waiting for the trips to kick in, in the days when acid really was acid, and Wayne would be swigging from the tequila bottle and daring everybody on; and they all laughed at their inner-city jokes and secret knowledge; and I, barely 16, was fascinated by them all.

To spend the night there, crashed out on the couch, was to enter a secret enclave. And Ian was part of that house, a musician, I had never met a real musician before, and he knew everybody, the way they kissed in public was daring beyond anything I had ever seen; and Rob was there, completely out of it as usual; and to me, meeting this drug-fucked band of renegades, they were different to anybody I had ever met; they were everything I wanted to be, creative, spectacularly out it; and I was cute enough to know my looks were an entre to anywhere I wanted to go. Rob turned out a mess, but in the process turned out a child with Virginia; the child is now in her 20s and turned out to be a lovely person. Virginia is now an older woman, poised, genteel. And Ian was just part of everything.

I organised a group house in Kings Cross, where a band of us lived; the shower never worked properly, John Nelson painted a mural of Queensland rooftops, washed out palm trees and the silvery tones of the Australian summer. And all these things, these bands of people, were part of Ian and Ian was part of them. He died in Adelaide and the funeral was held very quickly because his sister had to return to America. As Russell put it, there weren't many of his ratbag friends there, representing his past, his true self. We came hunting; but skipping across time was not going to solve the disappearance of someone we thought would always be there, a witness to us all, our mascot, our spiritual guide.

One of the most vivid events I ever remember with Ian I even now hesitate to tell. I didn't look good in the outcome, I was blamed for my own harshness, the cruelty of the games I played with other men's hearts. As every rent boy knows, they pay better if you dangle them along, offer them little and give them nothing; if, to put it bluntly, you're a pricktease. I wanted to be in the inner-circle, to get to know these people, to adopt a band, be part of a group which included such wonderful characters, Lynne Hapgood, Ian Farr, Johnny Bygate. Lynne overdosed while pregnant with her second child, Bygate died of a brain haemorage after his final, hopeless years soaked in alcohol and prescription pills.

The first money I ever made out of writing was after I won a short story competition with a story about Bygate, who was a close friend of Ian's. And like I had wriggled and flirted with so many, with so little genuine care or consideration for what happened to these fragile souls, a manipulative little tart, so I wanted entre to the galaxy of genuine creative spirits that Ian knew. If they wanted me they paid, and in his own way pay he did. For someone with no money, for someone who was so gentle and so genuine, it was just plain wrong. He fell in love. It wasn't quite true, but I liked to think I could always get off with anyone, male or female, as long as the price was right. I was about 24 before I started to have sex for anything but social or financial gain.

Unrequited love in the terraces of Paddington. We shared our time; but the dividends were not high enough. Those were the days of Mandrax, and in that house in Hargrave Street, nextdoor to the Bellevue Hotel which was such a critical part of the annals of Sydney life, the dramas played out in a series of magical days. In the preceding hours or days I had told him that things couldn't go on, I really didn't love him, didn't want to sleep with him anymore, that after years of emotional blackmail I wasn't going to be held hostage anymore. We were all, as I said, spectacularly out of it; flopping around on the double bed in the front room upstairs; the group gropes and fluster clucks that were all part of mandies and being off our scones. There were several of us in various states of unconsciouness in and on the bed. And then he just emerged from under the blankets; blood everywhere.

He had slahsed his wrists in my bed, underneath the blankets; with all of us around. The only reason I was conscious was because I was tripping, everyone else was on the mandies - a now banned subtitute for sleeping pills which were very fashionable at the time; and mixed with a bit of alcohol really made one very amicable indeed. The mandrax stagger was a completely fashionable statement of an inner-city elite; we're off our scones and we don't give a fuck about all your normal oppressive crap, going to work, being straight, being normal. He rose up from under the blankets like some great bewildered bird; and there was instant chaos in an already chaotic scene.

I went nextdoor to the pub and got them to ring triple 000. The ambulance came and took him away. For a pianist, slashing his wrists was the worst thing he could possibly do; it impacted on his ability to play for years to come, for the rest of his life really. He had had a jolly good attempt at it; in the days when we were all fascinated by the suicide of Sylvia Plath, or Sylvia Platitude as some of the graffiti in our houses said.

I never went to see him in hospital. This was the third time in my short life that someone had pulled a stunt like this; one of the men had died, with massive associated drama, people screaming hatred at me out of car windows; the other just ended up in hospital. And there was Ian. I considered it an outrageous piece of emotional blackmail, and I wasn't going to play ball. I was considered a cold hearted bastard, blamed for ravaging this sensitive soul, but I stayed away from the hospital nonetheless.

I remember when he came to see me, after he got out of hospital. The house was a different place now; much quieter, more organised. I went to work, I tapped away at short stories which were rarely published; and the house was mine now, not a wild band of partying fringe dwellers. We sat in almost frozen silence in the front loungeroom; I couldn't possibly explain, didn't even know, why I had acted the way I did. And his hopeful, tremulous expressions were just nothing; I couldn't participate. Sydney's gay scene was kicking off, we were a real, big city now; and and with all the crass competitiveness and bitchy swirls; love was easy to find. All you had to do was sit on a bar stool. We sat in the front room, drinking heavily, awkwardly, and as I downed each glass of Douglas scotch, I threw the empty glasses into the fireplace, smashing them. We both acted as if this was perfectly normal behaviour; and continued to talk, or maneouvre, in our frozen, awkward way until he finally left.

We didn't speak much for months afterwards, the intimacy wiped in one horrific afternoon of acid drenched flashing and blood streaming arms. In the end we became friends; although things were never the same again. And now time has finished the job he started so long ago. I wish he was still here, a sentinal for our group; our priest, taking confession and leading prayers for our troubled little band.

Ian Farr

This is a post I never wanted to write. Ian Farr, a very old friend, has died. He was barely 60. He's been living in Adelaide the past few years, so I haven't seen much of him in recent times, but we were very close in the 1970s, when he was a major figure in our pretty wild group. He was a lovely man. Apparently he went to the doctor about a month ago complaining of stomach ache, was diagnosed with stomach cancer, and died in his sleep a couple of nights ago. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of him ready to hand.

They were really wild days, way back then, living in Hargrave Street in Paddington, off our ever loving trees, pioneers of thought disorder, tripping in Centennial Park. Wild nights, with the bushes rustling and the sky whack whacking and us awake while the rest of the suburb slept; the normal people slept. He cared, and these days, few people care.

These were the people we shared our life's story with; and Ian in particular. He always listened. He was always kind. I rang him up only a month or so ago and my opening line was: "Thought I'd give you a blast from the past". It's been sad now for days, old friends getting in touch, there just aren't many of us left any more from that merry band, so long ago. We thought we were the cutting edge, the future generation of Australia's great artists, writers, actors, musicians. It didn't work out that way. There's been some minor successes; but we didn't become the epoch changing characters we thought we were at the time.

Ian had got a mention as a promising young composer in a book about Australian music; watch this space was the gist; but that didn't happen. But Ian kept performing; even in later years, when he had been caring for his elderly mother, who died not long ago, he would play the piano in the old people's home; much appreciated. He did a lot of the music for various theatre groups; those tiny bells, the pure appreciation of beauty, that was all him. It seemed to me, in the wash of it all, that his theatre music was too ephemeral, there was no full record of it, and he and his memory and his music would be washed away. At least with words they stayed moldering on sheets of paper. But he wouldn't of cared. That wasn't what he was about.

Ian always seemed, in a sense, purer than the rest of us. His motives were cleaer, more honest, he struggled for creative achievement in the purest sense; while the rest of us, well some of us, were just grotty and wanted to get out of it, cheap thrills, cheap success, to be fabulous without effort; to ignore the consequences of our actions.

I remember most the days at Hargrave Street, where we all lived in a group household next to the pub. I kept bantams in the backyard, making the derelict backyard toilet into a chook pen. Unique, in that inner suburb, now the font of trendiness and million dollar terraces, was the crowing of the rooster each morning. I was up at six every morning, spewing out incomprehensibe, certainly unpublished, science fiction novels; of the forces that moved across chequered floors in great castles in the sky. Ian was part of all this; because to me he was the embodiment of the pure creative life. It had never occurred to him to be anything other than a musician; and he had dedicated his life to that cause. And he was always encouraging; that to be the artist was the only forward for any of us; the artist as a young man.

The pub next door loved us; and not just because of the amount of money we spent in there. While the rest of the neighbourhood complained about the noise and got together petitions, we as the people right next door, never complained. They didn't complain about our chooks, we didn't complain about their late night drunks. Apart from the fact that we were the late night drunks. On the front of our house, we had painted each of the pointed tops of the iron railing a different colour, pink, purple, silver, it was the seventies; and everyone knew that our house was different; that while everybody else got up and went to work, our mornings were spent sleeping off the night before. It would never have occurred to us to be different. Actually, at one time I did have a job for three months; as assistant director for the Pacific Island Monthly; and I would smoke a joint and have a strong coffee and self-righteously step over groaning bodies each morning on the way to work. A lot of these people sleeping on my floor were Ian's friends; from the different theatre groups he was involved in. They all loved him; they all raged into the night with bottles of tequila, and in those days, lots of hash.

No one ever doubted that Ian was a brilliant musician; and it had never occurred to him to be anything else. Struggling to write, from a background devoid of art or art appreciation, I was fascinated by someone who lived the creative life and had never, apparently, thought to do anything else.

It was Jenny Blyton's house; which she had inherited from her parents; and I was living there. And with me came all the rest. Ian was there for a long time; those were the days of mandies and we would be falling all over each other; in and out bed, every bed. And those were the days when we were young enough; it was a never a question of whether you wanted to sleep with me, or whatever; of course you did.

Bridges Too Far

This is the bridge down at Darling Harbour, a reclamation project which transformed an old part of Sydney into a modern sweep of shops and entertainment centres, one of Sydney's show case areas; with everything from an Imax theatre to a Japanese garden, to Italian cafes and fancy restaurants. I always think it would be a nice place to take my mother, but she wouldn't be comfortable and an expensive lunch would be largely wasted. People reach an age where they don't want to go outside their comfort zones. I worry that I might have caught some interminable, or terminal, disease, against the odds. We are always frightened that life will be truncated; packed as it has been with everything from moments of clarity and indeed ecstasy, through to pools of discontent and hugging sadness. We could walk free but that was not our destiny. The wealthy tourists chatted happily over their expensive lunches; and we looked on, knowing we could never be the same.

During the 1980s, when Darling Harbour was under construction, I was working as a reporter at the Sydney Morning Herald. It didn't matter what happened, no matter how small the incident, at the slightest sniff of something going wrong we would be down there to write a negative story about them. Some trees that had been transplanted wilted one day, the leaves going brown, suffering stress from the transplant. It didn't matter that the botanists insisted this was perfectly normal die-back, and the trees would rejuvenate and be perfectly healthy once they settled down, we were determined to pillory them. Those brain leaves turned into another disaster for the problem plagued project, as we put it. The hatred for Darling Harbour was driven in part by the utter egocentric of the minister then responsible, Laurie Brereton if I've spelt that right, from the right wing of the Labor Party.

The whole of Sydney was plagued with these signs that everyone hated; with Laurie claiming credit for every last piece of infrastructure. Built by the Minister for Public Works. Never mind the people that actually did the work, the people who were out on the roads digging and driving earth movers at six o'clock in the morning; they didn't matter, there was Laurie and his signs claiming credit. It was typical of what the Labor Party had become, no longer a party of the workers but a party for everybody but the workers. Most of the parliamentarians were back door party officials who had never wielded a shovel or run a business; in smart, expensive but still sleazy suits. And the public sensed these betrayals of the comman man. There were always rumours now about the close relationship between Labor and developers; with millions having been made along transport corridors and in mile after mile of suburban houses. A height restriction shift by a councillor from two to three floors along a single street was enough to make millions.

The Labor councils had become yet another sleazy part of Sydney life. Now no longer a minister, Eddie Obeid, who has just won a defamation case against the Sydney Morning Herald over an article claimed to have defematory implications relating to a multi-million dollar development; Paul Keating, the retired Prime Minister who's astonishing arrogance made him probably the most hated and polarising PM in Australian history, made millions from a piggery near Scone in the upper-Hunter; Bob Carr, the recently retired Premier who told everyone he was retiring to spend more time with his wife and promptly took up a half a million dollar a year position with Macquarie Bank. It was one of the few enjoyable moments in journalism when I asked the present premier Morris Iemma - are you making this announcement today to avoid the odium sticking to the party because of its close relationship to Macquarie Bank? No, he snapped, in his media-trained deep, supposedly authorative voice. No; and the press conference was rapidly wound up. They're all millionaires; and they're all a million miles from the original ideas of a party representing the working class.

And oddly enough, Darling Harbour became one of the most popular and most successful precincts in Sydney.


NEWS:
ABC:

Laurie Brereton to retire

AM - Saturday, 5 June , 2004 08:20:00
Reporter: Louise Yaxley
EDMOND ROY: An era is closing. The Labor Party's Laurie Brereton has decided to retire from Federal Parliament at the next election. Mr Brereton says he will release a statement later this morning outlining the reasons for his decision.Mr Brereton revealed the news last night to the federal electorate council for his eastern Sydney seat of Kingsford Smith, in a move which has surprised his Federal Parliamentary colleagues.Louise Yaxley looks back at the controversial powerbroker's career.LOUISE YAXLEY: Laurie Brereton's one of the cornerstones of the New South Wales right faction of the ALP. And he helped oversee Mark Latham's victory in the election leadership battle last year.Mr Brereton's been a powerful figure on the Opposition backbench since stepping down from his job as Shadow Foreign Affairs minister in 2001 when he cited the need for new blood.Mr Brereton's played a leading role in shaping Labor's foreign affairs policy in recent years. He helped change the policy on East Timor and has been a vocal critic of the war against Iraq.The Inspector-General of Intelligence last year cleared the spy agency the Defence Signals Directorate over allegations it had tried to bug Mr Brereton's phone calls after a secret government document on East Timor was leaked to the media.Laurie Brereton's nicknamed "dangerman". He's spent almost all his working life in politics, beginning in 1970 in New South Wales State Parliament. And in 1990 he moved to the federal arena where he had stints as Industrial Relations Minister and to Federal Transport Minister.It's not clear who will replace Mr Brereton in his safe Labor seat of Kingsford Smith. The seat is home to the New South Wales Premier Bob Carr, who was quoted in a biography last year as saying he'd be interested in federal politics after the 2007 state election.EDMOND ROY: Louise Yaxley reporting.

Latham Stake Outs

Here's some of the gang outside Mark Latham's house. Latham was the former leader of the Labor Party, in opposition now for ten years at the federal level. He was the great white hope, so to speak, of the party, a bust through or bust option which in the end ended up a bust. Earlier in the year, we would always end up staking out his house. The neighbours were used to us, parked at the front of their homes, cluttering up the culdesac where he lived in Glen Alpine, an up market part of a not very upmarket area. I will always be faithful to Green Valley, I will always be faithful to that, he said as he conceded defeat. It was a brutal loss, but there were signs he was losing it long before then.

He had a bout of pancreatitis and ended up in hospital a few months before the election. Ruthless, the media was parked on the top of neighbouring buildings, hunched outside the hospital, even masquerading as visitors and going up and down the corridors in what many would regard as a complete breach of decency, or even common sense. The poor bastard was sick, for God' sake. But hounded he was. He grew to hate the media, who had once been his main cheer squad. And he would never come out of his front door, never say booh, and so all our bosses would keep us there, day after day. Nobody came, nobody went, he wrote a vicious set of diaries which pilloried all his Labor colleagues, an out of control stream of ill will which created headlines but did him no good.

What was clear was that there was no one left to tell him how to behave, no one saying mate, you've gone off the rails, pull your head in, no one to offer a friendly arm and no advice on how to deal with a media pack. The easiest way would have been to make himself available, and we would, could all have gone home, well back to the office. Instead his door remained closed. The mailman would come and go, and sooner or later they would pap him collecting his mail while he called everyone paedophiles. I interviewed him once for the dads show; he was enormously entertaining, put his feet up on the table in the studio and talked easily about his testicular cancer. One ball left. He managed to sire two children, who were the beginning and the end for him, as you could tell, loved beyond life itself. But in the twirling dogged stream of all this, he became more and more isolated, more and more angry, I could never understand why he didn't just move to a place with better security, a long drive, an intercom system, trees. But he didn't. He sat inside and fumed; not just against us, against everybody. Occasionally we were obliged to jump the child proof fence and knock on his door; mostly he refused to answer, you could hear the kids playing inside, sometimes, tell you and your buddies to get off the property. I sympathised with his isolation and madness; he held no sympathy for us, stuck for so many boring hours outside his house, watching the trees move in the wind, imagining life inside the large suburban homes denied to us inner-city dwellers. There was no peace for him, no peace for us; and the Labor party moved on without him.


NEWS

Sydney Morning Herald:

Mystery path from architect to terrorist

Leonie LamontAugust 24, 2006


FAHEEM KHALID LODHI said he came to Australia for a better life, and had "no antipathy" towards his new homeland. But Lodhi's journey from a hard-working young professional from a good family to a convicted terrorist sentenced to 20 years' jail in maximum security conditions remains a mystery.
"I can gain no meaningful insight into the circumstances which have transformed him from an otherwise respectable member of the community to a dangerous terrorist whose views are coloured by notions of the most extreme and fundamental kind," commented Supreme Court Justice Anthony Whealy....

"They were the consequences of a deeply fanatical, but sincerely held, religious and world view based on his faith and his attitude to the extreme dictates of fundamentalist Islamic proposition," the judge said.
He said among the material seized from Lodhi in 2003 was a CD-ROM, a "virtual library" of justifications for suicide bombings and violent jihad.
"The offender is a person who, in recent years, has been … informed by the concept of violent jihad and the glorification of Muslim heroes who have fought and died for jihad."

Harbour Bubbles

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Shane

This is my friend Shane, a bombastic and difficult person, but interesting. He's here outside the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, RPA, where I had driven him. He hasn't been well lately and has been bouncing in and out of hospital a lot lately; and I sometimes kept hauled in to pick him up and take him in when things go haywire late at night. I first got to know him on the phone, he rang up the news desk one night; it was those times when winter really did seem like winter, gusty dark winds around corners, dank spots, chaos, and it was the night I had got the judgement from the Family Court which progressively reeduced my time with the children over the next two years. Luckily this never came about; but at the time, after I thought I was doing the right thing and instead came up against a wall of the most dishonest and corrupt arseholes I had ever met in my life. I was upset, teary, and didn't know what to do.

Shane at the time had a little child protection lobby group called Care For Us, and he was ringing up to pester us about some story or other. Nobody ever pays much attention to the public, they're mostly lunatics or would have know idea what a story was. These days, the days of talkback, they all think they're on radio. They ring you up and give you their opinion on this that or the other that has been published in the paper, and nothing will stop them. There's no point interrupting them. But as soon as they've said their bit and you've thanked them for their input their off, happy as Larry. Any suggestion that they might follow some traditional route, such as writing a letter to the editor, falls on death ears.

Anyway, Shane rang up this night and I told him the whole story, and one way or another we've known each other ever since. The fascinating thing about Care For Us was the body of documentation he had accumulated on a string of outrageous child cases; where the appalling conducts of the psychs and the closed, circuitous nature of the system, were clearly evidenced. I met a Lebanese couple. Could I help. I was a big pooh bah journalist. No, I couldn't help. They were the big messy family that lived down at the end of the street. A neighbour had made some stupid complaint. The department stepped in. The mother, a Lebanese villager, made the mistake of telling the psych, oh my God what shonks some of these people are, anyway; she made the mistake of telling this psych, in response to a question of what she did during the day, that she sometimes talked to the mouse in the house. That was enough. They lost all four children, including a new born, and she was put on medication which made her vague and sweaty. And they couldn't understand why they had lost their children. And they pleaded with me to help. That was just one of the cases.

The story goes that one of the kids got run over and badly hurt in his foster home by a case worker. That was the last I heard.

NEWS:

www.spacedaily.com

A Matter of Fact

by Staff Writers
Boston MA (SPX) Aug 22, 2006
As a rule, scientists seek certainty. So it's rather unusual that for more than 70 years, many astronomers have wagered the universe is primarily made of dark matter -- a mysterious and unproven substance.
It's a bet that finally paid off, because a team of scientists working with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has found direct evidence that dark matter is as real as the rings around Saturn.
The discovery cements dark matter's status as the biggest building block in the universe, while also putting to rest the nagging worries of many astronomers that they gambled wrong....
It ends:
Hidden Influence
The scientists had already calculated the masses of the galaxies using other measuring methods. Yet the results from gravitational lensing showed the galaxies are bending much more light toward themselves than they should be able to. The astronomers knew something was amiss. An unseen force, substance or object had escaped the clouds along with the galaxies and was helping to bend more light.
For the first time in history, astronomers caught dark matter at work.
"These results prove that dark matter exists," declared Clowe.
So there it is, bright as starlight: Dark matter matters, as a matter of fact.

Falun Dafa

This is an early draft of a story on Falun Dafa. The project was to find out who all these people were sitting around in parks and why the Chinese government hated them so much.

``When two truths meet the most courageous one wins.'' Chinese proverb.
THE number one enemy of the Chinese government, the so-called ``evil'' or ``doomsday cult'' of Falun Dafa or Falun Gong, has spread rapidly across Australia.
Outside the Chinese embassy in Canberra and consulates in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, Falun Dafa adherents sit cross legged in silent, almost daily protests.
In Sydney, unlike in much of the rest of the country, Chinese adherents outnumber Westerners. At the park opposite Sydney's Central Station a group of old Chinese ladies gather each morning, performing their distinctive Falun Dafa exercises. At Ashfield Park in the west of the city a mix of Westerners and Chinese gather at dawn. On the weekends at Darling Harbour thirty or more join in meditation.
In Queensland, where Falun Dafa was first introduced in 1996, there are now practice sites from Cairns down to the Gold Coast and west to Toowoomba. In Brisbane the majority of practitioners are Chinese, in the rest of the state they are mostly westerners.
In Western Australia, where Falun Dafa was introduced in 1998, there are now practice sites from the picturesque town of Albany in the south to the northern suburbs of Perth.
The astonishingly rapid spread of Falun Dafa across Australia mirrors its rapid spread around the world. It is now just as easy to practise Falun Gong in Spanish or French as it is in English or Chinese. Around the globe, as in Australia, it is rapidly spreading outside Chinese ethnic groups.
Begun in China in 1992 by Master Li Hongzing, Falun Dafa is probably best understood as being simultaneously a powerful Buddhist sect and a traditional Chinese ``qijong'' or energy cultivation and meditation exercise.
That is, it is at once a religion and an exercise or meditation program.
Even the most sympathetic of journalists covering the Falun Dafa story around the globe have remarked on their eclectic and sometimes decidedly eccentric beliefs. Essentially it is a blend of the civic and personal self responsibility of Confucianism, the mysticism of Daoism and the cosmology of Buddhism mixed with animist and magical beliefs. Plants have souls. You can be reincarnated into a rock. Multi-dimensional universes are taken as a given. Advanced beings can appear and disappear at will. While there is much that is wise, sometimes the teachings appear just plain hallucinatory. Be that as it may, there is little doubt we are witnessing the birth of a major new religion.
On one level Falun Dafa promises a fast track to enlightenment, to a Buddha-like state of being, through exercises, cultivation and the purification of mind, body and soul.
The secrets of enlightenment, according to Falun Dafa, were previously passed down from master to pupil in Chinese monasteries over thousands of years. They have been made available at this time to the ordinary person, here at the ``end of days'', because we now face the final apocalyptic fall of mankind's final civilisation.
On another level, through the physical exercises and improved moral character from concentration on the faith's precepts of ``Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance'' it promises increased mental, spiritual and physical health.
It is the emphasis on good health and the curative character of the practice which Falun Gong practitioners most immediately emphasise. Characteristically, many look far younger than their actual years.
By the time Falun Dafa was outlawed by the Chinese Communist Party in 1999 its followers numbered in the tens of millions. Each morning practitioners gathered in their hundreds in parks across China. Thanks to the relentless efforts of Falun Dafa and the vicious brutality of the crackdown, the tortures, the murders and the forced labour camps are now common knowledge and the subject of concern to human rights bodies around the world.
Latest estimates suggest around 2800 have died as a result of the crackdown, hundreds of thousands of others have been forced through labour camps, and the practising of the exercises in a park or even at home anywhere across China provokes immediate arrests. While the world rallied over the issue of apartheid in South Africa, and Australia led the charge on Zimbabwe, Falun Gong has evoked no such sympathies. A rapidly increasing multi-billion dollar trade with China has made sure of that.
The sect's numerous internet websites are also forbidden. Even the mention of the words Falun Gong on the burgeoning number of Chinese blog sites can provoke police attention or are automatically deleted.
Falun Gong practitioners were people who don't drink, smoke, gamble or take drugs and who believe in improving their moral character through meditation and adherence to the three precepts of their faith, the universal principles of ``Truth, Compassion, Forbearance''. Women, often elderly, are drawn to the practice in large numbers, partly because of its health benefits.
Yet rightly enough, the Chinse Communist Party sensed the most serious threat to their authority they have ever faced.
Falun Dafa regard the communist party as a Western aberration, a moral corruption on the noble history of Chinese civilisation. It is not a de facto pro-democracy movement. Instead they hark back to a nobler time in China's past.
While in its physical exercises Falun Dafa bears a passing resemble to Tai Chi, in its spiritual precepts it resembles millennial sects which have played in an integral part in overthrowing Chinese dynasties and shaping the nature of its government.
As American political scientist Maria Hsia Chang noted in her recent book Falun Gong: The End of Days, historically Falun Dafa most closely resembles the Buddhist secret society White Lotus, which first emerged in 1360. Just as with Falun Dafa, its repression at the hand of the state politicised an essentially religious movement. Its diffuse organisation and powerful belief system made White Lotus instrumental in overthrowing the Yuan dynasty. Pre-existing conditions, including oppressive state control and a largely disaffected population, mirrored the present day.
Chang wrote: ``Since 209 BC, when the first rebellion by a secret society overthrew the Qin dynasty, millenarian movements had exerted a profound impact on the course of Chinese history. For that matter, the last millenarian movement that succeeded in overthrowing the state was none other than the Communist revolution of 1949... Having come to power by exploiting China's millenarian tradition, the Communist Party is only too mindful of the potency of such movements.''
As a reporter, it was plain old curiosity and fascination for the story that led me to sitting cross legged at dawn in parks across Sydney.
"Velly good," old Chinese ladies with barely a word of English would beam whenever I got a hand movement right. Or they would sternly show me the right way if I got something wrong. I was always welcome.
For a physically disassociated person such as myself the exercises, slow moving though they are, seemed at first immensely complex and difficult. Even though they are exactly the same each time it took me weeks to accomplish them. I am still incapable of sitting in the Buddha or lotus position so characteristic of the sect.
The exercises are meant to focus on the energy lines in the body, to implant a Falun or energy wheel in the lower abdomen, to purify the body of negative energy or "dark matter", to turn negative karma into white light through the transformation of pain into virtue, to link one's body to the natural energy of the universe and to strengthen divine or supernatural powers.
Whatever they actually do, and whether celestial beings really do hover over practice sites around the world, as Master Li has maintained, it is certainly true that Falun Dafa is on to something. After two hours in the park doing the exercises you walk away feeling as if you had been hit over the head with a cosmic hammer. Most adherents claim almost immediate health benefits. Coincidental or not, after a month of doing the exercises I too feel healthier, more organised, somehow more peaceful.
While Falun Gong had hardly been hiding, I first noticed them after the Chinese diplomat Chen Yonglin defected from the Sydney consulate, making claims that among the duties of a thousand Chinese spies in Australia were the close monitoring of Falun Gong practitioners.
Chen claimed the Chinese Consulate in Sydney had a blacklist of more than 800 Falun Gong practitioners. While many of these people were born in China, they would now have great difficulty returning there. To back his claims Chen provided several pieces of documentation, including a list of 300 names of practitioners sent to the Sydney and Melbourne consulates by the Chinese ambassador in Canberra.
Chen's claims, and his conduct in defecting, had particular credibility by Falun Dafa practitioners because he was previously well known to them as someone who harassed and filmed them.
Demonstrations after Chen's defection, a number organised by Falun Gong themselves, changed the face of refugee protests overnight.
For years bored reporters have covered these utterly predictable events out of some sense of duty. A scruffy ragbag of the Socialist Alliance and left wing unions, in the company of a few aggrieved immigrants from Iran or Iraq, would wave makeshift banners and pound on about the evils of Ruddock and more recently Vanstone.
Overnight their character transformed. Now huge, neatly manufactured banners line the perimeter of the demonstration, earnest groups, including children, furiously wave neatly produced paper flags, and neat people speak passionately about the evils of the Communist regime in China, imploring the Australian government not to trade with this repressive regime or they will create a new generation of refugees.
The acting out of shocking images of men and women being tortured and brainwashed is also now a standard part of the campaigns.
With much of Australia's mineral and energy wealth riding on the back of insatiable demand from Chine, the chances of the Australian government not trading with China are remote.
But with three years to go to the Beijing Olympics, Falun Gong are a proving a major embarrassment to the Chinese government worldwide. As The Australian's Chinese correspondent Catherine Armitage recently reported, the Beijing Olympic press office have not even been answering their phones in case it is a call from a Falun Gong devotee. Anyone visiting a Chinese embassy almost anywhere in the world will have leaflets or pictures of tortured women thrust at them or be confronted with silent and apparently peaceable people in the lotus position under Falun Dafa insignia.
If, as Chen claimed, there are a thousand spies monitoring the activities of Falun Gong in Australia, they have had a very easy time of it. The practice sites in public parks across Australia are advertised on the web. The telephone numbers of devotees are also up on the web. Public meetings and demonstrations are advertised. And with Truthfulness one of the platforms of their belief, if approached and asked if they are practitioners, they invariably say yes.
The group owes its phenomenal success partly to its loose organisational structure. It has none of the priests, churches or organisational infrastructure characteristic of the established faiths. It costs nothing to meditate and do exercises in the park. The literature, music and exercise instructions can all be downloaded for free. Any devotee, or disciple as they have come to be known, can start up a practice site without prior authorisation.
In my observation there are two broadly different types of Falun Dafa practitioners - those who follow the exercises for the physical and mental health benefits and those who use the exercises as a portal into the spiritual world. Only those who practice both the exercises and cultivation of their character or "heart nature" can be disciples.
Construction manager Steve Olding, 50, is the only Falun Dafa practitioner I ever saw smoke a cigarette. He declares cheerfully there are no rules. He says he began going to Falun Gong eight years ago in Hong Kong. "For me it is a practical more than spiritual thing," he says. "It clears my mind, gives me a positive outlook on life. They don't force anything upon you. You can turn up for practice or not, You are never pressured into it in any shape or form. I have never been asked to donate a cent, yet I have been given so much."
On the other hand John Andress, 58, a traffic controller on the Queensland Gold Coast, has been doing Falun Dafa for more than six years. "I spent many years following spiritual practices in the Indian systems. A friend of mine introduced me. I came for the spiritual aspects. I didn't come for the health. Many people, particularly in China, came for health; because it had such an immediate impact. I came for the deeper aspects. It is beneficial on all levels; the physical is the one every one recognises, but it upgrades moral standards. It is based on very high principles. We live by Truth Compassion Forbearance."
Tane Dalzell, 21, a house painter from Annandale, is also a "seeker". "From a young age I have always been interested in what life is all about," he says. "I have always been intrigued by different practices from India, different yoga masters. And one day Falun Dafa came along and answered a lot of questions that other practices didn't answer. I found out what life is all about and what I am here for. That is how I am a different person. A few years ago I was really lost. Now my head is sharp and clear, I don't have any illnesses, I don't have anything wrong with me."
Thomas Dobson, 31, a language teacher, puts it another way: "Some of the nicest people I have ever met in my life are in Falun Dafa. All I know is I haven't been ill in years, haven't even had to take an aspirin."
Many of the elderly Chinese seen in parks and outside consulates and embassies began the practice in Australia after Master Li visited Australia to give lectures, twice in 1996 and once in 1998. A number have family or friends who have suffered as a result of China's oppression of their sect. For them Truthfulness involves telling the truth about what is happening in China.
At one point, interviewing Chinese women in a park with the help of an interpreter, I just started laughing. These stubborn old girls, well into their seventies, were the biggest threat to the Chinese Communist Party in its history!? Well so it has proved to be.
Here's one example. Guo Ying Zhang, 73, who speaks no English, was a farm labourer in one of the poorest provinces of China. She says of her four children, two died of starvation. She herself nearly died in child birth. She came to Australia in the early 1990s as part of a family reunion. She had never heard of Falun Gong until Master Li visited Australia in 1996. "My own life was very hard, my health was in a very bad condition, I nearly died," she says. "I am a very simple person, but I learn, I practice, now I am healthy. I don't know if I would still be alive if it was not for Falun Gong."
For Zhang and others like her, sitting outside the Chinese consulate all day protesting over the treatment of Falun Gong in China is the very least she can do.
Guo Jiu, 72, also in Australia as part of a family reunion, worked in an electronics factory in China. She says she suffered numerous health problems, and shows the scars from a knee operation. This is a woman who can now sit in the lotus position for hours. "After I start the practice, I don't need to go to doctors," she says. At first she practised at home alone, but says she likes to come to the park. "I meet people who are very kind and who take care of me and I feel very nice," she says. "I am very active with Falun Gong activity and I feel very happy with it."
Melong Yie, 62, was born in Shanghai but was allocated to work for the Ministry of Culture in the harsh conditions along the Chinese Russian border. Like other civilian workers, she regularly wore army uniform to convince the Russians of the large number of Chinese soldiers. She taught Tai Chi sessions organised by the Workers Union. "For me, before I started practice I focussed on daily life, myself, my children, my family. Now I understand that life is more, that life is precious. I am very active, I protest outside the consulate. People ask me why, do the American and Australian governments give me money? No one gives me money. It is from my heart. The minimum thing is: we should tell people the truth."
The Chinese consulate in Sydney moved recently from Elizabeth Street, where the daily Falun Gong protests cluttered the streets and were a major embarrassment. Despite a massive new multi-million dollar compound, with high walls and state of the art security, Chinese officials have not been able to escape the Falun Dafa. Being an enterprising mob, a practitioner promptly rented a vacant shop opposite and it has become the headquarters for daily protests. Jiamo Li, 67, who's daughter in law rents the shop, said he is happy to endure the daily insults as he protests outside the consulate. His heart breaks when he hears what has happened to so many practitioners, their families and their children in China. He says: "No matter whether it is hot or cold, I will stand here to clarify the truth."
It is not just the elderly Chinese who are being attracted to Falun Dafa, with young professionals also in evidence.
Albert Lin. 34, a doctor in Fremantle in Western Australia, says considering they give out tens of thousands of flyers it clearly doesn't appeal to everyone. "For me I find it is a pure environment, where everyone wants to be a good person. It improves my mental and physical health. People find the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance echo with their own principles, and then they want to learn the practice. And also because some find it helps them relax, and their health improves.
"I am not surprised it appeals to Westerners. There are a lot of kind people. Their thinking is not as complicated as Chinese people. They have an inclination to goodness. We have some very good western practitioners."
However much Falun Dafa focuses on individual self-improvement, its political potency is without doubt. Opposite the Chinese consulate in Sydney Falun Dafa signs suggest: "Saying goodbye for good to the Chinese Communist Party is realising hope for freedom and peace." Another suggests getting rid of the CCP "is refusing brutality and returning to humanity".
Many Falun Dafa devotees are critical of the Australian government's perceived kowtowing to the Chinese government. This has included the issuing of certificates to curtail their activities in front of the Chinese Embassy in Canberra. This is now the subject of appeal to the ACT Supreme Court.
"Downer has bowed to the regime," says Vina Lee, 42, who came to Australia in 1990. "The Chinese Communist Party has no humanity, it is killing people. I am just a practitioner. If they did not persecute Falun Gong, I could never have imagined I would stand on the street and tell people what is happening in China. As practitioners we are not interested in power, fame. We focus on self improvement, to be a good person. I would never have campaigned against the Communist Party if they had not persecuted us."
For a group whose traditions date back into Chinese antiquity Falun Dafa has shown a remarkably adept use of modern technology. They are all over the web, with numerous websites dedicated to their cause. Little old ladies thrust CDs at you in the parks. Members have disrupted television broadcasts across China. Though it may be a crime to listen to it, a satellite now beams sympathetic coverage across the country.
The Epoch Times, introduced into Australia with a local edition in December last year, has become the most widely distributed Chinese English language newspaper in the world. While the owners remain strictly anonymous, some are rumoured to be Falun Gong devotees. While it is a general interest newspaper, it has covered the Falun Gong story with thoroughness and sympathy. It recently published "The Nine Commentaries", a hugely influential critique of the CCP within the Chinese world.
They have recently claimed more than two million resignations from the communist party as a result of their campaigns.
An Australian spokeswoman for the Epoch Times Caroline Dobson said they were an independent media outlet and were an entirely separate entity to Falun Dafa. "The reason that we cover Falun Dafa is because we have a multilingual staff, unique contacts within the community and for anyone interested in China it is such a big story. It affects a large number of people.
The press office of the Chinese Embassy referred inquiries to the head press officer, Mrs Ou Boqian, who did not answer the number provided by the press office.
Even since the spectacular mid-year defection of Chen Yonglin the story of Falun Gong in Australia keeps popping up in unusual ways. In the UK and Canada in recent months, just as in Australia, there have been sorrowful stories of Chinese practitioners being forcibly repatriated back to China and a very uncertain future. Recent activities in Australia have included a conference titled A Great Wall of Courage, an anti-torture exhibition and a candlelight vigil to mark the sixth anniversary of the Chinese crackdown.
In another incident, Falun Gong was forced to deny that any of its members were involved in an episode of self harm amongst Chinese inmates at Villawood; pointing out, not for the first time, that their beliefs are totally opposed to self harm or killing of any kind.
And in yet another incident, Sydney's University of Technology refused to remove mention of a Falun Dafa meditation club from its website. As a result, the UTS website has been blocked in China, which is expected to lower the number of incoming Chinese students, substantially affecting university revenue. UTS Vice Chancellor Ross Milbourne says an increase in undergraduate student fees was largely due to the university taking a principled stand in keeping Falun Dafa content on the site.Equally odd, a San Francisco politician of Chinese origin withdrew her support for an art show, the "National Treasures of China", after it was revealed that owner of the valuable collection Mei-Ling Dai, described by the local press as the matriarch ofan aristocratic Chinese-Australian family,practices Falun Gong.
There is no doubt as the Beijing Olympics and 2008 approaches, stories of Falun Dafa will proliferate. At the very least, virtually anyone in the world who goes to a Chinese embassy or a Chinese consulate to get a visa will have a Falun Dafa leaflet thrust at them.
I shrug when people ask me if I will continue with the exercises after I finish the story. In 17 years, since Falun Gong was launched in 1992, it has attracted millions of followers in more than 60 different countries and as evidenced by the crackdown by the Chinese Communist Party it has posed a serious threat to the government of the most populous nation on earth. What is clear is that the story of Falun Dafa is far from over.

The Kids

I have a new phone Sony Ericsson K800i which is the best phone I've ever had. I realised it was a seriously clever little piece of technology when it rang me up, told me I had a new email and proceeded to read it to me. Ten years ago I wouldn't have known what an email was. I chose the phone because it has the best camera, 3 megapixels whatever that means, and so there will be no more blurry poor quality pictures like the one above. One of the guys at work was telling me they shot the whole Olympics on 2 megs and to have a phone like that in a camera is really quite astonishing. It also means moving on from Picasa, which I've always had trouble with. Almost everytime I choose a picture the whole thing collapses; half the time it collapses before I can manage to blog one of the pictures. Anyway, I'm going through what pictures are in the system and this is one of them.

The kids, overnight it seems, have turned into teenagers. You wouldn't get them playing on the swings in the local park anymore; well probably not. If the radio deviates from Nova 96.9 they regard it as a serious lapse in taste. One minute they're having a serious basically adult conversation with you; and the next they're running breakneck through the park with the dogs snapping at their heels. I have the exes sausage dog in the house at the moment, one of those situations, would you just mind Estie for a couple of days; and a month later she is still there. The most annoying and useless animal I have ever come across. The laziest dog on the planet. It rolls from the couch to the floor, waddles outside to eat, and that is it. If you lock it outside it sits at the back door and cries and cries and cries; it doesn't matter how long you leave it or how often you yell at it. But the kids love it.

I've been off sick for a week, well not on sick pay, I took a week's holiday at short notice; and today is the first day back. It's been nice just being able to potter around the house; do the dishes and get the laundry done, just act like a normal person. Now it's back in the saddle, in servitude, spilling words for another master. The radio show is now all organised, with a new bloke doing the web, and it's been good to have time to get that done as well. That's one achievement of the week off. We had the big meeting with Glen yesterday out at the Moorebank Sports Club. It was awkward, we were basically ripping the site off him; but it couldn't go on anymore. We were being seriously held up; and now the future looks much brighter in that regard; news tickers and calendars and running the news letters. It will be a big step forward; we hope; towards world domination. And while the kids know nothing; or echo the sneers of their mother; the program has quietly become the most successful community radio web site in Australia.


NEWS:

Suddenly, after the last terror scare in Britain and the discovery that many of them were homegrown, there is a spate of opinion pieces questioning the creed of multiculturalism; which has essentially been the state religion in Australia for the past 20 years.

Here's a couple of examples of the new questioning:

Simon Nixon, a writer for The Spectator, The Australian and others:

Britain's loss of nerve is one of the main reasons it has become a global centre of Islamic extremism. For decades, successive British governments have regarded multiculturalism as an article of faith. The idea that Britain should become a joyous melting pot of different cultures and religions living side by side in mutual toleration and respect is a noble vision. But it's not working out that way. Instead, the benefits of immigration are being lost through a failure to control numbers and a reluctance to pursue policies that might promote integration. As a result, Britain has a huge Muslim population, much of which is increasingly alienated from mainstream society. "Londonistan" is no longer just a safe haven for foreign extremists. Today, it nurtures home-grown terrorists, many born in Britain, educated at British schools and attending British universities.

So why do young Muslims embrace terrorism rather than democratic politics? How can people born and educated in Britain feel so alienated from its culture and values? The snag is that many never fully engage with British culture and values. Muslims make up the majority in many towns and in most big cities there are large Muslim enclaves. Even if the multiculturalists were to change their minds on the need for integration, it would be too late. Muslim leaders are demanding more separation from mainstream society, not less.

They want bank holidays for Muslim festivals and sharia law courts to rule on family matters. They may well get it. They are helped by the remarkable ambivalence of the liberal Left towards British culture and values: to Christianity, British history, free markets and free trade.
Above all, the Left is deeply suspicious of the institutions in which those values are embedded, starting with the family and extending via churches, schools, businesses, clubs, right through to parliament and the monarchy. To the Left, Britain's social institutions are bastions of privilege that must be remodelled or destroyed to make way for multiculturalism. The resulting cultural war has left British society brutalised and infantilised, and wide open to attack.