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.

Puffs of Smoke

Since I last posted there has been a war on the other side of the world, won or lost depending on your standpoint. For us, isolated here in Australia, the turmoil is distant, little more than puffs of smoke on television screens. But each of those puffs of smoke represent mangled bodies, dreams, the beauties of loved ones smashed to smithereens. It's hard to do anything but look on in astonishment from afar. I have a new phone, and now, with the technology, it's possible to sit in a cafe and watch the bombing in Beirut while sipping a latte. It's the cruelty of modernity, that thousands, millions of experiences are reduced to pixels on a screen, to abstraction.

I've had the past week off sick after a kidney, urinary tract infection gone haywire. It hasn't been much fun and the antibiotics make me sick and vague. But it's been very nice to be away from work for awhile, to just live a normal life instead of being run ragged on a daily basis. I'm 54 years old with two teenage kids to care for and I'm at work at 7.30am most mornings. Anyone who dares to complain about their lives or how hard it is to cope with the kids gets short shrift from me. This country's full of taxpayer funded bludgers, a situation which has only got worse under the Howard government, and not being one of them wears you out. I got a brief insight, or window, into what it was like to just potter around on the dole.

Although I took a week off with holiday pay, it was nice that the dishes were done, that the laundry was roughly up to date, the housework done. Normally I just never have time to get everything done. Burnt out; is how I feel a lot of the time. My ex is back in town, and from this I feel nothing but exasperation. She is talking about taking the kids back so they spend half the time with hert; that woman can never leave anything alone for five seconds. The kids are happy, settled and doing well at school and all she wants to do is create chaos for her own selfish purposes. To fill the gaping black hole which can never be filled, to make herself feel better. It drives me mad. I want to be free. I am so glad I have bought my cottage in the country, somewhere to escape to. I fell off the real estate ladder during separation, and her eternal chaos, and haven't been able to get back into the hyper-inflated Sydney market. We could have been rich, but she would never have stopped until she had got every last cent; so in one way it's probably for the better. And now, head lifted high, radio show back on track and working hard, we are back in the stream of public display.

NEWS:

New York Times:

Editorial:

As everyone with a television is aware, Lebanon has just suffered through a terrible month, with more than 1,000 people killed, most of them innocent civilians. But Iraq has suffered through an even worse month. Since June, more than 3,000 Iraqis have been killed each month, and the rate continues to rise. While Lebanon is now trying to pick up the pieces, Iraq is falling apart at an accelerating pace.
As Americans debate where to go from here on Iraq, one thing should be clear. Staying the course until President Bush leaves office 29 months from now is not an option. It is no longer even clear just what course America is on. Most of what Washington now claims to be doing cannot withstand the most elementary reality test.
Just this week, Mr. Bush defined America’s purpose as supporting an inclusive national unity government. Every day, it becomes increasingly clear that there is no such unity government, that there never has been and that the various branches of the Iraqi leadership are not trying to create one. ....

The other key element of Mr. Bush’s policy is his promise that as Iraqi forces stand up, American forces will stand down. Even on the rare occasions that Iraqi forces have stood up, they have often been unreliable and ineffective. In June, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki announced a drive by Iraqi and American troops to secure Baghdad. Baghdad became even less secure, and more American troops had to be called in to do a job they were supposed to be phasing out of. More Iraqis were killed in July than in any other month of the war.
And the mayhem in Baghdad continues unabated. Local policing is, in fact, a job that only Iraqis can do successfully. But almost three and a half years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, there is still no Iraqi force capable of taking this on. And it is hard to see how the present Iraqi government will ever field such a force, so long as its power depends on armed sectarian militias that fuel the Baghdad violence.
Things in Iraq are not going to get better by themselves. The answer is not blind perseverance in staying a course that has demonstrably failed.