CROSS-CULTURAL CONFUSION

Mitta Mitta River Picture by Gilbert Atkin 

But was it true? Was it even possible? That there was reason in the morass, that some of the Watchers on the Watch could actually be friends; that they, too, were constrained by their own circumstances, their own bosses, and would have actually reached out, liked to be friends, would have liked to sit down and discuss everything, explain what had happened, put the accusations that had been handed to them to him, let him answer for himself.

"What do you want to say? What do you want to tell me?" he asked in the predawn, when they were all freest to communicate. "I don't trust anyone. I've been very very badly harassed for a very long time. Everyone is on a payroll. Everyone has a master to serve, nests to feather, career ladders to climb. No one wishes well."

But he had said it so often now that even he was tired of stating the obvious.

"You're exactly right in what you think," came the answer, "Except that things are far worse than you imagine. Far worse."

And in an instant, as if they were living things, he saw the elaborate edifices of the Australian bureaucracies, all the intricate lines of power, the suspensions of disbelief, the obedience to state creeds, the mundane intelligences which festered in air conditioned offices, covering their own asses before they covered anything else, without integrity, without good motive. 

He had made the same mistake before, presuming that what had happened to him had been a simple bureaucratic slip or a misunderstanding, that higher up the food chain there would be commonsense, rationality, responsibility.

"Am I safe?" he asked. 

"They're not going to try and kill you now, you're too closely watched."

Well, well, Dark Dark Policing. 

The legislation targeting journalists allowed 21 government departments access to his data, his emails, websites, personal information, everything.

In other words, one giant cluster fuck. Everything the Australian government touched turned into a fiasco, mismanagement at every level, everywhere; and in the end, as the country took one step after another towards the abyss, as the worst Recession in the nation's history gathered storm, as the country's original stories disappeared into the early pages of its history, as the social engineers remade the social, cultural and demographic makeup of the country, everyone who could looked the other way, out of some sort of fear of being different, or out of some wan hope that the situation wasn't really as bad as they feared.

Summer had arrived, and the anodyne levels of public debate stepped into an over-heated, slippery summer of vacation and the smell of coconut oil, of the pleasures of vitality and hopeful life, of peace and pleasure and bright sunshine, In the Middle East bombs paid for by Australian taxpayers rained down on the mujaheddin, a war rarely mentioned in the media, Those lyrical, peaceful moments were bought at a price; vacuity. 

THE BIGGER STORY:




Hundreds of protesters have gathered outside Cairo's largest Coptic cathedral demanding revenge for the bombing which killed 25 people on Sunday (local time), in the deadliest attack on Egypt's Christian minority in years.
The bombing at the cathedral in Egypt also left 49 wounded, many of them women and children attending Sunday mass.
Scuffles broke out with police after they arrived at the scene with armoured vehicles.
Security sources told Reuters the explosion was caused by a device containing at least 12 kilograms of TNT, with the blast detonating on the side of the church normally used by women.
The attack, which took place on a Muslim holiday marking the Prophet Mohammad's birthday, came as President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi fought battles on several fronts.
His economic reforms have angered the poor, a bloody crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood has seen thousands jailed, whilst an insurgency rages in Northern Sinai led by the Egyptian branch of Islamic State (IS).
The militant group has also carried out deadly attacks in Cairo and has urged its supporters to launch attacks around the world in recent weeks as it goes on the defensive in its Iraqi and Syrian strongholds.
IS supporters celebrated on social media.

FEATURED BOOK:

RESISTANCE

The City of Homs, Picture courtesy of Reuters

Cannot you conceive that a man may wish well to the world, and struggle for its good, on some other plan  than precisely that which you have laid down? Mankind ... is but another yoke of oxen, stubborn, stupid and sluggish. But are we his oxen? And what right has he to be the driver?"
Nathaniel Hawthorne quoted in The Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Skvorecky.


Years of harassment, it was taking some time to recover.
Radio National had abandoned gay marriage aka marriage equality as the social justice issue of the moment; and in between swathes of climate change was inserting urgent new stories on the pros of a fortnight of Domestic Violence Leave as part of all employment accords.
Decades of disastrous social policy and the perpetration of the gendered agendas of the 1980s was playing out in the public sphere, circa 2016.
The Apostle birds came each morning now, expecting to be fed.
"Do you know I'm here?" a voice asked.
"Yes," he replied, rolled over, willed himself promptly back to sleep.
"He would like to have said, welcome back old friend, but he had been betrayed too often by too many thugs on too many government payrolls, and would not engage again.
The wall to wall surveillance he had endured for so long built up its own narratives, erupting synapses, distorted visions; some of the images, or narrative threads, as the brain naturally filled in the gaps, made connections, tried to make sense of conflicting data.
Nobody in all that time had the decency spoke to him directly, and Glen, who for a moment Old Alex had thought was actually speaking to him directly, was showing signs of decency, turned out to be more dishonest and more treacherous than the simple minded thugs who had kept up their prolonged bullying, day in day out, month in, month out.
A fortnight's domestic violence leave.
Yet the government, through its surveillance regimes and psychological operations could bully citizens for years, and not feel any obligation to pay compensation. 
Imagine, Old Alex thought, if a man tried to claim domestic violence leave, although a significant number of researchers and a significant body of evidence world wide pointed to domestic violence as an equal opportunity employer; word would spread, the complainant would be back stabbed as an hysteric, and become the subject of office hilarity, just like that.
How often could you claim it? Once a year? 
Would it discourage employers from hiring women?
Was it open to gay couples?
The thuggish group think of political correctness allowed for no debate.
And just like gay marriage, domestic violence leave was now, at least as far as the national taxpayer funded broadcaster was concerned, an unalloyed good; and away, through the long summer months, the discussion would go, hour after hour, expert after expert, mingling with refugee advocates and climate change experts; as the public switched, firmly, off.
It may well be a good, who was Old Alex to judge?
But a simple test of other goods, what was the government doing about the extremely high rates of suicide for separated men, a disastrous social outcome with which it was integrally involved through its public policies, family court and child support agencies? 
Precisely nothing.
What coverage did that get on the taxpayer funded channels?
Precisely nothing.
There was no simple fairness. There was nothing but madness; in those long nights when he surrendered to colourful dreams; and stopped ranting in his head about social injustice and media incompetence, about the brutality of a country which was being driven straight down a garbage strewn hole, into a new and even more barbaric totalitarianism.
Each morning he filled the buckets from the tanks, and trundled them out to water the corn, bean, tomatoes, cucumber, rock melon. 
They made jokes about the Babylonian gardens and the slaves in the fields; as if in that fay grandiosity there was some humour. In reality the nights stretched out across arid fields, and, in some weird way, he was trying to come home to roost, to bring the fractured lineages back into one place.
Enemies approached.
He twisted a hand.
Cutting edge weapons went mashing through their brains.
And at last, at very long last, the the vindictive, excited buzz of hatred, their whirring intensity of dissatisfaction, anger and frustration at not simply being able to bring out a shotgun, their malevolent, putrid, stinking animosity towards a target they neither knew nor understood, all of it ebbed away.
And he turned over and mumbled: welcome back old friend.


THE BIGGER STORY:

INTERNATIONAL:

Islamic State fighters appear to have reconquered the historic city of Palmyra after days of intense fighting on its outskirts prompted a withdrawal by the Syrian military.
“The catastrophe has happened, I am in absolute shock,” said Maamoun Abdulkarim, Syria’s director of antiquities, in a phone interview. “I am losing hope, it looks like we have lost the city.”
An Isis-affiliated news channel claimed victory in the battle on Sunday, saying its soldiers had reclaimed control of the entirety of Palmyra, once a Silk Road oasis that boasted some of the best-preserved ruins of antiquity.


AUSTRALIAN:

CENTRELINK is ignoring Islamic polygamy, paying spousal benefits to Muslim families with multiple wives in an effort to save taxpayers’ money.The welfare agency has revealed it refuses to collect data on polygamous marriages under Islamic law, despite the fact some families are claiming to be living in a domestic relationship with more than one woman when claiming welfare.
Describing the decision as “political correctness” gone mad, MPs last night called for a full investigation and demanded the welfare agency start collecting the data.


FEATURED BOOK:

CEASE AND DESIST

Picture by John Stapleton Sydney scene

A flurry of figures were running towards their hideouts.
The nuclear flash lit up their forms in a black etching, burning their fleeing images on to the thick convulsing air. And then they were gone; in one brutal, infinitely cruel second.
Not one of them made it to their bunkers.
And then it all went quiet; the arid landscape kissed with the divine, a kind of liquid silver flowing across the cacti, burnt grass, rusting trucks and collapsed dwellings of the old mining camps.
Sydney seemed a long time in the past; everything had slipped away.
Storms swept across the comparatively well equipped camp where he was staying, positively bourgeois in contrast to some. Rain drummed on the roof. The tanks filled.
He was far away from the urban areas he had once so loved.  
"I am in receipt of no questions," he muttered into the long night. "I provide no answers. I transmit no information."
"What are you?" came a question from one of the Watchers on the Watch, different now, a more senior, more sensible, more intelligent voice.
As if commonsense was finally breaking through the blizzard of thuggish garbage which had come his way.
"And that question most of all, I will not answer," he responded; tired of the ridicule, the targeting, the viciousness that humans displayed towards those of their kind who were different, or they did not understand.
In Australia, the pack mentality of group think was worse than he had ever seen; and he reiterated the theme once again: the shutting down of debate, the narrowness of the prisms through which most of the population now saw the world, the official amnesia, as entire fields of controversy were excised from the public debate, all of it was poisoning the country.
"What can you do?" Boris would ask over coffee outside the Neighbourhood Centre.
Malaise was everywhere, and not just in the collapse of Australia's underclass.
The announcement came, the legendary Kidman properties, spanning three states and the Northern Territory, reportedly some 2.6% of the nation's land area, 101,000 square kilometres, was being sold to a Chinese consortium with Australia's richest woman Gina Rinehart as the the local component.
The sale was perceived by its critics as an insult to all Australian taxpayers, an insult to the indigenous whose sacred lands the properties had once been, and an insult to the generations who had built the country. 
The Foreign Investment Review Board approved the sale.
Fat cats hunkered down in their air-conditioned streets as they passed fashionable city restaurants, a glowing air of satisfaction wreathing their out-size bodies. What was the use of the Foreign Investment Review Board? They stood in the way of nothing. 
"Madness," Boris said,
"They've sold off most of the countries major ports, most of the electricity infrastructure, most of the prime real estate in the major cities. We're becoming a southern province of China. What sort of country does this, allows this to happen?"
"Madness," Boris said again. "What can you do?"
The "jobs and growth" rhetoric with which the conservatives had narrowly won the last election looked more and more irrelevant; that week the news the economy was contracting. One more such quarter and the country would officially be in recession.
In country towns and shopping centres across the country, in the extinguished hopes of millions, recession had hit long ago. 
Sometimes, in those long dream infested nights, it was as if someone was trying to contact him, sometimes urgently, sometimes just the puerile games Old Alex's now vanquished pursuers had indulged in.
An international competition, he heard someone say, perhaps a radio in one of the neighbouring camp, apropos of nothing that he knew of.
"What's the urgency?" he asked, and slipped back into a doze, dreaming of a wonderful party, crowded party at his old friend Michael's house.\Again, apropos of nothing. The skies were cloudless, the morning air clear and uncharacteristically cool.
"He's settling down," someone observed. "I wouldn't be so sure," he replied, but there was far less danger than there had been for a very long time.
If only it would remain so.
For months turning into years he had held one primary desire: for his tormentors to cease and desist.
Perhaps, at last, it was coming true. 

THE BIGGER STORY:



AUSTRALIA’S Treasurer Scott Morrison has approved the sale of Australia’s largest pastoral land holding, S. Kidman & Co, to a partnership involving local mining magnate Gina Rinehart and Chinese consortium Shanghai CRED.

Following months of speculation as to whether or not Morrison would approve a bid involving a foreign firm, the treasurer released a statement yesterday formally approving the sale of the cattle empire to Australian Outback Beef, a venture 67 percent owned by Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting and 33 percent by Shanghai CRED.Morrison had previously knocked back Chinese-majority bids for the empire due to worries over “national security” and “national interest,” but under the deal struck with AOB, Morrison said there would be no cause for concern.“Consistent with the recommendation from the Foreign Investment Review Board, I have decided that the acquisition of Kidman as proposed would not be contrary to the national interest and will be permitted to proceed as proposed,” he said.

FEATURED BOOK:

THE DAWN

Photograph by John Stapleton

The cactus flower one day a year, and flowered the day after he arrived.

At first, it did not seem that hope was being born anew, his life reinvented.

In his head life was running backwards, in every sense; across terrains of regret and embarrassment, remorse over little things, or what came to seem like little things in the grand suffering of the race. Stupid things he wished he could forget. The larger things, the torment of the authorities, their blizzards of false claims and abuse of process, that was just part of an adventure, as revealing to him as it was destructive to them.

That previous evening, with the last of the storms disappearing across the low treeline in the middle distance towards the East, that is towards the far off hinterlands of the coast, had been oppressive and he had felt fundamentally disturbed.  

Above the sky was an horizon to horizon bank of grinding machinery, slicing through the atmosphere as if the air itself was solid. Shards, each with a human face, rained down. Inch by inch, the grinding wall of steel edged machinery worked its way downwards, ever closer to the surface.

He had to survive. He formed into liquid mercury and slid away through the cracks in the rock; life would survive, he would survive.

Here in the Outback, with its flat, sandy soils, on the surface of what had once been an inland sea. 

On the surface of what often resembled Mars, or a future Mars, the struggling, haphazard outposts of mankind.

And then in the early hours: "We will speak at first light."

Old Alex could not decipher the stream of thoughts, confused as they were by dreams of those who slept in the surrounding camps, and then in a rush he got the message: Hope, Renewal, Kindness, Forgiveness. Warmth. We will take care and you will take care. The universe will provide. The unforced suffering is over.  The king tide is running out to sea. Commonsense has prevailed. Alertness will do you no harm. At last: optimism.

It did not come from the official media.

On the taxpayer funded Radio National the big news was a half percent contraction in the economy, which came as no surprise. Ever since he had returned, he had been shocked by the hapless state of local shopping centres, had begun collecting photographs of shuttered shops. Australian school children had fallen two years behind in educational standards. And a bevy of experts droned on about one of the ABC's favourite topics, climate change and emissions trading schemes, a debate which had curdled Australian politics for 20 years, justified the building of vast green bureaucracies, and achieved precisely nothing. Lo and behold a skeptic should be invited on to liven up the deadly debate; as one tax payer funded expert after another lined up to give their views. They knew where their grant money lay. An Australian delegation was heading to the Solomon Islands, where every Pacific Island leader worth their salt lined up with begging bowl for international grants to fight, of course, climate change. An island was born, an island disappeared. One place was hotter. One place was colder. China had just approved another 200 power stations. Nothing Australia did would make the slightest bit of difference to the world climate; but hot air blanketed the public space. 

Indigenous disadvantage. The empowerment of women. 

No countering debate was ever allowed to ruffle the walls of bureaucratic certitude.

The side mirror of his old blue Ford had detached, and he took it down to the local K&M garage in Lightning Ridge. It was fixed in an instant and cost $20; a bush savvy cheerfulness.

And there was a strange comfort in the ready practicability, the warmth of things. Perhaps, indeed, the therapeutic aspects of the desert, before, once more, the Gods became roiled. And decided to speak.

THE BIGGER STORY:




Syrian rebels have called for a five-day truce to allow the evacuation of civilians, after withdrawing from their last strongholds in Aleppo's old city.
They said civilians were in great danger and they would support any initiative to ease their suffering.
The US and five Western powers also put out a joint statement calling for an immediate ceasefire to allow aid into rebel-held areas.
The Syrian government has ruled out any further ceasefires.
President Bashar al-Assad told Syrian media that a victory in Aleppo would be a "huge step" towards ending the five-year civil war, though he admitted "it won't mean the end of the war".
"Terrorists are present elsewhere," he told the daily al-Watan newspaper. "Even if we finish with Aleppo, we will continue our war against them."Since it began in March 2011, the war in Syria has killed hundreds of thousands of people, made more than half of Syrians homeless, and created the world's worst refugee crisis.

FEATURED BOOK:

FLAYED BY THE PUTRID

Picture John Stapleton Lightning Ridge 7 December, 2016.

Storms circled the camp. He thrashed, feverish.
"It's very unusual weather, Lightning Ridge," he said. "Even for the Outback it stands out; as if some strange electro-magnetic resonance."
Lightning flashed across the low flung sky, squalls of rain in the distance.
The colour of everything changed.
"You're deliberately refusing to connect," someone said, there in those peculiar waking states he was doing his best to avoid.
"Yes," he mumbled into a sweat soaked pillow.
 What good would it do, simply to switch tormentors?
Most of his dreams seemed to be about complex efforts to find a home; large rooms, disappearing canyons, brief moments of comfort, where it seemed like there would be security, where he could establish himself; often he was with his children, sometimes not.
He had been hunted from one place to another to another, the authorities determined to make his life miserable wherever he went.
All because of things he had written, material which had embarrassed them.
And made perpetually homeless, for in the flight and fright state that was in his soul he would not stand and fight his ground, he could not ignore the endless manufactured ridicule generated by dark dark policing techniques of which the average punter had no ken.
But as a Targeted Individual, he knew just how bad they were.
And he kept asking: To What End?
There was only one answer: They wanted him off the mortal coil.
And as they hunted and hunted, he knew who the guilty were.
He knew that a former AFP officer had been directly involved; him and his charlatan mates protecting their own positions and their own misconduct at his expense; hunting and hunting, because that's what bullies do, without conscience, without character, without compassion.
He had been discrete about their identities in the past, the man who falsely claimed to have written a book that he had ghost written, and in those curdled, increasingly despairing dreams, and perhaps with a flair for the melodramatic, he wanted to write a last will and testament: 
In Case of My Death.
How the National Security Agencies of Australia destroy people's lives, Without Warrant, Without Judicial Oversight, Without Evidence. 
Vindictive, Vicious. 
The worst examples of the fringe elements of policing in the country.
Boofheads, Bully Girls, Tricky Dicks.
And he would begin with his own mutterings: "I have been very badly harassed for a very long time."
And so, in his dreams, yet another home turned out not to be a home; another refuge just another trap. 
And he woke up in Lightning Ridge, with storm clouds above a low horizon.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Click on this image to go to the Twitter account of a journalist working inside Aleppo, Ahmad Alkhtibb.

It is simply horrific. Nothing justifies this.

https://twitter.com/AhmadAlkhtiib




Syrian forces were on the verge of seizing a key rebel-held district of east Aleppo on Tuesday as Damascus and ally Moscow warned that rebels who failed to leave the city peacefully would be destroyed. After retaking control of about two-thirds of opposition-held east Aleppo over the past week, forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad advanced on the large residential district of Shaar. With the capture of Shaar, the army would hold nearly 70 percent of east Aleppo, four years after rebels first seized it and divided the ancient city. In Damascus, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried on the state SANA news agency that the government would not allow rebels a chance to "regroup and repeat their crimes" in Aleppo. On Monday, Russia and China blocked a draft resolution at the UN Security Council demanding a seven-day truce in Aleppo to evacuate the sick and wounded, and to provide humanitarian aid workers time to get food and medicine in.

FEATURED BOOK:

FORTY DAYS AND FORTY NIGHTS

Picture John Stapleton Lightning Ridge 6 December, 2016.



I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.
Deutronomy 18:18


"Barmy," said one of the Watchers on the Watch; and Old Alex launched into a lecture on protocol, common decency and respect. .

"Yes, it's barmy weather. Barmy weather. Don't ridicule me. I could easily be your father."

None of the more senior Watchers on the Watch wanted to be out here, in the gusting heat and barren lands, in harsh conditions and drying winds, amid the flocks of Apostle birds and the decaying machinery, the shuffling and the mad, the vacant stairs of the genuinely bewildered.

"I have been very badly harassed for a very long time," Old Alex said repeatedly, there on the border of sleep, on the borders of consciousness; referring to the ceaseless harassment by the incompetent, dishonest and vengeful authorities who had pursued the word of the mafia linked and utterly corrupt Thai police to make his life a misery. You don't find stories watering a suburban backyard, but that didn't seem to occur to the geniuses in Australia's national security agencies, and so he had been tarred by those he had brushed up against.

But an ebbing tide takes out the rubbish; and already the clutter of false allegations and those who had attempted to make their reputation at his expense were being flushed across the mud flats, down gutters and drains, into the tumbling glitter of the anonymous surf; and he could not be more pleased to never see them again. 

There were greater spirits abroad. They would find their way. They would help him.

"How did you fall to Earth?"

Out here on the edge of desert, on the edge of sanity, there were always the voices of the divine, unlikely moments propelled out of God's ragged army, peculiar wisdoms in the rough stone. Why here, why opal here? 

Once upon a time they were a children's toy for the indigenous, the coloured stones. Now fortunes were made, in secret. 

And he heard the cry: "We have come to protect you."

The personality that had once been Stapo had long since been overwhelmed; and there on the edge of the desert, he reached up into different layers of consciousness. There had been a swirl of rain through the night, a pounding on the roof, as the storms swept across some of the country's most marginal acreage. 

While many things in the overpowering heat; with the crushed houses and the squat, abandoned buildings, were far more prosaic. 

Just like that, he had become one of the IT experts at the local Lightning Ridge Neighbourhood Centre.

One of the more common questions was how to print something. Control P Click, he would respond.

"Control, what's that?"

The most startling, transformative technology in the history of man and yet out here, in the so-called Outback, the crawling state of the internet, the circling blue buffering symbol the most common of all experiences, was an insult to everybody who paid taxes; a connivance of government to further dumb down the population. 

Radio National's Breakfast show with Fran Kelly dedicated much of the morning to yet another learned questioning about emissions trading schemes and what Australia should do to stop climate change.

Retreat five years, ten years, there were the same conversations. Hundreds of millions, billions of dollars in funding and all that had been achieved was to gift Australians with the most expensive electricity in the world, in the case of New South Wales, unreliable supply, and vast green bureaucracies.

He frittered in annoyance, and went swimming at the local pool. There was no use being constantly annoyed by choosing to listen to the white noise the government decreed as news; and which in fact was nothing but propaganda and contrivance. There was no use wishing he could be the news editor. That wasn't going to happen.

The Lightning Ridge pool was one of the best public pools in the country; and there in the 100F heat, with the sun frying his skin, the splash of cool water was as delightful as ever.

"It's 60 degrees in the shearing shed," said one of the girls from one of the neighbouring properties. She was talking Centigrade.

"Is anyone working?" he asked.

"Oh yes," she said. "Me, too."

"Jesus," he said, and swam on.

"A crown of thorns." 

As if all had become suffering, in this degraded state. 

The First Noble Truth is that the suffering of birth, old age, sickness and death is unavoidable. Some fortunate people may now be enjoying relatively happy and carefree lives, but it is only a matter of time before they, too, will experience suffering of some kind. What is also true is that this suffering — whether it is a cold, an injury or a sad event — must be borne alone. 

THE BIGGER STORY:




The Russian government said on Monday it would start talks with Washington on a rebel withdrawal from Aleppo this week as Russian-backed Syrian forces fought to seize more territory from rebels who are struggling to avoid a major defeat.
The latest army attack, which saw fierce clashes around the Old City, aims to cut off another area of rebel control in eastern Aleppo and tighten the noose on opposition-held districts where tens of thousands of people are trapped.
Advances in recent weeks have brought Damascus, backed militarily by Russia, Iran and Lebanon's Hezbollah, closer to recapturing Syria's second largest city before the nearly six-year war and a prize long sought by President Bashar al-Assad.
The rebels are now reduced to an area just kilometers across.


FEATURED BOOK:

THE FINAL REFUGE OF GOD'S RAGGED ARMY

"Adventure Before Dementia" read the sign on the side of a bus passing the Neighbourhood Centre.

Just as he had done two years before, he had retreated to Lightning Ridge in the north-west of the state.

It had been a wet winter, and when he arrived the landscape had been remarkably green for a place that often looked more like Mars than Earth.

But now the gusts of hot wind dried out plant life into crackling sticks in an instant, the colouring went to pastel shades of red and brown and olive, and an ennui crept across the low slung buildings of the outback town. It was too hot to do anything. 

Except on this one day, when the sky was overcast and he could see the streaks of rain falling from overcast skies, far off across flat burnt plains. 

Lightning Ridge was a place of elderly orphans, Australia's largest open air asylum, as the joke went, the only place in Australia where four out of every two people you meet are schizophrenic.

It was one of the only places in the world where opal could be found, and so the harsh landscape was littered with old mines and rusting machinery, abandoned camps, homes that were no longer homes, repeated scenes of previous endeavour, everything a reflection of someone else's past hopes.

Everyone who comes to Lightning Ridge is escaping from something, the saying went, and certainly the town had its fair share of old jailbirds, with their cheap prison tats and in some cases puffed faces, they'd been smashed up so often. Something had gone seriously wrong in their lives, and they weren't coming back from whatever had destroyed him.

Just as before, he was escaping excessive, intrusive, offensive and abusive surveillance. Back then it was the mafia linked authorities of Thailand, incensed by what he had written and determined to destroy him. The PsyOps operations were running in full force.

This time around it had been the Australian authorities.

"Tell your bosses they are dishonest, incompetent and corrupt," he told one of the Watchers on the Watch.

"I'm not going to tell him that!" came the response.

But he was tired of it, tired of them, tired of the sustained abuse, the idiot boofheads who could not tell the difference between false claims generated by the Thai mafia and their Australian cohorts; whose powers of investigation were sub-zero and whose integrity was somewhere beneath that.

It was difficult, expensive and uncomfortable for them to continue the chase out here; and as he kept asking, "To what end?"

Indeed there seemed no end to it, no motivation but abuse and bullying, no rationality in the continued targetting, except, he assumed, a desperate attempt to cover up their own malfeasance, their own outlandish and vindictive abuse of public funds.

"Surveillance is abuse, surveillance is abuse," he kept muttering in half sleep, out there in that outpost on the edge of what was an even harsher, more dramatic, and emptier interior.

And so his life continued to run backwards, through triumphs and regrets, loves and disasters, visual tableaus and the deaths of old friends.

On the taxpayer funded Radio National he heard an earnest discussion from taxpayer funded agriculture and cooking experts on how climate change would affect the spaghetti bolognaise of the future, the upshot being that the carrots might be a different shape, Meanwhile, the bombardment of Aleppo and Australia's tacit and explicit support for the Syrian dictator Assad went entirely undiscussed.

And his head went round and round: Those who tormented him had no idea; these illiterate thugs. 

And he read apropos of nothing, a piece on the high death rate in Lightning Ridge:

The volunteers collect bodies from simple cottages in town, from canvas tents on the dusty pink opal fields and from trailers parked at the edge of pebbly mine shafts. Sometimes they retrieve bodies from the scrubby saltbush brush, where out-of-luck miners retreat to end their lives.
“Summer is the worst,” Mr. Molyneux said. Temperatures rise above 112 degrees, and stay there for days. “It doesn’t take long for a body to fall apart in that heat,” he said, recalling a dead miner whose arm fell off as he tried to pick up the body.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Syria's army and allied militia advanced towards rebel-held areas of Aleppo's Old City on Sunday in an attack which a military source predicted would be over in a matter of weeks.

Western and regional states backing the rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad appear unwilling or unable to do anything to prevent a major defeat for those fighting to topple the Syrian leader, whose campaign to regain all Aleppo has been backed by the Russian air force and foreign Shi'ite militias.

Rebel groups in Aleppo have told the United States they will not leave their shrinking enclave, a senior rebel official told Reuters, after Russia call for talks with Washington over a full withdrawal of opposition fighters.

But the rebels may eventually have no choice but to negotiate a withdrawal from eastern Aleppo, where tens of thousands of civilians are thought to be sheltering, in the face of relentless bombardment and ground assaults.

Why, why why are we involved? 

FEATURED BOOK

GOD'S RAGGED ARMY

The car rose slowly from the fetid plains. For days, in tormented dreams, he had been a soldier going around a battlefield, killing the wounded. Shot after shot after shot in those terrible scenes. Mostly the victims were already dead; and his bullets thudded into corpses beginning to rot in that terrible heat. Some, he knew, were playacting death, hoping against hope that they would be overlooked. Sometimes they begged for mercy, a final futile plea for life. Sometimes, their consciousness already slipping, they moaned as the bullets thudded into their flesh. Mostly, he was just firing bullets into corpses. He felt no regret.

In a different realm, he finally escaped the corner of suburbia into which he had been hunted.

The surveillance had been brutal, invasive, offensive, had repeatedly made him homeless, and the ordered houses which surrounded him as he finished Hideout in the Apocalypse might have been a comfort to some, but were of no comfort to him. He could hear the orchestrated derision. He was meant to suffer, cringe, withdraw. They hoped, more than anything, he would kill himself and save themselves the trouble.

He had made the same mistake before, assuming that somewhere in government run agencies there was reason, intelligence, compassion, that the treatment dished out to him had somehow been a mistake of the lower orders.

We seen in others what we see in ourselves.

Old Alex would not make the mistake again.

He remained continually astonished at just how bad Australian governance was, just how dishonest, incompetent and corrupt were the security agencies who hunted him, just how bleakly totalitarian, how utterly ignorant, had become the country he had once so loved.

Hunted back to the home of an elderly relative, he finished the book against all odds, in difficult circumstances, draped as the backdrop of his thoughts were with the carping hatred of the pig ignorant police and government agents who circled him, hoping to destroy.

They forgot: he heard everything, and he knew just how malicious they were.

The shifting personnel of the Watchers on the Watch contained few of any integrity; and he had become a zoo exhibit, someone to poke fun at, or simply to torment.

"They were selling tickets," one of the supervisors called in to clean up the mess would later say.

It was an instinct to hide, to pretend to be someone other than who he was. No one could act more stupid or unassuming than he could, if the situation required. But even in this latest circumstance, it was as if he had run down a rabbit hole, and they had continued to poke their sticks, the cruelty of mob behaviour, as they poked and poked and poked.

The government ran anti-bullying campaigns, but were the biggest bullies of all.

They forget: he learnt more about them than they would ever learn from him.

The car rose from the plains, and after visiting Glen, whose perverted duplicities, multiple treacheries and flagrant dishonesties were flowering into new extremes, he spent two nights in the stone house where he had been two months before, in the midst of that terrible winter during which he wrote Hideout in the Apocalypse.

This time there was a different, more powerful kind of wrath.

A Terradactyl swept high across the mountains, In his dreams it resembled more a giant sting-ray, except it was high high in the sky. He could see the suburban houses far below, and the seaweed thoughts of the denizens rising in little huddles. He no longer tried to listen. After months of persecution and harassment, which planet does he think he's from this time, he had lost all interest and all faith in the species. Whatever hope there may once have been, their tedious preoccupations were no longer of interest. There was a reason why the ancient Gods had been so cruel, their warriors so merciless. That was the nature of the species, blunt, disinterested, barbaric. He had once thought, with all the naivety of a new born, that people were mostly well intentioned. He knew better now..

Once his flying dreams had been a source of wonder and delight. Now he flew high and fierce, with piercing eye, and the cruelty that had been displayed towards him, the ceaseless bullying and harassment he had been subjected to by state agencies, all the attempts to silence a journalist, were folding out in the provisions of an ancient curse.

He knew more than he let on.

His enemies circled ever more frantically.

"Let's spell it out in Simple Language. We Will Kill You."

And then, out there in the desert where his mind could roam free, there was a shift in puzzling emphasis.

He performed the ultimate of modern insults, and unfriended Glen on Facebook, For his efforts he got sworn at, and Glen demanded to know why he had been wiped when he had been helping him with an ethical dilemma.

Glen could have been a friend, could have helped him with the abusive, unwarranted, unfair and invasive surveillance he had been enduring for so long.

Instead he had chosen to join the conga line of clever dicks; and further his own career.

The talk of an ethical dilemma was just another piece of vaulting gestalt about face, another lie among so many lies.

The only ethical dilemma was why the government agencies were so profoundly dishonest, why no one spoke up, why the supreme power of surveillance the modern technologies had gifted the very worst characters in the nation's secretive security agencies were not being properly monitored.

Why a government which was meant to serve the people, had instead become their enemy.

And why those who had so utterly mismanaged his case, and who had clearly wasted considerable government funds to hunt him and to try and intimidate a journalist, could still hold their jobs.

It was a good sign.

He was no longer participating in his own persecution.

Out there in the desert nights, with the stars feeding far above.


THE BIGGER STORY:






Tens of thousands of Cubans greeted Fidel Castro's funeral cortege on its journey across Cuba on Thursday, unflagging in their admiration for one of the towering figures of the 20th Century who is equally loathed by his adversaries.
Waving flags and singing the national anthem, Cubans thickly lined pastel-colored colonial streets to pay their respects to Castro. He died on Friday at age 90, a decade after stepping down as president but defiant to the end toward the United States, the world power he tormented from just 90 miles (145 km) away.
The government declared nine days of mourning for the man who built a Communist state, aligned Cuba with the Soviet Union and survived what his government claimed were more than 600 U.S. assassination attempts.

FEATURED BOOK:

WISER ANGELS

He slept deeply, away from the idiots who were always trying to contact him; as if he was some experiment, a live rat to be tortured, a curiosity to be examined. He had been able to hear all too much; and spent as much time pretending not to hear them as he did listening to the poisonous fronds of thought emerging from surrounding houses. For he did not know who he could trust.

And now he was away from suburbia, as the denizens of Lightning Ridge called Australia's cities with a shudder of dislike. 

Those who could cope with suburbia were a different species altogether. 

Much of what he had heard through that long, interminable, bitterly cold winter had been harmless. Lasagna for dinner. Medical concerns. Television programs and the endless drivel of government propaganda from the radio. 

Sometimes he would hear one of the operatives lying to new recruits amongst the Watchers on the Watch, expressing their distaste for him; and inflamed dislike which would never have been there in the first place if they had not mounted their prolonged surveillance campaigns, and attempted, time and time and time again, to encourage him to have a heart attack or to take his own life; to do their job for them, to relieve the world of his disturbing presence.

Old Alex was determined not to let them destroy him. 

The reasons for their being, for he did not regard himself as a singular, or ordinary person, the reasons why he, or they, with their image infested consciousnesses and trails of memory and wisdom and sadness from other lives, were beyond the ken of any of them, including himself. He could no more explain why he had been cast into this unhappy place, forced to listen to the tendrils of malicious thought which would whisper and curl through the long nights, then he could explain the meaning of life.

The frontiers of science were realigning the evolution of the species, and what seemed like magic, or like the voices of the Gods, was in fact an evolution of themselves, or people like themselves, cast forward, cast back. He, like hundreds of others, had volunteered for the sacrifice in an instant, as if it meant nothing; as if it would be an easy assignment, and he had never thought, in that defining instant which would confine him to this planet for so many years, through so many lives, of what it would be like to be so profoundly trapped for such a very long time.

The mistakes that had been made would not be made again.

As he lay away and listened to the occasionally supportive, mostly disparaging, voices of the Watchers on the Watch.

"I told you this guy could hear us."
"I told you he was extraordinary."
"Pigs might fly."

They no more understood a cluster soul, or cluster intelligence, than they understood their own confined fates, or their adopted, inherited Gods and belief systems.

Old Alex listened to the garbage of persistence, for they were on government or military contracts and had nothing to do but watch and wait, for abandonment or indiscretion or proof he was not what he said he was, while his own mind searched through the tedious fog for a friend, a sympathiser, someone of like mind, someone who understood. On the rare occasion when he found them, they were invariably hidden, and did not want their comrades to know. 

He kept his secrets of a different style of consciousness; as the Watchers on the Watch spilled their secrets; told him stories of the bureaucratic fiascoes and blind incompetence of government, and most of all, like workers everywhere, of the peculiarity, bastardry and arrogant blindness of their grotesquely overpaid bosses.

It had worked, those strange curses. "You will spend the rest of your life dedicated to exposing what you have learnt."

That is, the dark shapes and intent of government functioning, the ways the machinery set out to destroy their targets, the problem being, those targets were simply citizens who refused to comply with the government narrative of the day, and who not only had every ,right to express their views and to think in an independent manner, but whose very suppression was poisoning the society as a whole. The culture was being destroyed by the very people who thought they were transforming it into something better. They thought, or hoped, a natural idealistic impulse, that they were leaving the world a better place, that they were doing good. 

Instead they had come out looking like grubs.

He had stated the theory frequently in his work. That the suppression of debate, the derision of those who did not accept the tertiary acquired theories of tolerance and diversity, who dared to disagree with the government narrative, was leading to a lurch to the right; and straight into the arms of extremist views.

It was a bureaucratic tendency, to quash that which did not fit their narrative, their belief system. But as they worked for their enlightenment, executed the theories they had acquired at the knees of their professors, they destroyed the very culture they wished to save; as they worked for the betterment of mankind, they stirred its darkest forces. The thuggery of group think became the norm. 

And in a more mundane sense, as they probed him for a response, there in those long nights, he built his defences. 

And so sat last, they finally left. And as his mind wandered across the empty desert; he could finally relax. 

They probed him and he resisted. They watched him and he curled into a ball. Hazing only works if the target is vulnerable. He had been very vulnerable. He had clung to old beliefs that humans were essentially good. He had never truly understood, despite all those multiple lives, the base nature of the species in which he had been landed. Crude, barbaric, self-interested, they had no adherence to the truth, that curse, or trait, which had made his own life so difficult.

"Why didn't you allow me the chance for happiness?" he asked of a relationship possibility he himself had killed.

"Because we didn't want you to be happy. You would never have written that book."

All he knew was relief, that the final mustering was taking shape, packing their bags, moving on, afraid of the internal reviews of other bureaucrats with too much money, time and power; bureaucrats who would seize the opportunity to expand their own power and hopefully, in the end, to fix that which was wrong, to ensure that no other journalist would endure the prolonged harassment and intimidation which had been his terrible fate. 

Winter was over, and the heat of the Outback soaked through his bones.

THE BIGGER STORY:

Russel Kiefel pic by Brendan Read

 













Former Neighbours star Russell Kiefel died over the weekend after being taken ill during a theatre performance.
The actor played Russell - the abusive father of the Brennan brothers - for a brief stint in the soap last year. He passed away last night after becoming unwell while performing in the play And I'm the Queen of Sheba at Brown's Mart Theatre in Australia.
The theatre has cancelled the rest of the season out of respect for Kiefel, with executive director Sean Pardy calling it a tragic and emotional time for the actor's family and everyone involved in the production.
Kiefel's co-stars - both old and new - have all rallied round to pay tribute to him, with Neighbours actress Colette Mann leading the way with an emotional Instagram post.

Colette Mann, who plays Sheila Canning, on the soap said: “I am very very sad to say that the wonderful actor, Russell Kiefel who played Russell Brennan in 2015 on @neighbours passed away yesterday.

INSTAGRAM

Kiefel's former Neighbours co-star Colette Mann paid tribute to the actor on Instagram

The late Russell Kiefel in rehearsal for Belvoir's The Blind Giant is Dancing (2016). Photo by Brett Boardman.

Russell Kiefel, whose career included roles in such landmark Australian films as Breaker Morant and Radiance, as well as work with many of Australia’s most significant theatre companies, has died.

He passed away on Sunday after falling ill backstage during a performance at Darwin’s Brown’s Mart Theatre on Friday night.

Born in 1951, Kiefel graduated from NIDA in 1974. His screen debut was Gillian Armstrong’s 52 minute film, The Singer and the Dancer, made in 1977 with Ruth Cracknell and Elisabeth Crosby in the key roles. He went on to appear in numerous other films including Neil Armfield’s Twelfth Night, telemovie The Leaving of Liverpool, and Children of the Revolution.

He joined Home and Away in 1993, and stayed in television through Heartbreak High, A Difficult Woman, Wildside, Water Rats, Blue Heelers, Stingers and Something in the Air. More recently he appeared in television productions Tricky Business, Neighbours, Childhood’s End and Secret City.

Kiefel also performed regularly on stage for many years, working with the likes of Belvoir, Sydney Theatre Company, Bell Shakespeare, Griffin Theatre Company, Queensland Theatre Company, and State Theatre Company of South Australia.

Colleagues remembered him as a versatile and truthful actor, and a warm and generous friend.  

Belvoir’s Artistic Director, Eamon Flack, said, ‘Russell’s theatre home was Belvoir. He is one of our legends, and his rough beauty as an actor and a person has inscribed itself in the ethos of the company.’

Kiefel performed in numerous Belvoir productions over three decades, including Ray’s Tempest, Stuff Happens, The Alchemist, The Tempest, Hamlet, The Power of Yes, The Spook, and Run Rabbit Run.

‘Russell’s last performance for us was in The Blind Giant is Dancing earlier this year, a play he performed in three times over three decades. The original production of that play at Lighthouse in 1983 pulled together the artists and ethos that later formed the foundations of Company B. Russell was part of that production, and of the legendary 1996 revival,’ said Flack.

‘He was one of the true stalwarts of our company and our profession. He is a great loss.’

FEATURED BOOK:

A SURPRISE AWAITS

Peter Rae The Suipermoon Clovelly Cemetery 

He had been harassed for so long, day in day out, month in month out, that in the end his head began to build narrative structures focused around extreme, sustained and taxpayer funded abuse. The surveillance was meant to produce its own madness, erratic and defiant behaviour, the chilling effect, and was left in the hands of uncompromising bullies. He had begun to act like any animal under surveillance, cringing, frightened, desperate to escape. 

Nobody, not one person, had the decency to talk to him directly. And so the narrative structures streamed half formed through his head, and he longed for escape. Forty days and forty nights. Seers throughout time had sought their time in the desert, where the voices of the spirits were clearer and sharper, where the spewing, crawling mass of thoughts that filled the villages could be escaped, where common self-interest was dispensed with, where they could find in the feeding deserts some respite.

It wasn't meant to be thus. He was instead meant to kill himself; that's what "they" would most have liked, the authorities so desperate to shuffle him off the mortal coil.

For his own case, as he had told them it would, lit up the chains of malfeasance and abuse otherwise hidden, and it became evident for any genuine inquiry where the devil lay. 

He was tired of it, tired of them, often angry, thrashing as he attempted to escape, the parsimonious rectitude, their extreme dishonesty, their frequent abuse of the power granted to them. Surveillance was a blunt instrument. It was meant to destroy. "How often did they encourage him to commit suicide?"asked one of the more recently recruited Watchers on the Watch.

"One hundred and sixty two times that we've counted," came the response. 

"More than that," Old Alex thought. 

And so his head swirled through the dry reaches, the tide had reached its full height, the seven years were up; and as he thought back across the social circumstances, the hotel rooms, the apartments, the various fleeting homes he had tried to establish, and the ceaseless government sponsored ridicule and abuse which had followed him everywhere; he thought, it was meant to be. He was meant to write a book called Dark Dark Policing, for no one should be exposed to the extra-judicial bastardry which had been so viciously used against him. 

These people, brutal, bullies by instinct, should not have the power to pursue journalists in the way they had pursued him. They should not, on contract, be allowed to intimidate, threaten and bully a citizen of the country. He was a far greater patriot than any of them; they acted out of self-interest, to climb their bureaucracies, collect their pay checks, gain the approval of the packs in which they hunted; he acted because he wanted to make the country a better place, people freer to express their views, a place where those who were different would not be hunted and bullied as he had been.

He longed, ever more feverishly, for a world where it was impossible to lie.

For in that transformational instant those who had so deliberately made his life a misery would be forced to recant. Or disappear. He didn't much care. He had no sympathy left, not for them. It was not by accident the ancient Gods had been so violent in their protection of the favoured ones. And so in the desert he could hear the stars feeding and the insect load scurrying under the trees, and he could feel, at last, the wheels changing direction. The Seven Years were up.

THE BIGGER STORY:

VALE DES BALL:

Des Ball at the entrance to the controversial Pine Gap facility 1984

Des Ball was a lovely man; and always helpful to journalists such as myself.

Desmond John Ball, born May 20 1947; died October 12, 2016.
Des Ball arrived at the Australian National University in February 1965, as a 16-year-old fresh from Timboon in country Victoria. He was a scholarship boy who had earlier topped his home state in three matriculation subjects. Before long, Des was making his mark on ANU, academically and socially.
An early example was his arrest for "offensive behaviour" at an anti-Vietnam War rally. Des, while still a member of the ANU Company of the Sydney University Regiment, became implacably opposed to military conscription. He considered it antithetical to the values of freedom for which Australians were supposedly fighting in south-east Asia. Journalists loved the contrast: they never failed to call Des a "prize-winning economics student" when they reported his "offensive behaviour" charge. He eventually defeated the prosecution case, setting a precedent still often taught in Australian law schools.
In his student years, and beyond, Des remained a "person of security interest" to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. In one five-page briefing, the then director-general of ASIO, writing to the secretary of the Department of Defence, clusters Des with a group of academics "the majority of whom have radical tendencies". When Des began publishing material about the joint intelligence facility at Pine Gap alongside Robert Cooksey, an ANU international relations lecturer and one of Des's mentors, ASIO paid close attention.
Des, for his part, long disputed many of the inaccuracies in the security intelligence files, some of which he claimed were the result of confused identification with other long-haired young men. When asked in recent years about the ASIO surveillance, Des said he was surprised by "the extent of the resources that they had devoted to me. I think that ASIO had lost the plot by then."
After finishing his undergraduate degree with a whirlwind of academic prizes, Des made quick progress towards the completion of his ANU PhD, awarded in 1972.
It was that work, along with his studies of American intelligence facilities in Australia, and particularly A Suitable Piece of Real Estate published in 1980, which first made Des famous. Some of his great collaborations also began back then, including with Jol Langtry, with whom Des shared his many research trips to northern Australia. They measured rivers, mountains and beaches to determine how the vast Australian continent could be defended against invasion.

Professor Desmond Ball, academic, military strategist and author of more than 40 books on military intelligence, died today at 3:35pm Australian time.

Des work was impressive. He spent time inside US top secret nuclear and command centres, advising the CIA, the White House and the Pentagon, where he persuaded them that a limited nuclear war was impossible.

Former US President Jimmy Carter, in a recent book credited Des as the man who saved the world and said, “Desmond Ball’s counsel and cautionary advice based on deep research made a great difference to our collective goal of avoiding nuclear war”.

In recent years Des, despite battling cancer, never lost his love or focus for the ethnic people of Burma. For the last 20 years Des spent much of his time amongst Burma’s ethnic people and armed groups. Des Ball was a harsh critic of the generals who used the Burma’s military to trample on the peoples’ human rights. He used his acclaimed position as an accepted and acknowledged ‘expert’ to speak out against the oppression of Burma’s military dictators.

Major General Isaac Po of the Karen National Liberation Army acknowledged the help that Des had given the Karen and other ethnic groups over the years when he said in an interview with Karen News that “Des Ball has been a good friend to the Karen for many years. Des shared his knowledge and skills with us and we appreciate what he did for us.”

FEATURED BOOK: