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.”

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