SEDITION

The view form the 18-footer Sailing Club at Double Bay in Sydney, NSW on the occasion of the launch of Sorry Time by Anthony Maguire.

Each new revelation followed another. All their worst fears were confirmed. Step by terrible step.

The bombing in Manchester. The massacre in London. Two Australians amongst the eight killed.

Step by terrible step.

Went from Lightning Ridge to Moree to Gunnedah to Wentworth Falls to Sydney to Shellharbour in a week.

And he was reading Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO Files.

Everywhere, the fallout was everywhere.

The extreme levels of surveillance. The growth of BCI, Brain Computer Interface.

They watched everything, followed everything, groped power to themselves. The worst of all nightmares were all coming true.

He tried to hide the integrity of his thoughts. The machines played their own tricks. They, too, were good at pretending to be more stupid than they were. Anthropomorphising machines, as they mimicked their creators.

We could become just like cats to them, far less intelligent, Elon Musk can warned, but the future was already here.

The bombs rained down on Mosul. The levels of hypocrisy of the West grew more and more insane by the minute.

And useful fools were everywhere, not just in the media. Everything was a misery. He struggled for coherence. And he laughed. "You're always so laid back." "Oh sure, he thought."

He arrived in Lightning Ridge after a long drive, as if driving through treacle, as if he wasn't meant to go  there, not this time around, through storms and a flat tyre and an aching heart, although for what he ached he could not say. They were everywhere, these days, the Watchers on the Watch, his worst fears bullies presiding in warring agencies, attempts at discretion, withdrawal, confinement, disappearing as Australia became more totalitarian by the moment.

Potential extremists could be sent to jail without trial, according to new proposals. But exactly who was an extremist in Australia in 2017 was an entirely arbitrary, government defined question; and could be extended to anyone who disagreed with the government narrative.

The United Patriots Front, who at least on the surface exhibited as old-fashioned nationalists alarmed at the ever spreading influence of Islam, had been shunted off Facebook, no doubt at government request.

There were cruel days ahead. Nothing resounded. The police went through the carpark at Nobbies in Lightning Ridge within 20 minutes of his arriving there. They knew exactly who he was, where he was.

Early next morning, perhaps 7.00 am, well early for winter, he went to the bore bath outside town. And once again, there they were, the police checking number plates.

Insane.

In a town without a traffic light.

Afterwards, he travelled to see a friend in Moree he had promised to help with a website, and there it was again, police everywhere, in tiny country towns, the traditional culture crushed. People, frightened, just stayed home. It was an insane level of over-policing, and everywhere he went, he saw the same.

Another incident in Melbourne, with a Somali refugee.  But this time around, the reflexive left coverage, each terror incident accompanied by stories attempting to dampen down any rise in Islamophobia, seemed strangely missing.

Who were the terrorists, in this strange place?

Turnbull's bombs continued to rain down on the Muslims of the Middle East, in lockstep, as always, with America's outlandish perpetration of war after war after war.

Coward bombs.

His face grew thinner. He grew less and less sincere. The prime minister was aging quickly, and not, it would seem, from the burdens of office, but from something less defined.

The haunting had begun, not for the sins of the flesh, but for the sins of the spirit.

The dead stalked the living. The evil eye, the succubi. The gods stalked their own operatives. You could not play fast and loose with the truth, as lawyers turned politicians so often did, without reprisal. The liars were not safe. Hypocrisy reaped its own rewards.

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