The Rapture: Australia Undone

  It was a stupid arrangement all along. He had set the trap long ago; and now it had reached full circle, those hungry worms and vicious teeth hanging from the cave ceiling, those tendrils of venom which made it unsafe for anyone to come near him. Fly fishing across the fate lines, the difficult precision required their full concentration, even at their level of cognition.  This country, bound for hell. The old Australia, disintegrating in front of their eyes. The treachery, deceit and dishonesty which lay all about, the reason for their urgency to get back into the house, their embarrassment in front of their bosses, that they had tried to kill him in such a base and lame way. He knew they were after him. No, it wasn't paranoia. They, too, could fly fish the fate lines and see what lay ahead. The City at the End of Time. The Country at the End of Time. The Species at the End of Their Time.  All of it echoed, the chanting, the deceit, the temples in which those withered ...

  We come from the future to tell you: all is not safe. Your country has been betrayed, you have been betrayed. All is not safe.  They tell you you are loved, but it is a miasma of faith and deception.  The leaders of your country are tantamount to evil. Resident Evil. Another movie of the moment.  The mood of the country had fallen off a cliff; for anyone who chose to care, or the few who chose to care. They shuffled through the miasmas of their local malls, washed, stripped, of all colour. Human companionship had been abolished.  A fit, handsome man stood there; they both knew who each other was, although they had never met.  There was a fog in the air. The mists were more veils than condensation. He left a record, but he did not know for what purpose.  They found him here, and they knew what had to be done. Do not approach. Beware. For they will kill any attacker in a flash, and not care. Because caring was not in their nature. Luckily for them, the...

  They were in the midst of a spiritual war. The population at large had no idea what was happening to them.  The taxpayer funded ABC, $1.3 billion raked off the working poor to fund their arrogance and sibulant self-referencing lack of empathy for everyone but their own tertiary educated echo-chamber selves, celebrated the opening of Australia's largest regional mosque, in Young, Victoria.  A giant chandelier lit up the beaming and bedraped; the beneficiaries of so much government largesse. These people were neither poor nor marginalised. While the Christians hovered in their diminishing congregations, their insipid spirituality easily overthrown.  All of it, the betrayal of the general population, the utter betrayal of Australia's traditional European population post colonisation, all of it sacrificed on the altar of diversity and multiculturalism. The road to idiocy is paved with good intentions, perhaps it was as simple as that. Meanwhile there was another massac...

  A Prayer-Sonnet for the Penguins of Phillip Island O gentle Guardians of the southern seas, Watch over these small souls in formal dress, Who waddle home on paths the moonlight sees And nest in burrows far from human stress. On Phillip’s shores, where ocean winds still sing, A new-made threat now rides the human hand; The needle’s point, the syringe’s offering— A vaccine’s risk upon this fragile land. Grant strength to wings that dive through cooling waves, Let no untested serum pierce them through; Preserve their colonies, their sandy caves, And keep the little ones from harm anew. May nature’s way, not man’s, keep them free— Protect these penguins, Lord of land and sea. Amen. Who amongst the penguins will have the courage to stand up for the vaccine injured? Unable to sell their MRNA vaccines to a sceptical public, the Australian government was now mounting a major campaign to vaccinate all the penguins on Phillip Island. They would claim success no matter how many they kille...

  The attempts to kill him had failed. Again. The gangsters, and those strange liaisons between them and the authorities, driven partly by the daring grasp of power, but mostly by money, wound through his life once more.  But here we were. In a survival kit. In survival mode.  And the horizon was full. And the necessity to survive hung strong. Beyond the borders of the village where the spirits had ordered him to take root, beyond those borders of swinging doors and empty rooms and abandoned dwellings, beyond that border of terror and enlightenment, beyond fear itself, lay not safety, not the comfort of the lords and the royals in their distant castles, but something even more remote, more terrifying, more all encompassing. And so humanity, and all those who sheltered within her, all those entities which stood within that all encompassing notion, humanity, they took their time, they had been through cataclysms before, they had been through the death of entire species, the...

  There he was then, with a head full of voices he portrayed as waking dreams, although that wasn't exactly it. Those calm, teaming with life scenes of thriving lagoon filled landscapes gave way to the soaring cold of mountain air, a whistling defeat, a million voices drowning in their own blood, all too aware of their own bird in a storm inconsequence. So he let out one vast sigh, as everywhere, backwards and forwards, outwards and in, gave way to a mesh of everything, everything connected, everything contained in the one.  Yet he knew he had been cut off, or had cut himself off, from his own kind. The mood in the country, that would be Australia, had soured. A defeated population was finally speaking out; but were apparently powerless to fight back. Robbed at every turn by their own government, lied to constantly by the political class more interested in their own welfare than that of the general population, the voices came and went, some of them decent, most of them carnivo...

  Live each day like it's a whole new life. Anon. They were in a rush because the world was in a rush, those Watchers on the Watch, those military analysts and aficionados of the obscure, the oblique, the little known. At times the ancients were like a bubbling brook, rushing by, pools of images forming and disbanding in a panic as they rushed towards the sea, or in this case a cataclysmic future. All life on Earth. Atomic War. Reality had overtaken science fiction. No one could have made up the story of the Iran War, much less the Covid drama which had now settled into established fact, the conspiracy theorists having been proven correct all along. Again.  Most of it passed in some other world far from here. The teenagers with their children in the beer garden. A life, another life. A thousand years ago. They tried to distract him. There was nothing to be gained. He remained invisible as best he could. The swirl, that ancient swirl, which had nothing to do with wisdom but wit...

  The guns were loaded, the knives were out. The derelict buildings on the outskirts of the village were even more desolate than before. The level of betrayal, that one human, one Australian, could do this to another, to others; he remained, he must admit, naive that these things could be. But they were. The crows circled in swarms above, signals of evil; of death.  And always, always, the ancients called. He had rarely been human, in all this times, and that saddest of sad pterodactyls, her chicks having died, her partner of so many seasons having failed to return; the last of her kind. She huddled against the cold, having pushed the dead chicks out and over the cliff edge. And she stared out at that bleak wasteland of ice and storm. And she knew. They had been betrayed. They had all been betrayed. The gods were not kind. And her partner was not coming back. She died of a broken heart, like so many before her, and so many to come. NEWS The Australian Security Intelligence Org...

  It's complicated enough as it is, a Watcher on the Watch declared of the many schemes now circulating. The ground had shifted. The ancient regime of ossifying officers were finally reaching retirement age, their figures and their health disfigured by long lunches and bold camaraderie only the most blatant grifters could survive. Much had changed since last he was here. The randy, newly married police officer who liked to sleep naked had moved to another suburb, the grief stricken, heartbroken woman tending for her cancer ridden husband had also moved moved on after he died; bereft she never recovered from his loss. Whether she went to an old age home or to relatives he could not tell; but suspected institutionalisation. The mood of the country had soured. Once upon a time, seemingly now a lost era, ask an Australian how they were going they would tell you they were "good". "Yeah, fine," was about as low as that octave went. A musical note of optimism. Now they...