The Rapture: Australia Undone

  Every journey begins with a single step, every story with a slogan or a cliche, every step towards redemption down a narrow clifftop path.  These moments, these movements in the ether of things, protected by spirits, exposed for all to see, a frightening circumstance, an addict in the house, the fridge full of dents where he had attacked the fridge, broken pieces here and there. Where did it end? This Satanic ritual? How could the country's leaders be so indifferent to the fate of the citizenry. Everything was roiling downwards. There was little money about, pockets of prosperity, mostly just pockets of middle class survival while the rest scrabbled and shrank into some bloodstained quiet, for these were killing machines, this quiet despair, these indifferent politicians, the armies of useless bureaucrats destroying the country one form at a time. An encroachment on decency. While in Oak Flats everything shrank, just like in the rest of the country. A bankrupt country, their...

  We are not human, we have never been human, the voices repeated time and time again, perhaps to differentiate themselves from the PsyOp programs and the ceaseless drift of voices from the surrounding houses and the nearby police station.  They were calling, flinching, swirling in the high air and looming over the freezing valleys of that cold winter.  A disillusioned population grew ever more disgruntled. Nobody, and I mean nobody, believed anymore that the government was working in their interests, or represented their interests. Too many people had been robbed, or blindsided. Too many people were working hard just to stand still, or sink slowly into an ever greater pool of debt.  Sinking, and no way to get ahead. It was all a chimera, the Iran War in the distance, to and fro, to and fro, the haze of a nuclear bomb in the background; more than a possibility, if they were mad enough.  Which they probably were. The tent flaps singed in the cold breeze, families...

  They were erecting tents along the perimeters of the cliffs; where we could edge, where we could soar, where all could be lost in a simple, single flick. The stakes barely held against the wind. The fronts of the tents were flapping in the cold air. Soldiers sought shelter inside the flimsy structures. All was not lost.  He had just turned 74, celebrated might be overstating the case, but the shock of it, he hadn't expected. So he suddenly just started pottering, like an old man, and everything that he had longed for suddenly seemed so far away. Yet new roads opened. Birds soared off cliffs. Arrangements were made. We came to you with open arms and you turned inward, denying your fate. Denying the work that needed to be done. He was appalled at his own behaviour, frightened of the consequences, moving silently in fear; and yet, there truly was hope.  The whale migration was moving up the coast. His old stomping ground at the Cross, once Australia's premier entertainment...