The Rapture: Australia Undone

  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...

  They had been preparing for a Black Mass, there in that humble place. Evil was, evil did, it truly stalked us all in those strange times, with talk of nuclear war in the Middle East, all the major prophets and prophecies predicting the End of Days, and a strange, eiry fatality which overtook them all. What can you do?  Horizons shut down, ambitions closed, a periphery was built around all their dreams. Everything became minute. Humans survived as their predecessors, Great Apes, Neanderthals, had once done, in remote, inaccessible valleys far from the world's centres of powers. Massive burn marks, scorch marks, from that screaming horror that was being inflicted on us all. Like animals since time began, well time began on this planet, they sheltered in place. There was no beginning. There was no end. The cloud showed us how it was done. Everything that was happening now, the evolution of super intelligence, had happened before.  That was why they operated in those massiv...

  He had discovered a new hole in the front room where his passing "meth head friend" had stayed for a few months. Holes in the wall. Holes in the floor. Dents in the fridge door. Electricity bills to pay.  What was that? The price of loneliness. Someone had been severely bashed. Someone was in hospital. Someone was nowhere to be found. These were dangerous days.  Those days, those images of the past, lingered on; the throat slitting in ancient forts, the medieval armour, the tough times, the candlelight; the rough love, for expectations were low. Australia? Australia was breaking apart into enclaves of rich and poor, into ethnic enclaves. While the resident population had been entirely, one hundred percent betrayed. And the indigenous the left loved to bleat over, sanctify, mumble respectively and apologise for the actions of colonials 250 years ago, they, too, had been utterly betrayed.  While billions, billions and billions of dollars, were wasted on mad bureaucra...

  Something terrible had happened to someone he knew, he assumed it was C, the crashing out crash landing meth addict who had come knocking at his house, homeless, and had stayed until he started smashing holes in his walls and yelling, shirtless, at the neighbours at 3am. It was lonely up the hill some days, well, most days, and he craved company, normal human company; and as always envied those villagers in remote mountain enclaves, people who grew up knowing all the people around them, whose identity was admired in those tiny hamlets, surrounded all their lives by the majestic. For it was in those remote mountain places that humanity, or a type of humanity, virtually a precursor, would survive. Bashed, some would say deservedly, the madness that overtook that poor man, now hospitalised and in extreme pain, showered through his distorted memory. He had no idea if any of it was true. His head could not be trusted to tell the truth about unseen things. There were too many operative...

  Kids erect sign in Jamberoo, NSW X Wins Court Battle Against Australia's eSafety Commissioner The court rejected the eSafety Commissioner's push to apply stricter rules on X's direct messages and encrypted chats alongside existing social media obligations, which could have led to penalties up to A$49.5 million. X stays regulated solely as a social media service, marking another clash between the Elon Musk-owned platform and commissioner Julie Inman Grant. The decision highlights tensions between online safety efforts against harmful content and concerns over regulatory overreach, with some linking it to debates on free speech and the agency's future. Derelict in his own home, the rats came out to play, literally and figuratively, human and animal.  He had noticed them a few months before, appearing briefly on the verandah. He initially thought they might be some rare Australian marsupial, the endangered Southern Potoroo or something of that order, and did nothing to d...

  People are livid. This is no longer tall-poppy syndrome or healthy scepticism. They want the whole system burnt to the ground.  The divide between ordinary Australians and the political class could not be greater. Politicians lecture us about what they stand for and then do the opposite. They may not all have lived by the skin of their teeth, but few have ever scrounged for durrie butts while properly down and out. The gap shows in the numbers. Jim Chalmers and Chris Bowen post ‘the facts’ on housing and energy. Westpac says mortgage applications are down 20 per cent, Commonwealth Bank 15 per cent, while yet another renewable energy project heads into administration. The Coalition cannot atone for its own failings. People remember it is part of the problem. While many politicians enjoyed European summer holidays, ordinary Australians shivered their way to work – truckies and factory hands, tradies in the frost, cleaners battling cold and damp, retail staff dealing with self-...

  For many people the impending collapse was already here. The streets were quiet, much quieter than they should be, as one business after another fell into bankruptcy, as the public became more dispirited by the day, as this egregiously overtaxed and over regulated country fell, a giant, a nation, in slow motion collapse. He was coming back from the dead, the forest litter, the hiding, the circling demons and the evil that was soaking across the world. There was no reason to continue; for many. There was no reason to be proud of their country. There was no reason to wake up, to thrust their hands in the sky in moments of celebration, to be. There was no reason at all. That was the state of this slow, these days not so slow, collapse. Everyone could feel it. Nobody knew what to do.  Nothing can stop what is coming, as Elon says. Nothing.  And so the human race, on the precipice, went through the daily motions of life as busy and employed individuals. But it was useless. T...

  A wild morning on the dog walk There is no escape. You can't be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don't try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Herman Hesse. Well, then, the story, or this part of the story, has to begin somewhere, he said conversationally. For days that giant disembodied eagles wing, blanketing the sky, a piercing eye, all of it had come back to here. "Take root," the spirits said, but here, in this dismal, lonely place. Well, it didn't have to be that way, but ...

  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...