The Rapture: Australia Undone

  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...

  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...