The Rapture: Australia Undone

Well, he’s moving through the flames of anarchy He’s moving through the winds of tyranny And the sweet, sweet tears of liberty Yeah, moving round the world He’s moving through your body like a prehistoric bird He’s moving round the world Nick Cave Wild God After one of the darkest periods in human history, after the greatest medical scandal, after the greatest crime, they coalesced, in a kind of way, as if on an ocean floor. He, too, Dear Old Alex, well cut the dear, had been through his own winter of the soul, so to speak, where he sat in front of the fire and drank and smoke too much, and rediscovered a love of whisky, and grew more forlorn by the day, tormented by images of bullets passing through his brain, of the acrid smell after an explosion, an instant where everything went still, where everything was destroyed. That smell of gunpowder or dynamite or whatever it was, the crackling in the air after a flash of lightning, destruction. As if preparing for his own death.  All th...

  Thank you for this opportunity, for us to be alive. That's what they told him, as the wind gusted through the swirling trees. He didn't understand it. He didn't expect it. And there they were, delighted at the opportunity to be in the physical realm.  Why he thought these things he would never know. And later they would tell him, we have been alive for a very long time. But not in this way, not in this realm; and so, we love you for the opportunity to see this beautiful world. He could feel when they were interested, that too was strange. Usually in social situations; and the organising principle of everything.  Meanwhile, one business after another shut down. And Australia headed towards a kind of internal bankruptcy, sleepwalking, people always said of the Australian population, and that was true, too. Sleepwalking into disaster, to finish the cliché. And so it was, and so it will always be, the phrases that repeated through these dark times, or dark for many whose bu...