The Rapture: Australia Undone

  As always, he had more ideas than he knew what to do with, and one of them was to begin a series of articles badged Australia's Hall of Fame, highlighting the characters who had emerged in these recent troubled years.  Top of the Pops, he guessed, would be Matthew Martin Gray of Café Locked Out, who had distinguished himself as one of the most significant documenters of the era.  Perhaps next would be Rukshan Fernando, who moved from being a moderately successful wedding photographer to one of the best and clearly most sincere commentators. Avi Yemini, always controversial, and Monica Smit both had new books out, forged in this era of conflict and repression. If the government, and its institutional libraries, funded as always by Australia's beleaguered taxpayers, were doing their job, they would be right across these developments. But of course they weren't.  As for the mainstream media, it simply couldn't be relied on to do its job, with the television news ...

  They were just cast there. His brother was ailing. The country was toxic.  "The country's gone bad," he said at his morning coffee. "The world's gone bad," the proprietor replied.  "English!!!" he thought. This strange language.  Around, about, above, below, the Voice campaign, for those who were paying attention, grew more putrid, more divisive and more confusing by the day; dragging the country down with it. The Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's whole hearted involvement diminished him and diminished his office. The gravy train of indigenous activists, with thousands of organisations and billions dollars, some $28 billion on one count, exposed. What? Nobody else's voice counted? No one else had a history?  The  Rousseauian discourse, the noble savage, defied all logic, stepped outside the realm. It was nothing. It was everything. It was just damned downright putrid, this disgusting and unnecessary conflict, this repeated name calling, t...

We are honour bound to tell him.  There they had been, so dishonest. There was a muffled story at the end of every alley. His dreams were strange, very strange. A moment in time. It was a terrible dilemma. They moved upon the water and were gone. Anchored in place, the pale fronds. Dream high, dream hard.  Petrol was over two dollars a litre. Electricity prices had run out of control. Everybody had lost faith in the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese. Well, maybe not everybody, but he was behind in the polls for the first time, after an extended honeymoon. He was only there because he wasn't Scott Morrison, whose stinking corpse still cluttered up the Australian political benches.  Nasty. The world moved in a sawed fashion, a creeping irrigation, a rippled hard surface; there was movement across the neutral zone; the voices were deception, the news media was deception, everything they touched turned to thieved gold or corrupt dust, blowing in the wind now, their integrity s...