And Then What Happened?

*

Then I saw the road, I heard the thunder
Tumble, and felt the talons of the rain
The night we came to Moorebank in slab-dark,
So dark you bore no body, had no face,
But a sheer voice that rattled out of air
(As now you'd cry if I could break the glass),
A voice that spoke beside me in the bush,
Loud for a breath or bitten off by wind,
Of Milton, melons, and the Rights of Man,
And blowing flutes, and how Tahitian girls
Are brown and angry-tongued, and Sydney girls
Are white and angry-tongued, or so you'd found.
But all I heard was words that didn't join
So Milton became melons, melons girls,
And fifty mouths, it seemed, were out that night,
And in each tree an Ear was bending down,
Or something that had just run, gone behind the grass,
When blank and bone-white, like a maniac's thought,
The naphtha-flash of lightning slit the sky,
Knifing the dark with deathly photographs.
There's not so many with so poor a purse
Or fierce a need, must fare by night like that,
Five miles in darkness on a country track,
But when you do, that's what you think.
Five bells.

Kenneth Slessor

And the nobility of the savage, that was not right. He could see teetering drag queens on their high heels, blowing kisses, reeking of cheap perfume, telling tales of outrage and personal courage with every lisp. Not well dear not well they shrieked at each other, like giant malformed parrots. He was stunned; everything had gone back to normal. Lucky finally stopped barking; someone called the council, the barking dog ranger came around. Suddenly it all seems so quiet. The loud constant obsessive barking which had populated his every free moment at home for years was finally gone. He hadn't realised how sick it was making, that constant bark, never being able to relax, constant, constant, the drip, destroying every last spark of sanity as the deranged creature howled and barked and barked.

It was shocking what had happened. Not just the goons roaming the streets, extensions of the thought police, searching for everyone who did not accept the government was marvellous, the courts fair and just, the bureaucracy running like a well oiled machine. The farcical state of decay into which democracy had fallen, with salutary warnings coming from Britain as politician after politician fell on their sword, exposed for rorting the system. No one could have any faith any more. The Westminster system was in crisis. The jihadists rallied. He was shocked, more at how quickly it had happened than anything else. The young ones had never seen Labor in power, they didn't realise how profligate they were, what hopeless administrators they were.

The voice was clear. Take no enemies. Take no prisoners. Fight strong. Be proud. Go back to the village and find your soul, discover the person who once was. Most people's lives were pretty damn boring, he realised that when he came to write about them. He had once thought everyone had an interesting tale to tell, but the school yards were empty and the same all over the world, a triumphant bully, a cowering victim, bright shiny eyes let me go let me go. The drum beat had gone. And the old voices, the imaginary wasps, they drifted on the wind. The stories of the city were already tiresome. Dealers and spruikers and street walkers, He had tried to join them, to become part of the criminal trash, but his impulses were more artistic.

He wanted, he never understood why, to transform ordinary events into artistic objects, to make statues out of clay, to aspire to a higher cause. These aspirations were decades old, and linked back to the voices of his ancestors, now weak in the modern world, overwhelmed by noise and information static. There was no way to really know what would happen. There was no way to be blessed and courageous all at once? All because modern man had defied the church. All because the shadows were marching through the corn, the shadows of clouds winging across the fields, brief moments in the torture scheme where the world was blessed and God prickled in the plant life as they admired another stunning day.

These gasps of beauty were rare in a city bleak with winter and a population groaning under their mortgage payments as they peer out from their flash four-wheel-drives. The city was a place inside his head; street view. It ignored all the casual beauties just around the corner; the bright bright views up and down the harbour, islands floating in the sun, rich greens and blues painted across their vision. He had wanted to go down, down, into the heart of the matter, but instead nausea gripped him and shadows ran fleeting from his side. The silence of this place, after a dog had barked constantly for more than five years, had spooked him. There was no other way. Did they kill it in the gas ovens? Was it trapped in an even smaller concrete prison with the guards outside? Were they warming the ovens already? Was this animal's sad fate really his fault?

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/05/26/2581485.htm

The number of swine flu cases in Australia has risen to 44, with eight more Victorians confirmed as having the virus and Queensland recording a further five positives.

The latest confirmed cases are a 32-year-old man and seven children aged between six and 18, all of whom live in Melbourne's northern and western suburbs.

Health officials are yet to reveal which schools the children attend.

The Queensland cases are five people among 13 who were tested at the Gold Coast Hospital after arriving on a flight from Sydney.

They had been passengers on the Pacific Dawn cruise ship, which docked in Sydney yesterday.

Those who tested positive were children aged five and seven, two 37-year-olds and a 45-year-old.

So far there are 24 confirmed cases in Victoria, nine in New South Wales, seven in Queensland, two in South Australia, and one each in Western Australia and the ACT.

Four people aboard the Pacific Dawn have since been diagnosed with swine flu and authorities say there is a risk the Victorians may have had contact with them.

Authorities are also trying to track down dozens of Victorians who were on the Pacific Dawn.

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/technology/818261/bogan-clare-may-have-hollywood-future

Hollywood funnyman Will Ferrell says Australia's most infamous bogan Clare Werbeloff may have a future on the screen after watching footage of her famous "eyewitness account" on a shooting.

Appearing on A Current Affair, the Talladega Nights star said Werbeloff's fabricated testimony about a Kings Cross shooting was "pretty good, pretty convincing" — although he suggested her accent might be a bit too thick for international audiences.

"I have no idea what she said," Ferrell said, before asking what a "wog" was and prompting interviewer Ben Fordham to bring the exchange to an abrupt close.

Werbelloff had revealed earlier on in the program that she has received death threats.

"I'm under fire — one lady phoned in [during a radio interview] and said I deserved to be shot and asked how I would feel if I got hit by a bus and someone made money off that," she said.

Werbeloff said she was not seeing the things as a joke and was now "taking it quite seriously".

"It's horrible — it makes me feel like a really bad person … we need to focus on the crime that’s happened," she said.

"I don’t condone violence at all."

Werbeloff, who polarised the country with her controversial and false report about a Kings Cross shooting just one week ago, also apologised to the victim of the incident.

"I'm so sorry — I couldn’t imagine having a gun pointed in your face and being shot," she said.

"I'm sorry that it's come to this and if there's anything I can do ... I'd love to meet with him … it wasn't my intention to make him feel bad."

The northern beaches local said her life had changed dramatically since her bogus report aired on Nine News.

"I am 19 and it's just changed my life … I've got fans and I've got people that hate me and I don't know what to do … I don't know what the future holds," she said.

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=817894

Twitter, the website that asks what everybody's doing, says it wants to be doing a TV series.

The social-networking site has teamed with Reveille productions and Brillstein Entertainment Partners to develop an unscripted series based on the popular site, which invites 140-character postings from members around the world.

The show would harness Twitter to put players on the trail of celebrities in an interactive, competitive format, the show's producers announced on Monday.

"Right now, Twitter is an incredible technological and cultural phenomenon," said executive producer Amy Ephron, who created the TV show and took it to Twitter.

The producers call their proposed series the first to bring the immediacy of Twitter to the TV screen.

"It captures what's best about Twitter, and it's a compelling TV show in its own right," said Noah Oppenheim, head of unscripted development for Reveille.

Like Ephron, he was tightlipped on any details about the show, its format, even its title. He said the partners are saving all that for their upcoming pitch meetings with networks.

Once a network deal is signed, "We're ready to go into production," Oppenheim said.