Bludgeoning The Country Into Submission

They laughed fit to split and then were dead. 

There was caution thrown to the wind and combat ready. Another spring of protest. 

The protests that began in their hundreds a year before now numbered in their thousands. 

The vast expenditure on policing showed a cruelty beyond all reckoning; an imagining that would not just haunt the victims being wrestled to the ground; but the soul of a nation destroyed.

They curled, he listened, they cupped his chin and stared google eyed straight into his heart; and the majesty built, the perimeters set, the sky a deep haze, the murmuring unconquered. We came to you. If there was anything to be learnt from this: no one needs the pretenders. He remained silent in face of all their evils. The course was already set. It mattered little, their murmurings and pretensions, but there was one he liked. No amount of threats would rid him of their pestilence. In the scheme of these things, in ancient temples and temples yet to be, in the waft of air on skin and perfumed rooms, in loves lost, so many loves lost, no, it would not be possible, he said, show respect. 

You may not understand, but that, too, is of no consequence. 

We're not running to your timetable. We barely know you're there. 

Ancient forests and courses of human action; and they come now. 

A year ago, that last September, Australia witnessed some of the most violent protests and largest mass arrests in its history. 

A year on, and the sullen indifference of the population had turned to something else. 

He noticed it, in friends his own age, edging 70; they had been wild in the day, now they were ultra-conformist. It had always confused him; those frontier seekers, those wild wild nights; just how conservative they were as they aged. 

They bought the govenrment line, hook line and sinker. 

That same generation whose most transformative experiences had been the anti-Vietnam protests of the 1970s. 

For just as we still did, back then Australia signed up to America's endless wars, and danced a dance signed on the dotted line of truly massive defence contracts. 

It was spilt in blood. It was raked off an impoverished people. It was manufactured out of thin air. 

And while taxpayer funded academics still blathered on about climate change, the people themselves had lost all their liberties. 

This day, another day of protest, thousands of police and military personnel would line the streets. 

And this day, just as they did a year ago, brave souls, his souls, their souls, would face certain arrest against the phalanxes of black wrapped police officers, and the credibility of the country, the credibility of the authorities, the stability of the country, its now increasingly uncertain, tendentious, contentious future, would all be borne aloft. 

What you do this day will live forever. 

Gird your loins

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