CONFLICT ZONE
Central / Western desert Papunya
The street riots of the future were already breaking through into the present, a land of consequence.
Broken.
He could feel them even as he half-listened to football blather at the local Table of Knowledge, a strange curving stream, dark figures shouting in torment, fury.
The days, at last, were growing longer, and, despite the intensity of tormenting imagery, a pallid light settled and then faded across the nesting suburb.
Not far off, the once magic lake.
"This government mismanages absolutely everything, and it has badly mismanaged immigration," Old Alex said after the subject of the Sydney terror arrests, and their Muslim nature, was broached.
"I agree with you on that," Phil said, who seemed determined some days not to agree with him on anything, for whatever reason; and at other times was one of the only people to show kindness or understanding.
Everything ran behind curtains.
"You'll have me to deal with," he had heard in the ether one day, as Phil had risen to his defence. He did not deny it. Nothing was ever fully recounted.
These people were entrenched in place. While he, as Ray Bradbury once put it, was clinging to the world by a single finger. Barely encased in flesh.
From the outside, there was nothing to see, a patrol officer moving on the crowd. "Nothing to see here, nothing to see."
External and internal landscapes.
"We're all friends here."
Nobody ever told the full truth. Perhaps it was best that way, although there was little to conceal except perhaps embarrassment, and in any case the years were fleeing towards a Vanishing Point, when these fleshly frames and false or inflamed, circuitous, self-confirming gossip would mean nothing.
Old Alex, stranded in one place long enough to sort through some boxes, found an interview with a broken lover Ian Farr, whose blood from a suicide attempt, rising from under the blanket of a group orgy, still scarred; far far less than it had scarred Ian, who in later years had gone to the doctor with a stomach ache one day and been dead within the week.
He had been an accomplished pianist who had destroyed his own ability to play. Old Alex, incensed by the emotional blackmail of the suicide attempt, had refused to visit him in hospital.
How hard would it have been, to show kindness?
It had been, once again, the wrong thing to do; and now, old men and their regrets, was a breach of decency which still cluttered conscience, detritus washed up on a distant shore, nothing.
Already most of those who had known Ian had passed on, and Old Alex couldn't even think who to share the interview with.
In the broader realm, the dreams of a Big Australian, first invoked up by the squattocracy of the so-call Liberal Party and then foisted on to the whole country, already lay in ruins, a victim of its own internal contradictions.
With their bloated dreams and a ballooning, inept bureaucracy metastasising across the social landscape, with the spiraling cost of everything, a broken democracy, they were witnessing first hand the march towards a totalitarian state.
On the evening news, the Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull touted terror, as he had done all year.
Governments, when unpopular and concerned about their grip on power, perpetuate fear through the use of the media. Then fear becomes the ulcer of the masses that cripples their psyche and vanquishes their freedom, and incapacitates people and renders them impotent. Fear is conducive to regressive behaviours by responsible adults, where people become dependent on their government as a parent figure, to protect them from evildoers. So they become willing to relinquish their most intimate and sacred rights in order to feel safe.
Maud, commenting on The Australian website.
Terror raids across Sydney screamed headlines.
Turnbull, that grey General of Stasi Australia, his pallid skin already peeling from the weight of the dead as they struggled to break through an appalling arrogance. Haunted by the ghosts of those he had been responsible for killing. The vainglory dreams of running the country, Il Duce, slamming into reality.
Australia, one news report claimed, had just been responsible for dropping more than 800 bombs on Mosul in Iraq.
What happened there was a war crime by any measure.
Now the attention had turned to Raqqa in Syria, the last redoubt, or so the propaganda claimed, of Islamic State.
There would be a very heavy price to pay for continued stupidity.
THE BIGGER STORY:
A family of suspected Islamist extremists allegedly plotted to bring down an Australian commercial jet by gassing the passengers, in what authorities believe was a major terrorist attack plan orchestrated by Islamic State militants from within Syria.
Travellers were warned last night to expect major delays at the nation’s airports as authorities rolled out extra security measures to counter what sources said was a fast-moving, still unfolding terror conspiracy, the full extent of which was not yet known.
Four Lebanese Australians — two fathers and two sons — were in custody after police swooped on the cell and thwarted what they will allege was a sophisticated attempt to kill hundreds of people by crashing a civilian plane.
Airports around the country were on heightened alert as counter-terrorism police worked to learn all they could about the operation. It was only on Wednesday that police received intelligence about the alleged cell from authorities overseas.
Malcolm Turnbull described the alleged plot as “major’’ and “elaborate’’ and said the government would impose extra security on airports across the country.
ISIL militants are coming under further attack in the Syrian city of Raqqa by US-backed Kurdish-led forces.
American jets are carrying out airstrikes as fighters from an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias (SDF) advance further into the city, a stronghold of ISIL in Syria since 2014.
This as Syria’s army and its allies reached the edge of the last town held by ISIL in Homs province.
In Raqqa, fighters from the SDF alliance say they seized drones and ammunition from ISIL.
One fighter showed a reporter what they found. “We found these and took them. They would fly these and explore our areas, we took them. You can also see mortars, made by hand, and here are the planes and bombs they would make.”
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says ISIL fighters attacked the US-backed forces east of Raqqa on Friday, abducting a number of people.