FORTY DAYS AND FORTY NIGHTS
Picture John Stapleton Lightning Ridge 6 December, 2016.
I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.
Deutronomy 18:18
"Barmy," said one of the Watchers on the Watch; and Old Alex launched into a lecture on protocol, common decency and respect. .
"Yes, it's barmy weather. Barmy weather. Don't ridicule me. I could easily be your father."
None of the more senior Watchers on the Watch wanted to be out here, in the gusting heat and barren lands, in harsh conditions and drying winds, amid the flocks of Apostle birds and the decaying machinery, the shuffling and the mad, the vacant stairs of the genuinely bewildered.
"I have been very badly harassed for a very long time," Old Alex said repeatedly, there on the border of sleep, on the borders of consciousness; referring to the ceaseless harassment by the incompetent, dishonest and vengeful authorities who had pursued the word of the mafia linked and utterly corrupt Thai police to make his life a misery. You don't find stories watering a suburban backyard, but that didn't seem to occur to the geniuses in Australia's national security agencies, and so he had been tarred by those he had brushed up against.
But an ebbing tide takes out the rubbish; and already the clutter of false allegations and those who had attempted to make their reputation at his expense were being flushed across the mud flats, down gutters and drains, into the tumbling glitter of the anonymous surf; and he could not be more pleased to never see them again.
There were greater spirits abroad. They would find their way. They would help him.
"How did you fall to Earth?"
Out here on the edge of desert, on the edge of sanity, there were always the voices of the divine, unlikely moments propelled out of God's ragged army, peculiar wisdoms in the rough stone. Why here, why opal here?
Once upon a time they were a children's toy for the indigenous, the coloured stones. Now fortunes were made, in secret.
And he heard the cry: "We have come to protect you."
The personality that had once been Stapo had long since been overwhelmed; and there on the edge of the desert, he reached up into different layers of consciousness. There had been a swirl of rain through the night, a pounding on the roof, as the storms swept across some of the country's most marginal acreage.
While many things in the overpowering heat; with the crushed houses and the squat, abandoned buildings, were far more prosaic.
Just like that, he had become one of the IT experts at the local Lightning Ridge Neighbourhood Centre.
One of the more common questions was how to print something. Control P Click, he would respond.
"Control, what's that?"
The most startling, transformative technology in the history of man and yet out here, in the so-called Outback, the crawling state of the internet, the circling blue buffering symbol the most common of all experiences, was an insult to everybody who paid taxes; a connivance of government to further dumb down the population.
Radio National's Breakfast show with Fran Kelly dedicated much of the morning to yet another learned questioning about emissions trading schemes and what Australia should do to stop climate change.
Retreat five years, ten years, there were the same conversations. Hundreds of millions, billions of dollars in funding and all that had been achieved was to gift Australians with the most expensive electricity in the world, in the case of New South Wales, unreliable supply, and vast green bureaucracies.
He frittered in annoyance, and went swimming at the local pool. There was no use being constantly annoyed by choosing to listen to the white noise the government decreed as news; and which in fact was nothing but propaganda and contrivance. There was no use wishing he could be the news editor. That wasn't going to happen.
The Lightning Ridge pool was one of the best public pools in the country; and there in the 100F heat, with the sun frying his skin, the splash of cool water was as delightful as ever.
"It's 60 degrees in the shearing shed," said one of the girls from one of the neighbouring properties. She was talking Centigrade.
"Is anyone working?" he asked.
"Oh yes," she said. "Me, too."
"Jesus," he said, and swam on.
"A crown of thorns."
As if all had become suffering, in this degraded state.
THE BIGGER STORY:
The Russian government said on Monday it would start talks with Washington on a rebel withdrawal from Aleppo this week as Russian-backed Syrian forces fought to seize more territory from rebels who are struggling to avoid a major defeat.
The latest army attack, which saw fierce clashes around the Old City, aims to cut off another area of rebel control in eastern Aleppo and tighten the noose on opposition-held districts where tens of thousands of people are trapped.
Advances in recent weeks have brought Damascus, backed militarily by Russia, Iran and Lebanon's Hezbollah, closer to recapturing Syria's second largest city before the nearly six-year war and a prize long sought by President Bashar al-Assad.
The rebels are now reduced to an area just kilometers across.
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