In Darkness We Found You

Hunted down, I came upon
A place of ferns and grass
Gathered to a redbud tree
And now their footsteps pass
Where I crouch in dread
Discovery my certain death
Her leaves reaching for my head
As I suspend my breath

[Chorus]
Redbud tree, shelter me, shelter me
Redbud tree, shelter me, shelter me

Mark Knopfler. 

Conflict. Controversy. Disgust. Animosity. Curiosity. Boredom.

"Together we will write history."

"He's in for a terrible shock."

Everything swirled, grasping for cover, deep in those woods and far from the light. They were accompanying him. He didn't know the answer. His brain had gone into silence. He could barely recall his date of birth. Drained. Sapped. Manipulated. He didn't trust the screens. He didn't trust the voices. He didn't trust his own judgement. 

But they were little things, here in the great reaches. The hint of old corridors. Balconies. Brief pleasures. Imperial lusts. 

The world had gone bad. The country had gone bad. Septic. The population, drained by excessive taxation, bleaching white the sterility of ignorance, they mustered and disappeared and he came to see them for what they were. 

The darkness was right. There was no hope. But of course it was a strange way of viewing things, surrounded by enemies and the occasional alliance, people who did not have the courage to face him face to face, confess their harassment, be true. 

And these billion dollar entities which had so much to protect, their own corruption, their own greed, the reason why no one shot them out of the sky despite all the damage they did. 

These people, who had been responsible for injecting millions of Australian children with an unsafe, defective, dangerous and at best ineffective vaccine on what was now widely viewed as a Covid scam manipulated by the big end of town to reap billions of dollars off a terrified population, and kill millions in the process, all of it was an evil beyond imagining, and yet there it was; as these same people peddled climate change, that is, yet further multi-billion contracts for a chimera, these so-called "elites" who manufactured crisis and thrived in the aftermath; all of it deadly, sick, sad in essence. 

The valley stirred.

For one brief moment, like a sped up movie of passing centuries compressed into minutes, or seconds, of villages rising and falling in the valley below, or opposite. 

The isolation drove him down. Yet he was the only one who could do anything about it. 

A descent into purgatory, deliberate perhaps, took time to climb back out of.

And the country; riven. Not vaccines this time. The Voice. The Indigenous Voice to Parliament. Which had descended into an appalling race baiting miasma. The sneering, jeering left denigrated everyone with their idiot placards, Vote Yes.

He was old fashioned. If you told him to do something he was more likely to do the opposite. It wasn't an effective strategy but there it was. They lied, the government apparatchiks, they lied and lied and lied. 

While others died. 

It was a transit point, a putrid, dishonest transit point in the nation's history; and no one, well certainly not the government and it's vast creaking bureaucracies, told the truth.

AUSTRALIAN MAINSTREAM MEDIA SITES

ABC

Immortalised in Paul Kelly's iconic song To Her Door, this drug rehabilitation centre near Byron Bay has a rich and recognisable alumni. 

"He went to the Buttery

He stayed about a year

Then he wrote a letter

He said, 'I wanna see ya'

She thought he sounded better

She sent him up the fare"

Lyrics from Paul Kelly's To Her Door

One of its greatest fans is former Divinyls, now Hoodoo Gurus member, Rick Grossman.

Like in the song To Her Door, Grossman experienced his own rock'n'roll redemption through recovery at the Buttery.

"I've got no doubt that if I hadn't come here, I probably wouldn't be sitting here talking to you, so I'm pretty grateful. It was life-changing," Grossman says.

"You know, a big part of addiction is denial.

"There are people here who made me actually realise what was going on. You know, addiction is not a little thing."

GUARDIAN AUSTRALIA

Russell Brand has been accused of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse over a seven-year period at the height of his fame.

The allegations were the result of a joint investigation by the Sunday Times, the Times and Channel 4 Dispatches. Brand denies the allegations.

The Times titles said they contacted Brand’s representatives with details of the allegations – as well as information to help him recall the incidents in question – in advance of its planned publication, giving them eight days to respond.

The papers reported that his lawyers initially claimed to be unable to do so because of the “large litany of questions” and the decision to agree to the women’s requests to anonymise them.

According to the report, Brand’s lawyers characterised the way in which the request for comment was made as part of a “pre-conceived strategy aimed at damaging their client” – adding that he believed there was a “deeply concerning agenda to all this, namely the fact that he is an alternative media broadcaster competing with mainstream media”. The Sunday Times said they did not reply to further requests for comment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGr_PVUHn2I

SKY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npqZ-2608oc

“Hysterical media elite” are rushing to defend prominent Yes campaigner for the Voice Professor Marcia Langton after she declared the No case was based on “racism and stupidity,” says Sky News Digital Editor Jack Houghton. Mr Houghton said some interpreted Professor Langton’s statement to slander all No voters, but “hysterical” journalists labelled it as “fake news”. “They even twisted the story to make it sound like Langton was talking only about campaigners, not the case for a No vote in general,” he said. Mr Houghton said Professor Langton – instead of owning her own comments – threatened to sue journalists over the semantics in a bid to silence her critics, which the ABC “lapped up”. “The lazy journalists had rushed to her defence without so much as a basic Google search,” he said. “And ironically, those journalists who dared to push back were labelled fake news and misinformation by a cohort of people who are supposed to be professional journalists.”

SMH

The Yes camp will use rallies for 50,000 people and concerts in capital cities on Sunday to try and draw a line under a messy opening fortnight, after the Voice referendum campaign became mired in a verbal crossfire about racism and the impact of colonisation.

Voice co-architect Noel Pearson said at a Yes23 rally in Sydney’s Redfern that the campaign would need to avoid “controversy bombs” over the remaining four weeks to referendum day on October 14, as he dismissed comments by Coalition frontbencher Jacinta Nampijinpa Price that British colonisation had no lasting negative impacts on Indigenous Australians.

“What I believe, is the only path forward for the Yes campaign over the next four weeks is to keep pushing a positive message,” Pearson said. “Don’t be distracted by these attempts to chuck controversy bombs into the water to blow up an argument over here that’s got nothing to do with the referendum.”

He said Price’s comments, made in response to a question about colonisation at the National Press Club on Thursday, were “just provocative words”.

“They ought to be taken as, alright, she’s woken up or her advisors have woken up and thought, what is the most annoying thing I could say today to cause a controversy?”

Pearson reiterated his comments about controversies when he attended a gathering of residents and other Yes campaigners at a “yarning table” in a pocket park in the inner-city suburb of Summer Hill where the Indigenous leader had lived during his formative university years.