THE FINAL REFUGE OF GOD'S RAGGED ARMY
"Adventure Before Dementia" read the sign on the side of a bus passing the Neighbourhood Centre.
Just as he had done two years before, he had retreated to Lightning Ridge in the north-west of the state.
It had been a wet winter, and when he arrived the landscape had been remarkably green for a place that often looked more like Mars than Earth.
But now the gusts of hot wind dried out plant life into crackling sticks in an instant, the colouring went to pastel shades of red and brown and olive, and an ennui crept across the low slung buildings of the outback town. It was too hot to do anything.
Except on this one day, when the sky was overcast and he could see the streaks of rain falling from overcast skies, far off across flat burnt plains.
Lightning Ridge was a place of elderly orphans, Australia's largest open air asylum, as the joke went, the only place in Australia where four out of every two people you meet are schizophrenic.
It was one of the only places in the world where opal could be found, and so the harsh landscape was littered with old mines and rusting machinery, abandoned camps, homes that were no longer homes, repeated scenes of previous endeavour, everything a reflection of someone else's past hopes.
Everyone who comes to Lightning Ridge is escaping from something, the saying went, and certainly the town had its fair share of old jailbirds, with their cheap prison tats and in some cases puffed faces, they'd been smashed up so often. Something had gone seriously wrong in their lives, and they weren't coming back from whatever had destroyed him.
Just as before, he was escaping excessive, intrusive, offensive and abusive surveillance. Back then it was the mafia linked authorities of Thailand, incensed by what he had written and determined to destroy him. The PsyOps operations were running in full force.
This time around it had been the Australian authorities.
"Tell your bosses they are dishonest, incompetent and corrupt," he told one of the Watchers on the Watch.
"I'm not going to tell him that!" came the response.
But he was tired of it, tired of them, tired of the sustained abuse, the idiot boofheads who could not tell the difference between false claims generated by the Thai mafia and their Australian cohorts; whose powers of investigation were sub-zero and whose integrity was somewhere beneath that.
It was difficult, expensive and uncomfortable for them to continue the chase out here; and as he kept asking, "To what end?"
Indeed there seemed no end to it, no motivation but abuse and bullying, no rationality in the continued targetting, except, he assumed, a desperate attempt to cover up their own malfeasance, their own outlandish and vindictive abuse of public funds.
"Surveillance is abuse, surveillance is abuse," he kept muttering in half sleep, out there in that outpost on the edge of what was an even harsher, more dramatic, and emptier interior.
And so his life continued to run backwards, through triumphs and regrets, loves and disasters, visual tableaus and the deaths of old friends.
On the taxpayer funded Radio National he heard an earnest discussion from taxpayer funded agriculture and cooking experts on how climate change would affect the spaghetti bolognaise of the future, the upshot being that the carrots might be a different shape, Meanwhile, the bombardment of Aleppo and Australia's tacit and explicit support for the Syrian dictator Assad went entirely undiscussed.
And his head went round and round: Those who tormented him had no idea; these illiterate thugs.
And he read apropos of nothing, a piece on the high death rate in Lightning Ridge:
THE BIGGER STORY:
Syria's army and allied militia advanced towards rebel-held areas of Aleppo's Old City on Sunday in an attack which a military source predicted would be over in a matter of weeks.
Western and regional states backing the rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad appear unwilling or unable to do anything to prevent a major defeat for those fighting to topple the Syrian leader, whose campaign to regain all Aleppo has been backed by the Russian air force and foreign Shi'ite militias.
Rebel groups in Aleppo have told the United States they will not leave their shrinking enclave, a senior rebel official told Reuters, after Russia call for talks with Washington over a full withdrawal of opposition fighters.
But the rebels may eventually have no choice but to negotiate a withdrawal from eastern Aleppo, where tens of thousands of civilians are thought to be sheltering, in the face of relentless bombardment and ground assaults.
Why, why why are we involved?
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