The Strange Travails of a Strange Time

Jun 18, 2024

And away we went. There were so many fools carping in the rafters, so many snipers at the edge of the wires. Inner-strength. A lyre bird flaunting its feathers at the edge of the highway, against the tableau of an ancient forest. These things passed so quickly, as he drove past, like life itself.

My brother Doug had a turn yesterday afternoon, the day before he was due to head off overseas. The voices were so often incorrect, so often deceived him, that he could not trust them. But time and again they told him: I will not see you again. And sometimes, at least on those matters, they were almost never wrong. Or he could not remember them ever being wrong. He hoped now, that they were wrong. But that was the level of his alarm.

A broken man. A due relic. A place to hide. An emotional wreck. A man crawling over the lid of a volcano. Out onto an open field. Out to a glorious sky. Out to a million people dancing in a river of joy. Out to a glorious, fun filled life. Out to reverence. Out to duty.

Dutton had just passed the halfway mark, so to speak, being polled as preferred Prime Minister for the first time. It was fascinating to watch his demeanour, a man with a calling, a man on the way to the Lodge. A man who took duty seriously.

The left play their politics hard and dirty, and the manipulation of journalists, the planting of journalists inside news organisations and the manufacture of faux community groups was all just part of their game.

We are heralded and we are gone. Our lives are a mist; implanted in the eternal ether and gone. The South Coast was so beautiful, now the whipped up waves pouring into the coast, now the rich green of saturated pasture, of cattle grazing in an eternal now, of a country that was both lost and found. And we knew our way. And we stayed in our lane. And did our duty. And lo and behold, the world was ours, open, as it was for everybody. If only they could see. The wages of sin is death.

HEADLINES

‘Never seen before’: Sydney’s heartbreaking problem

The man behind a Sydney charity who has helped homeless people for over a decade says the current situation is the worst he has ever seen.

Rick Herrera from SWAG Family Sydney told news.com.au he can get up to about 160 calls for help some weeks on top of feeding hundreds of people meals on the streets of Sydney CBD, Liverpool and Wollongong.

“What I’m seeing now, I’ve never seen before,” Mr Herrera said. “More mothers and kids sleeping in cars. We’ve got elderly sleeping in cars. We’ve got families who can’t afford just the basic rent.”

He said he was even seeing people with homes coming out to queue for food.

“We’ve noticed an increase in people that actually have somewhere to live coming out just for food because after paying the rent, electricity and say the phone bill, they’ve got nothing left for shopping,” he said.