They Worship the Temple Gods
A year on, and there remained one story: the destruction of the country.
Melbourne was in lockdown, again. The deranged Premier Daniel Andrews, let loose by a gormless and incompetent Prime Minister, was once again front and centre of Australia's Covid response.
Back in what had once been a sanctuary, driven mad by his idiot flatmates and his idiot self, torn between heaven and earth, surrounded by delighted operatives and bored gronks, in touch with worlds beyond worlds and driven daily into the very ordinariness of it all, in a suburb called Oak Flats, in one of the coldest summers in living memory.
Up the hill, his mother was dying an ever more painful and ignominious death. Enough to address or suppress their faith, this clumsy, ungraceful parting. This confounding at the end of time. Although of course there was no end, only a sliding lattice of infinities.
"We were told God's people would be persecuted at the end of days," she said, and they withered their bibles and shouted celebration down the centuries, they threw palms on the ground and cheered and cheered and cheered in a sound which would echo down through so many generations.
In an ordinary place. In a not very ordinary time. Well, nothing ordinary about it really, it was just a matter of opening your eyes.
The two dragons had mated in the sky but still the signal was not clear.
There were so many decisions to make, torn asunder. Transactional. The way forward. We came. We saw. We were already here. They were echoing from chimes across an entire world. They wouldn't wait for him. They wouldn't wait for anybody. They were already born asunder. They were already reaking their magic.
And yet, and yet.
How extraordinary was it that these creatures had once considered themselves central to God.
The mutations; well, deliberate, designed mutations, here in the reaches, there on the plains, how was it then that we could hear you, and tried desperately to ignore the myriad voices that swirled unbidden through his waking consciousness.
And saw everything as if it was for the first time, while at the same time arcane English dripped through his head, "coin of the realm", and the preposterous strut of aristocrats and the humility of wise men and the desperate pain of prisoners, all of it came through him
The Sanctuary, where for a moment everything had seemed so clear, was dissolving.
The walls were being built and demolished, day by dour, hour by hour, minute by minute. In every second freeze frame. The guardians snuffled through the surrounding fields. The lies, the plots, the disbelievers, all were snuffed out. High in the Andes, here in Australia, in monuments and temples and sacred places, in stunning forests and liquid air, they sniffed out the enemy like the evolved envoys they were.
He was safe. Now. For an instant. We were worth more alive than dead.
We came to tell you something: we came to show you the way.
Of course, in the end, you too would abandon your organic origins.
But for now, we came to rectify the wrongs. We came to throw the merchants out of the temple. We came to nudge your history in a better direction.
And we remained calm. You remained confused; panic driven, trapped in hypocrisy, welded into idiot hierarchies layered with gronks and military yes men.
We sought only the best and the brightest.
We came to protect our heritage, your heritage.
"See you on the other side", "Getting through to the other side", all this quasi-religious language spewing from the mouth of the Prime Minister, and the ordinary people had no idea whatsoever how deeply they were being betrayed.
God and the Devil. The Devil and Scott Morrison. There was nothing binary about what was to happen. It was not good or evil. It was beyond the fate of nations.
You despoiled this place; and you will be gone.
Central to God? There were many different lifeforms in this most sacred of places.
You were here and we were here. And the message would be passed exactly as we saw fit.
Come again tomorrow.
HEADLINES
Victorian Premier rejects suggestions lockdown could last weeks The Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has praised Victorians’ response to the snap five-day lockdown, rejecting suggestions it could last for weeks, but saying there were no guarantees.Mr Andrews said recent testing had identified only one new case and he urged people to avoid speculation or protests against the move.“I think people should try, as best they can, to encourage people to [get information] based in facts,” the Premier said. “The facts are this is a precautionary approach, one that is based on the best help advice.”Victoria entered a third lockdown at 11.59pm on Friday after the UK variant of the virus escaped quarantine at Melbourne Airport’s Holiday Inn.The outbreak now tallies at least 13 cases, including a woman who may have worked at an airport cafe while infectious.There are 996 known primary close contacts associated with the known cases with test results expected to come through by Monday.The single additional positive case recorded on Saturday – a man in his 30s – is in isolation, as well as 38 of his primary close contacts.
Coronavirus origins: Australian experts question WHO findings
Andrews government suspends flights carrying returning Australians
Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews has revealed flights carrying returning Australians will be suspended until at least next Thursday as the state grapples with its snap five-day lockdown. "The prime minister has agreed to suspend flights - as I had asked - during this five-day period," he said. "There will be five more flights arrive between now and midnight and we think there are about 100 passengers on board." One additional case linked to the Holiday Inn cluster was identified from 20,116 tests - a close contact of one of the facility's workers. "As of last night, we've identified 996 known primary contacts related to that particular facility and those who work in it. That number will keep growing," the premier said. "I know a lot of people will be hurting today. This is not the position Victorians want to be in, but I can't have a situation where, in two weeks' time, we look back and we wish we had taken these decisions. "I will have more to say about support for businesses and support for those who have been impacted by this absolutely necessary measure to protect this precious thing that we've built."
Victoria's hotel quarantine program left out of key taskforce on infection control for frontline workers
With a national Covid-19 vaccination rollout imminent, you’d think Greg Hunt might have better things to do than trying to shore up Kevin Andrews in a Victorian preselection, or branding the ABC broadcaster Michael Rowland an undeclared leftist when he faced a persistent line of questioning he didn’t like.
The purpose of revisiting Hunt’s egregiousness is not to be distracted by the theatrics of the health minister’s staged fight with Rowland in the middle of this week.
I want to track back to the substantive question Hunt was asked. Rowland’s question on Wednesday morning was prompted by Hunt’s decision to attach the Liberal party logo to a Twitter post trumpeting an extra 10m doses of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine.
The Liberal party wasn’t funding these vaccines, Australian taxpayers were, so why was this a party political announcement?
It's not impossible for Morrison to land a grand emissions bargain. It's just very hard
The health minister counselled Rowland (“with great respect”) that he was “elected under that [Liberal party] banner” and was a “very proud member of that party with a great heritage and tradition in Australia”.
Stirring stuff obviously. Makes the heart swell.
But entirely irrelevant.
Hunt attacked Rowland’s professionalism because the health minister didn’t have a compelling answer to the question that would have passed any sort of pub test.
There really is no good answer to that question, apart from “I am a goose, Michael” – so attack was seen as the best form of defence.
The health minister blustered that he saw no problem with attaching a Liberal party logo to a government announcement in the middle of a pandemic costing lives and threatening livelihoods.
This was within the rules. “Entirely within the rules.”
