AUSTRALIA BREAKS APART: THE FIRST TAKES

  They were here for a reason.  As magisterial as they could be, these were frightening times. The behaviour of the perpetrators was absolutely chilling, no regret, no apology, no sympathy.  The world was looking at the greatest crime against humanity in history; that seemed the only explanation for what he knew to be true. That they didn't come in ordinary times. That they rarely intervened; that indeed they rarely spoke, content to be where they were and what they were; magisterial, magisterium, "I am here, and you are where you are".  But now was different. And the same explanations, or messaging, that he had been receiving for months said it simply: "We are here to preserve a future." This staggering thing, the scale of this disaster, the destruction of Australia, his country, just incidental in a wholesale destruction; no apology, no explanation, cold, beyond cold. As always he remained astonished: how little they cared for each other.  And this manifest tr...

  They are partial to that partial light.  The population was as confused, anxious, terrified even, as they had ever been.  The supply chains were breaking down.  The blizzard of government diktats grew worse, more strangulating, more confusing. Western Australia remained cut off from the rest of the country; already an island nation, more deeply divided than ever before, each state was already well on the way to becoming its own principality. The vaxxed, the unvaxxed, the believers, the sceptics; the supreme arrogance and indifference of those who had completely stuffed the country.  Class riven. Ethnically riven. Nothing the government did was of any assistance to the ordinary person; and ultimately a government which does nothing but generate complexity and difficulty in the lives of the citizenry will collapse.  Partial to that partial light, as Nick Cave had put it, that evocation of the spirit Ghosteen, there were times when he could feel them moving ...

  The imperial warship was here, the ladders spilling down to the planet surface. "We come at the end of empire," they explained, time and again, and while it made no sense to him, or to those who watched, there was in it some kind of internal logic, an explanation for what was happening, in the here and now, as indeed, empires collapsed; tectonic shifts as some were calling it.  What made it make sense was the utter irrationality which had swept over all of them; the utter madness of the political class, the Covid hysteria which engulfed them all, the hyper-connectivity of the era exploited by the worst of the worst.  The rabid, what other word was there, exploitation by the Corporate giants of the Covid scare represented the ultimate end of capitalism as we know it, because the richest individuals and entities on the planet had discarded the concerns of the general population as irrelevant, had treated the human population as less than cattle, had herded with hysteria a...

Red is for danger. Red is for distance. Red is for the vast reaches of space and the origin of everything.  "The imperial battleship has landed," he said, apropos of precisely nothing. Except that that was the way it felt; as if the story was beginning all over again, as if these creatures outside of time were settling here, in a giant, awe inspiring swirl as they settled in this time and place. In a technology definitely not of Earth, and most definitely not of this time. With the same questions over and over: Why here, why now?  And the same lines repeating over and over: "We stood for you on a distant shore." And time again, almost a thrum: "You are blessed. You are blessed. Blessed art thou." And so these mad swirls ran through his head in this most ordinary of places; Oak Flats. and on the ground, a kind of distancing, or increase parochialism, as the country became increasingly divided, as bureaucrats talked of "evidence based policy" while...