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| Picture by John Stapleton Sydney scene |
A flurry of figures were running towards their hideouts.
The nuclear flash lit up their forms in a black etching, burning their fleeing images on to the thick convulsing air. And then they were gone; in one brutal, infinitely cruel second.
Not one of them made it to their bunkers.
And then it all went quiet; the arid landscape kissed with the divine, a kind of liquid silver flowing across the cacti, burnt grass, rusting trucks and collapsed dwellings of the old mining camps.
Sydney seemed a long time in the past; everything had slipped away.
Storms swept across the comparatively well equipped camp where he was staying, positively bourgeois in contrast to some. Rain drummed on the roof. The tanks filled.
He was far away from the urban areas he had once so loved.
"I am in receipt of no questions," he muttered into the long night. "I provide no answers. I transmit no information."
"What are you?" came a question from one of the Watchers on the Watch, different now, a more senior, more sensible, more intelligent voice.
As if commonsense was finally breaking through the blizzard of thuggish garbage which had come his way.
"And that question most of all, I will not answer," he responded; tired of the ridicule, the targeting, the viciousness that humans displayed towards those of their kind who were different, or they did not understand.
In Australia, the pack mentality of group think was worse than he had ever seen; and he reiterated the theme once again: the shutting down of debate, the narrowness of the prisms through which most of the population now saw the world, the official amnesia, as entire fields of controversy were excised from the public debate, all of it was poisoning the country.
"What can you do?" Boris would ask over coffee outside the Neighbourhood Centre.
Malaise was everywhere, and not just in the collapse of Australia's underclass.
The announcement came, the legendary Kidman properties, spanning three states and the Northern Territory, reportedly some 2.6% of the nation's land area, 101,000 square kilometres, was being sold to a Chinese consortium with Australia's richest woman Gina Rinehart as the the local component.
The sale was perceived by its critics as an insult to all Australian taxpayers, an insult to the indigenous whose sacred lands the properties had once been, and an insult to the generations who had built the country.
The Foreign Investment Review Board approved the sale.
Fat cats hunkered down in their air-conditioned streets as they passed fashionable city restaurants, a glowing air of satisfaction wreathing their out-size bodies. What was the use of the Foreign Investment Review Board? They stood in the way of nothing.
"Madness," Boris said,
"They've sold off most of the countries major ports, most of the electricity infrastructure, most of the prime real estate in the major cities. We're becoming a southern province of China. What sort of country does this, allows this to happen?"
"Madness," Boris said again. "What can you do?"
The "jobs and growth" rhetoric with which the conservatives had narrowly won the last election looked more and more irrelevant; that week the news the economy was contracting. One more such quarter and the country would officially be in recession.
In country towns and shopping centres across the country, in the extinguished hopes of millions, recession had hit long ago.
Sometimes, in those long dream infested nights, it was as if someone was trying to contact him, sometimes urgently, sometimes just the puerile games Old Alex's now vanquished pursuers had indulged in.
An international competition, he heard someone say, perhaps a radio in one of the neighbouring camp, apropos of nothing that he knew of.
"What's the urgency?" he asked, and slipped back into a doze, dreaming of a wonderful party, crowded party at his old friend Michael's house.\Again, apropos of nothing. The skies were cloudless, the morning air clear and uncharacteristically cool.
"He's settling down," someone observed. "I wouldn't be so sure," he replied, but there was far less danger than there had been for a very long time.
If only it would remain so.
For months turning into years he had held one primary desire: for his tormentors to cease and desist.
Perhaps, at last, it was coming true.
AUSTRALIA’S Treasurer Scott Morrison has approved the sale of Australia’s largest pastoral land holding, S. Kidman & Co, to a partnership involving local mining magnate Gina Rinehart and Chinese consortium Shanghai CRED.
Following months of speculation as to whether or not Morrison would approve a bid involving a foreign firm, the treasurer released a statement yesterday formally approving the sale of the cattle empire to Australian Outback Beef, a venture 67 percent owned by Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting and 33 percent by Shanghai CRED.Morrison had previously knocked back Chinese-majority bids for the empire due to worries over “national security” and “national interest,” but under the deal struck with AOB, Morrison said there would be no cause for concern.“Consistent with the recommendation from the Foreign Investment Review Board, I have decided that the acquisition of Kidman as proposed would not be contrary to the national interest and will be permitted to proceed as proposed,” he said.
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