The Funny Thing About a Wall

How gauche to be living in a small rural town with a dark secret. Boring, done before. And just as I was about to retire (to France).

The town is all a-flutter because somebody has gone to great expense to print an eight page, full colour 'community newsletter' and had it delivered to what seems to be every one of the two thousand odd homes in the Fassifern district.

It is not a publication that lives the promise of its virtue. Dedicated to truth, liberty and transparency, the newsletter does not descend to the picky matter of explaining who has written, published or funded it. There is a generic email address but no postal address, name, or any identifying features. The high gloss grievance pamphlet has no website, despite rigorous searching on my part, no company or charity structure that might render its benefactors at least partially visible.

In fact, the only vaguely approachable way of finding out who has published this catalogue of complaint is to zero in on the person's core fixation and work backwards from there. One must obtain the ideological dental records from the corpse, so to speak.

The central obsession, in this case and in the little town of Boonah, happens to be a 4m high sound abatement barrier that has been installed alongside a new development on the way into town and which has been compared to the famously similar Berlin Wall that separated the bleak, repressed East Germany from the vibrant and more permissive West after the war.

What I love most about the fully conspiratorial is their sense of proportion.

The Boonah Wall has radicalised at least one person in town because a year or two ago every shop in the main street had a paper petition foisted upon it, asking people to sign in protest against the barrier and all the ones I saw had between two and five signatures. One store owner told me a vaguely aggressive man would wander in periodically and berate them for not displaying his petition more prominently, perhaps with the breakfast menu if they wouldn't mind.

Now, it's true: I suspect the wall built at the development that separates the repressed and depressed new estate from the more vibrant and permissive Boonah-Ipswich Road is ultra vires. I suspect, even, that it is unnecessary. Certainly unnecessarily big. Many are the injustices of local planning. Few are the ones that should be met with full-blown psychosis.

The petition against the wall had the familiar tenor of a document written by a person who believes they found a secret manifesto drafted by the world's controlling elite while hanging out in an internet forum devoted to greyhound racing.

I knew instantly that the same person driven mad about the wall in the petition was the same person who wrote this brochure in the mail, or at least was heavily involved. But I do not know their name, and having already spent $40 of my own money on company searches relating to potential candidates all I have managed to unearth is a vigorous public supporter of the mailout who was once a massage 'therapist' with a controversial and discredited massage school who was banned by that same institution for being discourteous and aggressive with the practitioners of the massage school and who is now a home builder in Queensland.

This would fit with the brochure's other preoccupations about vaccine injury and 'coercive' government decision making but, ironically, I have found no causal link between this candidate and his having produced the full-colour glossy document at great expense. The funny thing about these concerns is that they do not venture all too far from some of the ones that enliven my reporting; the power of government or otherwise large systems and the ability to disappear information to protect same. Often I find myself double-checking to make sure I am not inadvertently crossing the Dubicon – it's the Rubicon, but dubious – in my own mind.

And then I remember that I've never crawled out of my own skull at the sight of a sound barrier. Generally speaking, I think the key difference between a conspiracy theory and a genuine conspiracy of power, of which there are many examples that are not at all controversial, is a traceable and verifiable series of waypoints. Each must follow on from the first, travelling outward from a central proposition. Think of it as a chain-of-custody for reason.

If, per chance, you consider that a large sound abatement wall has been built potentially at odds with council planning laws that is one thing. It is quite another to decide that this fact leads inexorably, bafflingly and instantly to the conclusion that we are the subjects of an East German-esque regime. A step or two has been skipped, possibly.

To be clear, sometimes there will never be enough steps. An eternal staircase couldn't get me to make this leap:

Not the first account belonging to 'Steven', by the way. That exists solely to harvest attention with increasingly bonkers content, like a farmer dedicated to growing fucked up looking carrots and nothing else. But look at the people in reply who are this close to joining the dots coherently only to veer off suddenly into a ravine.

My favourite genre of response belongs to the (many) who casually explained that the Australian government has been blocking out the sun for years now and implied that the guy who just made it up for outrage clicks is daft for not realising this already. Check out how 'Old School Australian' here verifies his statement:

Ah, yes, the clinical verity of children's drawings. And the sun used to have glasses in our drawings but now he don't.

When you have a large cross-section of a major political party begin to mind-merge with the cult of Trump's MAGA, which has as one of its distinguishing qualities a rabid and willing distortion of reality animated by myriad petty hatreds that all emerge from the uncomfortable realm of being held accountable in a modern society, the problem of this approach can soon bend back on itself.

That is when you get electoral results like in Canada and now, with some relief, Australia. It would be daft to suggest this means the question is settled – conspiracy is an attractive notion to the fearful mind because it erases incompetence and caprice as explanatory mechanisms – but, for now, the reality-rejection of the Coalition has meant they failed to see their own disfigurement coming in the polls. I guess spending three years in a Sky News Australia studio booth is the ultimate sensory deprivation tank.

What nightmares it must conjure in the absence of the real.

Addenda

Field of Dreams

My cousin and his partner, six of their friends and my uncle and aunt all arrived in town over the weekend with the sole intention of going to the local Kalbar Sunflower Festival which was started a few years ago by the parents of a friend of mine but to which I have never been. The family had some spare tickets and so Mum and I went along, too. It was a gorgeous not-quite-winter day in the valley, when the mornings are crisp and the day warm with a blue sky you could snap in half if only you could get your hands on it, and I chose this outing to road test my 'becoming a hat guy'. That's what fields of sunflowers and warmth will do to a guy, give him the confidence to wear a cap.

But I mean, come on, look at that day!

Sorrento Mementos

I returned last week from a weekend away in Sorrento, down the Mornington Peninsula outside of Melbourne, for the writers' festival there which was absolutely magic and exhausting. Drive 90 minutes into Brisbane, fly 2.5 hours to Melbourne, then another 2.6 hours to Sorrento and four sessions over the weekend and then back.

But, again, beautiful even in the rain that poured most of the weekend.

I am always happy when I get to continue a long-running gag. That weekend, it was yet another occasion I had to run away from the writer and columnist Sean Kelly who is lovely and kind and funny and with whom I will never be in the same room for more than 10 minutes. We cross paths often but the last time, as I was preparing to leave just after he said hello, he said: 'One day we will manage to have a proper conversation'. And I said, mostly in jest: 'We can't, I'm terrified of you!' And then I left.

On Friday night a week ago, I was having one wine (one!) with some friends and new acquaintances when I announced I was going back to my room to order dinner and hibernate. My friend then said, as if it might stall me: 'Sean Kelly is just about to get here'!

When he arrived I stood up, gave him my chair and left.

Love your work, Sean!

Gossip Mongers

You'd think I, of all people, would have some rudimentary understanding of how the media works but, alas, I am quite silly. At Sorrento a former colleague of mine from many years ago now, Stephen Brook, was also in town covering various bits of scandal and intrigue for The Age's CBD Column when he ran into me in the car park of our hotel and he asked what I have been up to.

Oh, you know, hoping to go to Paris, write a novel, all those things. He was asking me more questions than is normal among my friends and halfway through I realised he was typing out what I was saying on the notes folder on my phone so I laughed and said, are you writing this down?

Anyway!

Well, fuck you too then. Better to be written about then not at all, I suppose.

For the record, that is the worst plot summary of the book I could have given to anyone ever because that is how the book started out and though it remains essentially the same it is not about a journalist, or journalism or any of that nonsense. It's about a guy that stopped asking questions until he was forced to start again. That's it!

And, in a more concrete update, my passport was mailed back to me on Friday and inside it was a little piece of paper stapled to one of the pages with the words: Congratulations! A long-stay visa has been granted.

I'm going to live in Paris!

Which is also terrifying. What have I done. How am I going to make this work. Et cetera.

This has been a very loosely planned long-term dream since my 20s, but part of it has always been to have the career freedom to work from anywhere. Not much is sorted out yet in terms of my day job, but I know this newsletter is going to become an even more significant outlet for me and one that, thanks to those who support the work in any capacity, will allow me to try and do something I've never done before.

I can't thank you enough. Well, maybe I'll try by making these even better. The change of scenery might help.

Zeitgeist

You may, or may not, have noticed that this is the first newsletter I've published after moving the operation from Far Right sympathetic Substack to the open-source platform called Ghost. I'm sure there will be some teething issues, but so far I have managed to transfer the entire subscriber list and all of the old content (sans comments, it would seem) here with minimal effort. The lovely people at Ghost have helped hold my hand during that process as well, and I am looking forward to making this our home.