Leaving Singleton this morning, I felt unusually angry. Not the passing irritation of discomfort, but a deeper, older anger—the kind that settles in the gut and stays there. Another bikepacking trip ended abruptly. Days stranded in a country town by heat so relentless it corrals you into the few air-conditioned refuges: the pub, not cheap, and blaring country music on endless rotation. Fine in small doses, but constant? There’s a reason despair grows in places like this.
At first, people were friendly. Then something shifted. You feel it before you can name it: a collective decision about who and what you are, made somewhere beyond earshot and passed around like wildfire smoke. Suddenly you’re opaque, suspect. You replay conversations, wondering if you said something—or if something was said about you. I’ve had this experience before in outback towns. Perhaps it’s time to accept that bush towns are no place for me.
From youth onward, I’ve never quite been like others. I still find myself asking how someone from the backstreets of Piccadilly Circus ended up sleeping under a gum tree in a town that can vanish from Google Maps with a casual twitch of the thumb. More than fifty years of life after London sometimes feels like an afterthought—something that needn’t have happened at all, were it not for descendants. “Sweet Thing” survived, had children, worked, paid bills, blended in. But the street boy born of the counter-culture never died. He just learned to keep quiet.
So what happened?
I remember music, literature, films that shocked—not because they were designed to offend, but because they thought freely. Ideas were argued out loud. Publishers of alternative media were not afraid of court and defended freedom of speech with ferocity. In the early seventies, OZ London was dragged through the courts for the “School Kids” issue. Today, that same issue has been quietly removed from the website of an Australian university—one that otherwise hosts PDF archives of OZ—accompanied by a warning about “different times” and “different values,” lest today’s fragile minds be distressed.
Distressed by what? History?
Think of Fluide Glacial, Métal Hurlant, Hara-Kiri—the latter eventually becoming Charlie Hebdo. None could be published today as they were fifty years ago. Which makes the sudden appearance of “Je Suis Charlie” T-shirts after the 2015 terrorist attack almost comical. You are not Charlie. You could not publish Charlie Hebdo in Australia. Wake up to yourselves.
I recall watching an American film critic reviewing Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968). He felt compelled to declare how shocked he was by the scene where Johann, the troubled artist, murders a boy while fishing. He insisted any decent person should be equally appalled. Idiot. The boy is Eros—the god who oppresses the artist—classically represented as a child. This is Greek mythology, not a snuff fantasy. Did this expert know the origin of the word erotic? Or had symbolism itself been scrubbed from his education?
I’m no PhD. I didn’t finish high school and ranked second-to-last in my class. I completed a degree late in life to patch the gaps. Yet even with a fragmented education, I find the ignorance of the present moment staggering—especially among those who claim to form the academic and cultural elite. A university erasing a seventies magazine is not sensitivity; it’s rot.
Another example: a Palestinian author excluded from the Adelaide Writers Festival because her views were deemed “unsafe,” mere weeks after the Bondi terrorist attack. Thinking music, please. What exactly is permitted at a writers festival now? The adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh? Or would that be sexist, speciesist, and emotionally destabilising?
I believe in vigorous debate. I believe no one should be afraid to express a belief they honestly hold. Universities, art exhibitions, writers festivals—these should be arenas of risk, not padded rooms. What we are witnessing now is the most insidious form of censorship: self-censorship. Institutions pre-emptively silence voices not because they are wrong, but because someone, somewhere, might object.
Yes, much cultural output is trash. It always has been. But trash is compost. From it, strange and vital things grow. When we sanitise the soil, nothing unexpected can take root.
Perhaps that is what I felt in Singleton: not just personal alienation, but the wider chill of a culture that no longer tolerates difference, ambiguity, or dissent. A culture that smiles first, then quietly decides you don’t belong. And maybe that is why the old anger surfaced again—because somewhere along the line, we traded freedom for comfort, and called it progress.