Author: Tadzio

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.

Successfully escaped Jerrys Plains this morning. I knew the forecast was for 41 degrees today so got up at 3am, packed up and was on the highway by 4am enroute for Singleton where I will this afternoon catch a train to Newcastle. Back to Sydney, and then go and check the yacht. Could be time to switch from long-distance cycling to sailing. 

I laugh every time I see advertisements for Musashi health supplements on the back of our local buses. A computer-game warrior, all menace and muscle, selling fantasy. The threatening salami chopper, fearless because thoughtless, living “as though already dead.” Musashi would have laughed as well. The use of his name borders on an insult. Still, I imagine he had a sense of humour.

A true hero is not someone who seeks danger. A hero is someone who could walk away, but doesn’t. Someone who risks his life for others.

The man who stopped the attacker at Bondi, Ahmed al Ahmed, is what a hero does. The word samurai means one who serves. In that moment, Ahmed—a Muslim saving Jewish lives—was a samurai. He acted as though already dead. Dead to himself.

He later said it was his soul that directed him. An affirmation of life over self. No hierarchy of people. Lives equal to his own. People equal to his people. That is service to something higher, whether you name it God or not.

Few of us will ever be tested like that, and we should be grateful. For most of us, there will be nothing spectacular. Yet the battle is daily.

I don’t remember whether it was Buddha or Confucius who said it—maybe neither—but it’s true: between the man who defeats an army of a thousand and the man who defeats himself, the latter is the greater conqueror. That is what the crucifixion story points to. Whether it’s factual doesn’t matter to me. The meaning does. The defeat of the self creates a void—space for something beyond ego to move through us.

Negation doesn’t tolerate this. The closer you get, the more vicious the resistance becomes. That’s where being a samurai matters. Remove the self, and you reduce your vulnerability. Each quiet victory strengthens you. And there are no medals. Inner battles rarely are visible.

The most brutal enemy is the sense that the effort is useless. Why be good when it costs you and gives nothing back? Fear of hell or prison doesn’t count. Fear doesn’t make you good.

Why do it anyway? I don’t have a clean answer. Once, belief in an afterlife made it easier. Now all I can say is notice how affirmation feels, and how negation feels.

I met a middle-aged Frenchman on a ferry in Thailand who joked about buying a boy as part of a hotel package. He laughed—until he suspected I might be the police. Later, when he saw me in Bangkok, he ran. He knew. There were no justifications. He had negated that boy’s humanity—and in doing so, his own. Shame chased him.

We can’t know with certainty whether God or Satan exist. But we know how choosing affirmation or negation feels.

Negation rarely begins with cruelty. It starts with despair. With the belief that the battle is already lost, that one is beyond repair. Some people come to prefer the abyss because it feels honest. They settle into it. Enjoy it. Until one day they realise they are trapped, and there is no way back.

That is when negation turns outward. That is when men like serial killer Denis Nilsen begin to destroy what they believe caused their fall.

The danger is not imperfection. The danger is believing that imperfection disqualifies you from serving anything good.

Often, the only reward for resisting negation is that others sense it in you. They don’t know why you feel safe—only that you do. I’ve had men approach me at truck stops, on bike rides, at campsites, at cliffs at sunset. A few are alive because someone listened.

To be a samurai is to serve—not because you are pure, but because you are available. Not perfect. Not holy. Open to being the conduit through which affirmation can act in the physical world.

I know this because the man who rescued me from the streets of Piccadilly Circus was deeply flawed himself. A boy-addicted punter.

And yet, in that moment, affirmation moved through him anyway.

No one should despair and choose negation. No one is exempt from being a servant of something better.

 

Delayed again. This time it’s trackwork between Sydney and Newcastle, where I’ll start the next ride. So now, God willing and trains running on time, departure will be on Monday.

Those who read Jeffery Robinson’s “Crimes against Humanity” might remember how he describes the Chilean secret police torturing children in front of their parents when the parents would not crack under torture themselves. Israel is applying the same strategy in Gaza: make life as painful as possible for the children of Gaza in the expectation that Palestinian parents will give in, pack up, and leave. The latest, given bombs, torture, starvation, and the blockade of life’s essentials, has not worked; Israel is banning aid agencies such as Doctors Without Borders. An organisation that is one of the most outstanding examples of human compassion and selflessness in coming to the aid of others. Israel bans it. Evil excludes love.

In Zen and other religions, it is known that when you negate your fellow human being, be it in thought, action, or speech, you throw the door wide open and roll out the red carpet for negation, call it evil if you prefer, to enter and take possession of yourself. That applies to nations as well, as history teaches us.

Tomorrow, Saturday 3rd. Train to Newcastle and then ride up the Hunter Valley to Dunedoo, where I’ll start the Central West Cycle Trail. The trail is a 400-kilometre loop. Altogether, trail and riding up and down the Hunter, this will be a 1000-kilometre ride. I’m going to take my time, no rush, and will post pictures and bullshit – technology working and sun shining.

Central West Cycle Trail website.

 

First day of the year.

No archive. No museum of half-right thoughts.
I cleared the walls because ideas aren’t medals. They’re tools.
When they’re bent, you don’t polish them — you melt them down.

We already know what’s at stake.
Life itself is on the line, not metaphorically, not someday.
And we already know what blocks us:
self-interest dressed up as realism,
division sold as identity.

This year has to be louder. Not noisier — clearer.
Demanding action, yes, but also embodying it.
Cut what emissions we can. Own our footprint without pretending it’s enough on its own.
And refuse the ancient distractions: race, religion, sexuality —
the recycled bullshit that turns neighbours into enemies
while the house burns.

Negation is the common thread.
Climate inaction negates the living world —
and we are not separate from it.
Hatred negates humanity, one person at a time.
A nod, a smile, an unremarkable kindness
is a small act of resistance.
It says: you exist, and so do I, and that matters.

I should already be on the road, bike loaded, days unfolding by pedal stroke.
But life interrupts. It always does.
Departure gets delayed, not cancelled.
In a few days I’ll roll out anyway.
The direction hasn’t changed.

No trophies. No certainty.
Just movement.
Just choosing, again, to stand where it counts.

I should be heading out on a bikepacking trip in a few days. Zen, the Australian bush,  and long-distance bicycle riding.

 

 

 

 

 

A young monk hurried to the master.
“Master, the monks are assembled. They request a sermon.”
The master rose without a word.
He walked to the hall, stepped onto the pulpit, looked out at the gathered monks,
and after a moment’s stillness, stepped down again.
He returned to his chambers.
Puzzled, the young monk followed.
“Master, why did you not give a sermon?”
The master smiled.
“I did,” he said.