Author: Tadzio

I know I’m not alone in trying to work out what to do with the years left before discharge day. That being death. For some, it can’t come soon enough.

Hunter S. Thompson wrote: sixty-seven—seventeen more than I needed, seventeen more than I wanted. Shortly after, he blew his brains out with a .44. I personally know others who opted for an early exit. One, a relative, left a note saying he didn’t want to grow old. He was seventy-four, a multi-millionaire, but could find no reason to endure old age.

That, I think, is the hardest thing: the apparent absence of a reason to exist any longer. Nothing left to look forward to. It’s subjective. For some, towing a box around the country is the reward for a lifetime of work and loyalty to family and nation. For others, it’s not. I’m no multi-millionaire, but I understand my relative’s question. Is there any reason to continue?

The answer depends on what you believed life was about in the first place. Yourself and your happiness? Or yourself as an expendable cog in something larger? The latter is hard to accept after decades of individualism hammered into us by advertising, self-help, and new-age fluff promising peace through self-focus and the careful management of desire. It borders on narcissism to believe oneself the reason the universe exists.

Desire is not the problem. Desire for the betterment of others is what gives life weight. This is why old age can be so brutal. People work their entire lives to acquire wealth and status, only to discover—too late—that these things are meaningless in the areas of existence that actually matter.

I once saw an interview on Australian television with Lee Stringer, who spent twelve years as a crack addict living under a platform at Grand Central Station in New York. He said he felt irritated when people congratulated him on his later success—fame, money, a big house. He said people addicted to money and fame were no different from him smoking crack under a railway platform. His success, he said, was becoming the writer he was meant to be.

The interviewer asked what he would say to his teenage self if he could go back in time. Stringer didn’t hesitate. He said he wouldn’t tell him anything, because if even one detail of his life had changed, he would not have become what he was destined to become: a published author.

Success, in other words, is self-realisation.

When I was nineteen, working on my Ducati in my parents’ garage, a friend of my father—staying with us at the time—came down to talk. He was a vice-president of an American multinational, about as close to corporate success as one can get. After a few minutes of talking motorbikes, he said he felt he had failed in life. What he really wanted, he said, was to be an art critic—a cultural educator. Marriage and family expectations had pushed him into business instead. Art remained a dream.

I carried that conversation for decades. Now, old myself, I think he was wrong. He did what he had to do when he became a father. That was a stage of his life. Had he turned to art and criticism later, he would have brought a depth of lived experience no twenty-two-year-old fresh out of university could match. Stringer was right: don’t regret your life. Musashi wrote, never regret what you have done in the past.

Self-realisation doesn’t have an expiry date. Sometimes it happens late, when we finally take our place in the machinery of life as we were meant to. Everything that came before was preparation. Often it isn’t dramatic. It’s accumulated knowledge offered to the one person who needs it at that exact moment. That’s what older people do best: be present, be available, and learn to listen before speaking.

And whether they admit it or not, young people need that now.

I recently restored a few posts I’d deleted. Even as imperfect as they are, they might be useful to someone. I often want to clock off, to leave everything to the younger generations, but something in me refuses. There’s still work to do. We’re facing unprecedented challenges, and every contribution—no matter how small—counts.

That, at least for now, is reason enough to stay.

 

Parliament has been recalled, we’re told, in the name of safety. Tough new laws. Anti-Semitic hate speech. Guns. Order restored by decree.
But listen closely and you can hear something else rattling under the floorboards: fear. And behind it, cowardice.

The Prime Minister is under pressure to “respond appropriately” to the Bondi shooting. So legislation is rushed forward that blurs, conveniently, into something else entirely. Criticism of Israel edges toward hate speech. Silence, meanwhile, is treated as virtue. Which makes me wonder: if hate speech deserves punishment, what about hate silence?

If I know that a nation—or a person—is committing heinous crimes and I look the other way, am I not complicit? If children are murdered, used as target practice by snipers, and I avert my gaze because it’s politically inconvenient, what does that make me?

I think of the American soldier from Collateral Murder. The footage we all saw but were encouraged to forget. He runs from a Bradley fighting vehicle to a van riddled with bullets and comes back carrying a wounded child. Blood everywhere. “Don’t die,” he pleads, again and again.
Later, in an interview, he explains why he enlisted. After 9/11, he hated Muslims. Wanted to kill them. Especially terrorists. Then he pauses. There were no terrorists in Iraq, he says—until we started killing their children.

That is how extremism is manufactured. Not by words. By actions.

The arguments used to justify these new laws are worn thin. They protect a rogue state from scrutiny and our politicians from electoral risk. Nothing more. In security studies, a government that governs by punishment rather than consent is defined plainly: weak.
A strong government does not need to threaten its citizens into silence. It enjoys legitimacy. Social cohesion follows naturally. A weak government reaches for laws, penalties, surveillance. The knock on the door replaces moral authority.

There is also wilful ignorance baked into the response—outsourced, tellingly, to an appointed “special envoy to combat anti-Semitism.” She is a committed Zionist, which makes her the last person you would appoint if cohesion, balance, or trust were the actual goal. One of her recommendations is that the Holocaust be taught in schools.

Good. It should be.
But teach it fully.

A cousin of my father died in a concentration camp. I don’t know why he was marked for death. He may not have been Jewish at all—perhaps he was homosexual. When I searched the archives, many non-Jewish victims were simply absent.
So let the lessons include them. The homosexuals. The Roma. The Soviet prisoners of war. The disabled. Let students learn that Auschwitz did not discriminate in its cruelty.

And let them also learn the broader historical truth that is so often airbrushed away. The Holocaust became the moral justification for the creation of Israel—but it was not the beginning of the story.
During the First World War, the British promised the Arabs sovereignty over their lands, including Palestine, if they rose up against the Ottomans. They did. With extraordinary courage. Led by T.E. Lawrence, they took Aqaba from the desert side—an impossible victory.

Lawrence later wrote of his shame, knowing all along that the promise would be broken. Because while Arab fighters bled, Britain and France had already signed the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, carving the Middle East into colonial protectorates. Palestine fell under British control.
After the Second World War, exhausted and uninterested—no oil, too much resistance—the British washed their hands of it and agreed to the creation of Israel.

In 1948 came the Nakba. Seven hundred thousand Palestinians expelled. Villages erased. A process that has never stopped, only modernised. And now, protesting this ongoing dispossession, this industrial-scale killing in Gaza and the West Bank, is labelled anti-Semitic hate speech.

Words are policed. Bombs are excused.

So I ask: dear Australia, who will come to your defence when a superpower lands troops on your shores?

I remember starting school in Brussels at ten years old, fresh from a dirt-road town south of Melbourne, unable to speak a word of French. I was bullied relentlessly. Then one day, an elderly woman entered the classroom. She spoke to the teacher, who pointed at me.
She sat beside me. “I hear you’re Australian,” she said. I nodded. She told me she had been a nurse in the Great War. That the Australians were the bravest of the brave. She put her arm around my shoulders. “Be proud of who you are.”

The next day—or the one after—I was cornered again, boys laughing as they stomped on my feet. But something had shifted. I picked the ringleader and went for him. All elbows and fury. A teacher eventually dragged me off, told the other boy to bugger off, then gave me a quiet thumbs-up.

No one touched the Aussie kid after that.

Thinking about that now—about the reputation earned in the trenches of the First World War—it enrages me that it was South Africa, not Australia, who first went to the International Court of Justice to challenge the slaughter in Gaza. We could have done the same. We didn’t.
Instead, we are told to accept lectures about morality from a state that murders civilians with impunity—and laws at home designed to make sure we don’t object too loudly.

That isn’t strength.
It’s fear, dressed up as order.

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Years ago, I was camped in the hills west of Sydney — what you do when rent is a luxury, and the bush is free. Every afternoon, like clockwork, around five, the backpackers arrived looking for somewhere to bed down. A bonfire would be lit, because that’s what young people do. They sat in a loose circle, wrapped in fragrant smoke, wine bottles scattered like punctuation, talking about the world as if it were theirs to fix.

As an older man, you don’t enter the circle. You sit back on a tree stump and listen.

The first thing you notice is language. Everyone speaks excellent English; only the accents betray where they’re from. The second thing is gender — or rather, the near absence of it. The old signals are muted. There’s no obvious peacocking, no ritualised flirtation, though the young men still carry that ancient swagger that predates civilisation itself. Some things are older than progress.

What they talk about is the future: the planet, climate, politics, the feeling — unstated but shared — that they belong to something larger than any one country. A global youth culture, already formed, already assumed.

I’d seen hints of it before. A Western journalist in Iran, filming a death-metal band rehearsing in a soundproofed basement to avoid the morality police. Another report from Lebanon: the lead guitarist of a rock band, explaining that young people in the Middle East want in—not as imitators, but as participants. A thirteen-year-old Yemeni boy was asked what he and his friends wanted. He didn’t hesitate. “The same as you have,” he said. “Freedom and democracy.”

Sitting by that fire, included by default as the token old bloke, it was apparent this wasn’t an anecdote but a pattern. These young people were already world citizens. That fact alone will reshape diplomacy, leadership, and even how the planet is managed. We will see international statespersons emerge not as abstractions but as inevitabilities.

I can’t recall who said it — only that he was French — but he nailed it when asked the difference between patriotism and nationalism. “Patriotism,” he said, “is loving your country. Nationalism is hating everyone else.” The young French woman opposite me, downing her fifth glass of wine, certainly loved France. She didn’t hate Burundi.

The obstacles are predictable. Extremists, either too stupid or too invested to see that this was inevitable once technology collapsed distance. Living forever in sealed geographic compartments, by race, was never sustainable. I once said to an Aboriginal elder in the outback that the moment someone figured out how to sail upwind, sixty-four thousand years of isolation were over. As two grandfathers, we agreed that the only question that mattered was what we wanted for our grandchildren. And the answer was clear: Indigenous youth must take their place at the table — not as symbols, not as museum pieces, but as full participants in whatever comes next.

What troubled me that night was who wasn’t there. Around that fire, there wasn’t a single young person of colour. There’s a danger that some groups will be welcomed first as curiosities —even pampered pets—tolerated, displayed—only to be quietly left behind once the party moves on.

The resistance to this emerging civilisation comes from fear: fear of losing control, fear of diluted identity, fear of the future itself. It comes dressed as the far right, as religious extremism, as nationalist revival. Putin’s Russia. Xi’s China. Modi’s India. Trump’s America. Different costumes, same impulse: to freeze history and pretend entropy can be negotiated with.

But sitting there in the Australian bush, listening to young people who already belonged to one another, I knew the truth. This movement isn’t political in the usual sense. It’s closer to an evolutionary step. You don’t vote against it. You don’t stop it. You either adapt — or you fossilise.