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The shenanigans continue here in the Great Southern Land.

This time someone lobbed an improvised explosive device into an Invasion Day protest in Perth. Invasion Day, of course, marks the moment in 1788 when British ships unloaded convicts onto a shore already inhabited — to the horror of the Indigenous population watching a foreign world land on top of their own.

The device didn’t explode, which is probably why the story didn’t dominate the news cycle. No bodies, no spectacle, no rolling outrage. Still, the familiar calls came: tougher laws, harsher penalties, louder policing. There was also anger that this incident received less attention than the Bondi attack on the Jewish community — as if tragedy is a competition, as if context doesn’t matter.

But step back far enough and a pattern appears. Our politicians no longer govern — they react. When governing becomes difficult, rules replace thinking. And almost no one asks the only question that matters: what is actually breaking down?

Most extremism doesn’t come from too much freedom. It comes from voices that no longer believe they are heard.

Culture gets tossed around in these debates like a slogan. All cultures are equal. All must be respected. We must be multicultural. But rarely does anyone ask what culture actually does. Why every human group has one. Why we keep building rituals, stories, dances, uniforms, songs.

The answer is simple and ancient: culture creates cohesion.

I once watched a documentary about an Indigenous African community. At dusk, people gathered. Food was shared. Torches were lit. Young men danced to drums while young women watched in a circle. An elder told an ancestral story — a lesson about sacrifice, duty, survival. Tradition reaching back thousands of years. The future reaching forward. The tribe reminding itself who it is.

In Western societies, we do the same thing — just louder and with better lighting. Nightclubs. Stadiums. Concerts. Social media. Entertainment. Different forms, same function.

Where multicultural societies struggle is not difference. It’s rules.
If every team in a soccer match plays by different rules, the game collapses. A diverse society only works if everyone agrees to the same framework — while remaining free to eat, dress, worship, dance, and love as they choose.

This is where that old Cold War film keeps coming back to me.

A lawyer agrees to defend a Soviet spy — not because he likes him, not because he trusts him, but because the law demands it. The country turns on him. His house is vandalised. The FBI follows him. Patriotism becomes a weapon.

In one scene, he sits across from an FBI agent in a bar. He asks the agent’s surname. German. He notes his own is British. Then he asks the question that cuts to the bone:

What makes either of us American?

And he answers it himself.

Not blood. Not fear. Not loyalty tests.
What makes them American is a shared commitment to rules — the Constitution — even when it protects someone you despise. Especially then. Because the moment the rules bend to panic, the system is already lost.

Societies don’t hold together because people agree.
They hold together because they agree on how to disagree — and because the rules survive fear.

Australia has never finished that work.

Our Constitution was written when colonies federated into a single self-governing outpost, not a fully independent nation. It still carries that unfinished identity. It enshrines hierarchy. It excludes citizens from becoming head of state. It tells us how power works, but not who we are.

A child born here cannot dream of leading their own country — while a child in the UK one day will.

We argue endlessly about culture, identity, belonging, and extremism, but we’ve never done the hardest, most boring, most necessary thing: agree on the rules that bind us. Agree on the values we expect of ourselves. Agree on what being Australian actually means.

Until we do, we’ll keep mistaking tougher laws for stronger communities.
We’ll keep responding to fractures with force instead of repair.
And we’ll keep lurching from crisis to crisis, wondering why cohesion feels like something we’ve lost — when in truth, we never finished building it.

 

Just a clip out of many covering the Buddhist monks walk for peace. Great interview of a woman who lost her child and found in the monks’ message a reason to continue. The crowds also show people are desperate for something higher in these challenging times. 🙏

I find myself deciding between zazen and whatever, literally.
Sitting still or moving on.

It still surprises me how long it has taken people like Canada’s prime minister and the French president to catch up with what many of us have been protesting for more than two years now: the collapse of international law and the return of rule by bullies. Had Western powers drawn a clear line the moment it became obvious that the end goal was the erasure of a people, the world would not be where it is today. Lawless. Precedent-free. A jungle again.

In response to a Bernie Sanders video deploring the actions of Trump’s ICE thugs, I pointed out that their behaviour is only a bulldozed home short of what the IDF has been doing in the West Bank for decades — with the ironclad backing of the United States, bipartisan and unwavering. It’s a law of the universe: when you negate others, you negate yourself. No exceptions. No escape clauses.

I wasn’t joking when I earlier asked who would come to Australia’s rescue if a powerful foreign nation decided to move in. I’m not the first to ask the question. Two defence academics recently argued against the purchase of Virginia-class submarines, noting that we could not even maintain them independently. And if a superpower to our north made a move, would the United States really risk global war for Australia? I doubt it. Greenland was openly threatened with invasion, and the only thing that saved it was NATO. Europe stands together. Who do we stand with?

Australia is rich in resources, land, sunlight, space, and strategic location. It is not unthinkable that a densely populated, resource-poor nation might one day decide they need it more than we do. Ask the Greenlanders. Ask the Ukrainians. Ask the Palestinians. If you still doubt it, keep an eye on Taiwan.

So I come back to the smaller question, the only one I can answer: what do I do with the years remaining?

Zazen is sitting still, legs folded into impossible geometry, mind emptied through patience and pain. It worked once, when I went walkabout and lived with the land. These days I lean toward iaido — meditation in movement. Drawing the blade, returning it. Breath, balance, intent. The katana has been collecting dust for too long.

As for writing here, I usually have no trouble talking under water, but lately I feel the futility of it. Silence can be a powerful response. Still, sometimes the obvious needs to be restated: dropping bombs on the heads of children can never be justified. Not by history, not by fear, not by law, not by God.

Hell is going to be crowded.

Friday evening I went to a demo in the city. I arrived an hour early and the first thing I noticed was the staging: police everywhere, news crews loitering, including Sky News, conservative-leaning and clearly expecting trouble. The assumption was written into the atmosphere—something will kick off, and we’ll be ready to frame it.

Nothing did.

A few hundred people turned up to protest the anti-protest legislation. In a city of more than five million, that’s sobering. I always think of what Irish statesman John Philpot Curran said in the late eighteenth century: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance—often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson. A few hundred bodies to defend civil and political rights. That’s what the “vigilance” looks like now: thin, tired, outnumbered by cameras.

Churchill’s line—people get the government they deserve—gets thrown around a lot, and it’s too neat, but in a functioning democracy there’s a sting to it. When things go wrong, media isn’t the only culprit, but it’s often a willing accomplice. Conservative outlets at the demo looked like they were waiting for a scuffle so they could run the familiar story: barefoot lefties, soft-headed idealists, terror-sympathisers. When it became clear there’d be no spectacle, they drifted off. No conflict, no product.

I mostly sat off to the side and listened to the speakers as best I could—maybe I’m going a bit deaf; too much loud music for too long. I also felt a kind of alienation, the sense that my presence was only useful in increasing attendance by a factor of one. And underneath that was another thought: all these demonstrations feel increasingly beside the point if we can’t face the main problem bearing down on everything—climate.

I tried to say something like that to a man around my age handing out flyers for the far left. The script was the old one: blame capitalism; the workers will unite; the global revolution will arrive and set things right. My point, as always, is that we don’t have time. Not for a worldwide class awakening on schedule, not for a miraculous pivot by Russia, China, India and the United States, not for the whole planet to discover virtue and coordination in the next few years. And besides: that mass revolution was predicted two centuries ago. It still hasn’t shown up.

I can forgive it in the young—because I hear my younger self in it. But in older people it lands differently. They should know, by now, that the future of the young is on the table, and waiting for history to do the right thing is just another way of choosing inaction.

I was a hardcore leftie in my early teens. By my mid-teens I’d started to suspect it was often less about rescuing workers from misery than about personal empowerment—the thrill of being righteous, the intoxication of belonging. Since then I’ve put my faith, however imperfectly, in parliamentary democracy. And where we are now, the only realistic way forward is to work with what exists—which includes free-market economics.

Use the system. Price the damage. Stop treating the atmosphere like a free sewer.

Factor the environment into economics: put a cost on using nature as a dumping ground. Push for a universal tax and enforcement regime that capital can’t simply dodge. Hit exports from nations that miss emissions targets with heavy tariffs. And, crucially, give industry the certainty it needs for large, long-term investment—because capital moves when rules are clear and the future is priced in.

It might not be as hard as it sounds. Hard, yes. But not mystical.

After a few hours I headed for a train back to the suburbs, feeling irrelevant, and telling myself I should check next week’s weather—work out when I’ll go up the coast and see if the yacht is still afloat. That’s the whiplash of the modern mind: civil liberties, planetary physics, then the quiet personal audit—is my own little vessel still sitting on the water? The big and the small, all braided together, and somehow we keep walking around as if they aren’t.

If nothing else, the evening was a reminder: the machinery of control is always ready. The machinery of attention is always hungry. And the machinery of public will—when it matters most—often struggles just to turn up.

I don’t think I’m a doomist. But given the level of scientific agreement about where we are heading, it’s alarming that world events—terrible as they are—have pushed climate almost entirely off the news agenda.

Many regions now locked in conflict will, within a few decades, become functionally uninhabitable as we approach two degrees of warming. We’re already at one and a half. Two is no longer a warning sign in the distance; it’s on the horizon, and we are accelerating towards it—and well beyond. Where does it stop? It doesn’t, so long as carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere.

There’s a simple fact people rarely grasp: how thin the atmosphere actually is. If the Earth were the size of a soccer ball, the atmosphere would be less than a millimetre thick. You don’t need to be a genius to work out that you can’t use something that fragile as a dumping ground forever. Pumping around 40 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into it every year is bound to have consequences—and not pleasant ones.

Scientists are increasingly dismayed by the lack of attention this looming disaster is receiving. And personally, were it not for children, developing nations, and non-human life, I’d be tempted to say humanity deserves what’s coming. We’ve had a good fifty years to address the problem. Yet here we are, in 2026, with global emissions still rising.

We need to find ways to force climate back onto the political agenda.

There is some good news in Australia. A number of writers’ festivals are beginning to recognise that cancel culture—excluding voices that challenge contemporary group-think—is a double-edged sword. There’s a reason Voltaire wrote: « Je déteste ce que vous écrivez, mais je donnerais ma vie pour que vous puissiez continuer à écrire. »
“I detest what you write, but I would give my life so that you may continue to write.”

Many English translations soften this to “I disagree with what you write,” but disagreeing and detesting are not the same thing. Voltaire was making it clear that freedom of speech is not conditional on opinions staying within approved boundaries.

On hate-speech and anti-protest laws, movement is happening too. There is a demonstration tomorrow at Sydney Town Hall in support of the right to protest. Check whether it’s going ahead and details are on the Palestine Action Group Instagram and Facebook pages. Below is a joint statement from the Jewish Council and the Palestine Action Group.

Also, a group of Buddhist monks and a dog are on a 2300 mile “Walk for Peace” from Texas to Washington. There’s heaps of footage on social media, but I thought I’d just include here what one of the monks said to an assembled crowd of supporters.

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.