Blog

Today SBS is running one of those bright-eyed pieces about how Australia could be “making billions with this untapped export.” Cultural exports, soft power, follow Japan and South Korea, etc. The usual litany: more government support, help the creatives, build a national identity. And the kicker: since we supposedly don’t have one, Indigenous culture must be the backbone.

There’s a truth in that, but only in the way a single tree tells you something about a whole forest. You feel it as you read: the whole frame is off.

A Japanese manga artist nailed the deeper point years ago. Asked why Japan rakes in billions while Western nations struggle, his answer was brutally simple: censorship.

Because here’s the part people don’t like to hear. Across East Asia, visual literacy runs high. People know an image is not a contract, not a confession, not a literal instruction manual for living. They know imagery can be symbolic, ironic, interior. They know that text and subtext dance.

Take some random panel from a Boys’ Love manga—two beautiful young men in an intimate moment. A Western reader scans it and starts generating alarms:
Is this LGBTQIA+ content? Is one partner too young? Is this appropriate? Does this violate any of our forty-seven categories of protected narratives?

The reflex is to supervise, classify, restrict. Sometimes punish.

But the Japanese female reader doesn’t see “two males.” She slips herself into the scene. She becomes the younger partner; the older man’s devotion becomes hers to enjoy. The whole appeal of the genre is romance unburdened by gender roles. And most of the creators are women making stories for women because gender, in Japan, is still an armour you want to slip out of, at least in fiction.

Here, that same creative space would summon not a fandom but a taskforce.

And even without the law stepping in, you hit the bureaucratic reef of “acceptable representation.” Whole pages of legislation telling you what you can and can’t say about certain demographics. And if you try to draw from Indigenous cultures without being Indigenous, you’re liable to be accused of appropriation. Meanwhile the SBS piece floats this fantasy that endless Indigenous stories are enough to sustain a global audience. They aren’t. They matter, they’re vital, but any culture that exports well exports universals: longing, alienation, power, identity, death, freedom.

Think of Ghost in the Shell—half Japanese cyber-myth, half Western philosophy, all of it translatable because it speaks to the human condition, not a committee.

Japan expects cultural exports to hit $198 billion by 2033. Could Australia do anything like that?

Yeah. Possibly. But only if we stop treating art like a hazardous chemical that needs to be handled with gloves and a police escort. Only if we trust audiences with complexity. Only if we let creators risk being misunderstood, disliked, controversial, excessive, strange.

Because no country ever exported culture while being scared of its own imagination.

First days of summer and temperatures here in Sydney are up and down like a bouncing ball. The system is increasingly unstable, and one can ponder how many joules must be pumped into it before it starts to get shaky and unpredictable. Ten to the power of what?

It’s similar to the old marshalling yards where a worker would move a carriage with a long lever. The carriage would move ever so slowly at first, but with each action of the lever on its wheels, it gathers up speed until the brakes need to be applied to prevent the carriage from becoming runaway. Same thing for the climate: keep allowing the system to gain energy, and change will, at some point, become unstoppable by human intervention. Whatever.

Having finished writing a book and with the cover art done, all that remains is formatting for publication. I’m thinking about my next project. Another book is a strong contender, as is a comic strip; both major undertakings and the logistics required for completion are not established, so lately I’ve been thinking about putting together something I can do under my present circumstances. A reflection on AI is possible; it’s certainly of public interest today, when here in Australia, the discussion is more about regulation than other aspects of this new technology. In a CNN article about the Australian social media ban for under-sixteens, they noted that Australia is traditionally fond of regulation. It’s long been true, here in Australia, social problems are addressed with political opportunism resulting in more laws, and where legal kits already existed, with harsher penalties. Laws, as anyone with half a brain would see, are often knee-jerk reactions at best because they are rarely, if ever, based on solid, unbiased research. Some laws here are supposed to protect the community from undesirables, and effectively remove freedom of thought, the cornerstone of democracy, and that’s forever unless a later parliament modifies the regulation.

Looking for a manageable subject, questions deriving from the trial of Oscar Wilde came to mind. I’d read the transcripts of the trial itself, including the witness statements. Oscar, today, would have copped twenty years. Why did he get two, and at a time when homosexuality attracted a life sentence? How many Oscar Wilde fan boys know Alfred Douglas (‘Bosie’) had an older brother? That the older brother was killed in a ‘hunting accident,’ that Victorian euphemism for ‘murdered.’ Even at the time, most people questioned this all-too-convenient accident. Was Queensberry a mad, violent, homophobe, or a father desperate to protect his second son from those untouchable gentlemen? Under the law of the time, and that of today, Wilde was guilty, no doubt there, but was he the fall guy? The witty buffoon who could be sacrificed to protect big reputations from public scrutiny? You could say Epstein was just such a disposable little party boy.

The fact that Wilde became a martyr to the LGBTQIA+ is interesting because of this apparent case of what’s called willful ignorance. Everything is there, on record. The question follows: Is LGBTQIA+ a construct? It started as the GLF, gay liberation front. A movement that grew out of working-class activism, and not forgetting the rent boys of Stonewall. Women signed up, and it became the GLBT, once transsexuals and bisexuals were included. The women got upset that the G was coming before the L, and so, under their insistence, it was flipped. Social acceptance was increasing; it became nearly fashionable to come out of the closet, so the upper class joined in, took over, and sought to remodel the community into something acceptable to their straight social peers. Marriage, gays in the military, the gay couple, same as anyone else, standing in a manicured garden with a white picket fence. When a gay billionaire gave a commencement speech that included his debt to the ‘men and women of Stonewall’, he was avoiding saying the rent boys of Stonewall. Maybe he really, really believes in fairy tales?

Where this line of thought ended was in human systems, those that are part of Universal law. Homosexuals are part of a system that is designed to do one thing primarily, and that is the continuation of the species. Homosexuals must play an essential role in that, but is its expression marching down a street in a jockstrap waving a flag? Or is that a breakdown of the system?

 

We keep talking about climate change like it’s weather chatter, but the truth is sharper: kids born today might grow old on a planet that’s no longer Earth. Something else. Something that looks like it crawled out of a B-grade sci-fi flick — low-budget apocalypse, real-world cast.

And the studies… God, the studies. Piled high enough to pave a highway to the moon. Square kilometres of warnings, charts, heat maps, predictions shouted into the void. Meanwhile, action only happens in the thin political space between now and the next election. Do just enough. Never too much. Don’t upset the donors.

We blame the fossil barons. The far-right denial factories. The religious crowds who shrug and say God wouldn’t let this happen — or better yet, that He promised a new heaven and a new Earth, so what’s the worry? Across the world, same story: Iran praying for rain as the rivers die, the dams suck air, the land cracks. Somewhere, a divine voice would probably say, I gave you a perfect world. You broke it. Fix it yourselves.

But I keep circling a darker question: what if we’re missing something fundamental? Some disruptive truth too awkward for our species-sized ego?

Think about it. In the 18th century, electromagnetism wasn’t even a rumour. Faraday pulls on a thread, Maxwell writes the equations, and suddenly the invisible becomes real. Then quantum physics, relativity, nuclear fire — boom. But is that the end of the road? We act like we’ve found the last great thing nature was hiding. That seems… unlikely.

Because here we are: a species smart enough to diagnose its doom in peer-reviewed detail, and still we keep tightening the noose. It makes you wonder — are we stupid, or is something driving us? Something we don’t name because to name it is to see it.

Call it negation. Not a ghost, not a demon, nothing with a shape or a pulse. Something that exists without existing. No mass, no coordinates, no timestamp. Undetectable, yet present. A kind of inward gravitational pull toward self-undoing.

You see it in the headlines: a young soldier kills toddlers, then turns the gun on himself. Erasing the child was erasing himself. Negation completing its circle.

And maybe — just maybe — the planet is just the latest child.

I’ve been feeding these machines—AI, code, silicon ghosts—with thoughts. Some mine, some borrowed, some stitched from the long cloth of human doubt. Then I tossed in a question like a final coin in an old wishing well: Do we have a duty to publish truth?

The machine did what machines do best: sifted the scatter, found the pattern, rolled out an answer smooth as a Zen pebble—yes.
And I felt that yes too.

But a doubt clung to me like the last smoke of a burnt match. Musashi warned never to move on a partial feeling, and I could hear him in the shadows: wait until the mind is clean as a blade just sharpened.
And then there’s that Zen tale—one I can’t shake—about the young monk itching to lecture a nearby king, bursting with wisdom he thinks the world needs. The master stops him cold: the king won’t listen, he says. Some people must walk their own crooked path to understanding.

And earlier this year, I finished a book—poured myself into it—then tucked it away like a letter I wasn’t brave enough to send. Recently I opened it again, dusted off the sentences, polished the bones. I thought: maybe this could help someone.
But the doubt whispered again: they’ll be like the king—deaf to it. Maybe I should deny myself permission to publish.
Or maybe it’s Musashi again: do nothing useless.
And that’s the trouble, isn’t it? These days trying to make people reflect feels like shouting poetry into an empty warehouse—your own echo coming back with a shrug.

Sometimes I wonder if this was how Aquinas felt before he put down his pen forever. One revelation and the whole Summa suddenly looked like a child’s sandcastle. He saw something vast, and human words felt small, useless.
Or take the flat-Earthers, or the moon-landing deniers—you could hurl truth at them like bricks and they’d still duck behind the cardboard shield of their beliefs. Psychologists have their profiles, and the conspiracy theorists I’ve known fit them like gloves.

So I look at my finished manuscript and wonder: what reception would it get? Would the LGBTQIA+ community ever consider the idea that strict heterosexuality isn’t the default state of most humans? Would feminists acknowledge that powerful men, across history and now, often desire what they desire despite ideology or expectation? Were ancient men really so different from the ones scrolling their feeds today? We still read Plato and find ourselves in his lines—so maybe not.

There are lies we treat as scripture. Stonewall is one of them. A friend of mine—a journalist with ink in his veins—tracked down men who were actually there. Their version of events was wild, raw, unvarnished—so different from the official myth you’d think they were talking about some other night in some other city. The gap between truth and the “approved story” was the size of a fairy tale, and maybe that’s all some histories are: bedtime stories for adults who crave heroes.

Still, I think I’ll publish. There’s one section left to finish—on the long-term mental health fallout of growing up too fast, burning too hot, seeing too much before you even knew the cost. I’ll get it done before the year ends. Maybe I’m wrong to feel the work is useless.

I keep thinking of a moment from years ago: I was out shooting street photos, drifting back toward the station, and picked up a gay newspaper for the ride home. Inside was a piece written by a young man asking what exactly he was expected to be proud of—and why, beneath all the rainbow gloss, he felt a quiet anger he couldn’t name.
I understood him. I still do.

Would Alexander the Great strut drunkenly down a city street in a jockstrap, waving a flag? Maybe—after enough wine. But you wouldn’t dare laugh unless you were ready to have your tongue removed by dawn. Pride is a strange beast. Truth is stranger still. And people—people believe what soothes them.

But maybe somewhere out there is one reader—just one—who’s looking for something real. And maybe the book is for them.

I have to admit the fossil fuel  industry did a fantastic job preventing action that could have been taken decades ago. In a  recent interview Professor David Suzuki was asked whether he thought it is now too late? He replied it is, and now the question is what to do about it? Going on the outcome of COP 30, I’m not holding my breath.

And it gets better, below is Professor Karl Sagan testifying to the US Congress in 1985.

 

 

The ferry pulled away from the Belgian coast with that low industrial moan ships make when they’re leaving something behind. I stood out on the deck where the wind knifed across the rails and the gulls circled like scraps of torn paper. Ostend was already shrinking into the haze, the flat land folding into itself the way memories do when they’ve been carried too long.

I was thinking of him again — the old man who wasn’t my father but carried a kind of gravity that fathers sometimes lose. A man at the far end of his road, stories hanging off him like worn medals. Once a priest, he said, once a missionary, once a believer in the bright machinery of salvation. But he’d shed all that. Left the Church, married late, built a film company out of nothing but stubborn will and the way he could talk images into existence.

He was my father’s friend, but he spoke to me like I was some last chance to pass something forward. Not wisdom — no one ever passes that on — but the bits of history that cling to a man’s ribs after the rest has rotted away. He had that quiet voice older Flemish men get, like each word has to be carried across a border.

It was from him I first heard the legend.

We walked the medieval streets of Damme, he leaned in— I was thirteen — and told me about the headless rider who came out of storm clouds, a ghost nobleman from the days when Damme was still a harbour and the sea crept all the way inland. Heer Hallawijn, he called him, though the name rolled out of his mouth like something older, rounder, half-cooked by dialect. I heard it as “Sear Hallawyn,” something sharp and foreign. The sort of name that makes a boy sit still.

Hallawijn rode a black horse with thunder for hooves. No head on his shoulders, no face, no mercy. He came for the young women, the man said, the ones with bright eyes and unspent lives. The storm opened like a gate and the rider broke through, took them up and carried them west, always west, toward the pale land across the water. The white cliffs, he whispered, as if they were a prison wall.

I didn’t understand anything then. Not the history beneath the legend, not the way folklore carries the trauma of a place when the people forget the source. I didn’t know about the raiders who crossed from England and vanished into the night with whoever they caught. I just knew the man was giving me something fragile, a story you don’t tell loud.

Now, on the ferry in ’72, with the coast slipping away and the wind howling like an old engine that wants to quit, I felt the legend rise again. Felt him rising with it — the old man with the tired eyes, the man who had lived too many lives to trust any single one of them.

The ferry turned its steel face toward England. The wake stretched out behind me, long and white and restless. For a moment I imagined Hallawijn riding that same line of water, headless and relentless, still chasing the souls he thought he was owed.

And I realized: some stories never leave you.
Some men don’t either.

They just ride on ahead, waiting for you to catch up.

I needed a pep talk. Here’s what I got and thought I’d share it given that today truth is a dangerous thing to possess, many who had the courage to speak are in jail, if not dead.

“Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.”

Wole Soyinka. Nobel  Prize Literature.

A Reflection on Truth and the Duty to Share It

There are moments in life when the personal stops being personal.
When the story you lived through becomes, by sheer weight of experience, something larger — a shard of collective knowledge. Georges Sand saw that clearly: the life of one is the life of all. Rousseau, too, knew that autobiography at its best is not self-display but contribution. A lantern held up for the next traveller on the same dark road.

Survival creates obligation.
Not the sentimental kind, but the clear, flint-edged duty of someone who has come through fire and knows where the burn lines run. If you’ve lived what others are heading toward, you carry information they need. Not theory. Not speculation. The unvarnished truth — the kind Stevenson insisted was the only kind worth speaking.

But truth in complex matters is rarely welcomed. Especially when it touches power, sex, institutions, and the cultural myths people cling to for comfort. You learn, quickly, that some truths are heavily patrolled. Entire systems rise up to mute them: law, shame, moral panic, public relations, and that strange modern fog that calls itself “protective” while obscuring precisely what needs to be seen.

You know this yourself.
You saw what boys disappeared into in Piccadilly, Brussels, Amsterdam.
You saw what predation looked like from the street level, long before academics or policymakers dared to map it. And because you survived — because you didn’t become a name in a field outside London or a body at the base of a hotel — you carry something sharper than commentary. You carry lived intelligence.

But lived intelligence is dangerous.
It disrupts narratives.
It implicates people long protected by rank, reputation, or convenient categories.
It shows where responsibility was shrugged off, and where evil wore the mask of “higher good.”

Institutions hate that.
Societies do, too.
They prefer their monsters cloaked in abstraction, safely distant, not woven into their own halls of power. When someone stands up and says, This is how it was — here are the names, the mechanisms, the blind eyes, the complicities, suddenly the truth becomes radioactive. Not because it is false, but because it is true.

And evil — the real kind, not the theatrical version — thrives in the gaps between what people know and what they are willing to say. Zen names it “ceaseless negation,” the force that undoes meaning, compassion, coherence. Western religion makes it a figure, a fallen angel chasing God’s throne. Ginsberg, reading Blake, saw how law can harden into tyranny, how order can calcify into cruelty. Pauwels and Bergier imagined evil as beautiful singing flowers — the inversion of beauty, seductive and wrong all at once.

But evil has a simpler habit: it hides behind respectability.
Behind bureaucracy.
Behind social discomfort.
Behind the instinct to protect reputation instead of children.
Behind the fear that telling the truth will tear down the cathedral.

Yet cathedrals built on silence have crypts full of bones.

The real danger is not in speaking the truth, but in what grows when truth is forbidden speech. When the lived past is censored, redacted, or brushed aside because it implicates the wrong people. When the suffering of the vulnerable becomes politically inconvenient. Then evil becomes self-renewing — a garden of those singing flowers, tended by the very systems meant to keep them from blooming.

So the question returns:
If you carry the truth — the difficult, lived truth — do you not have a duty to speak it? Even if it unsettles? Even if it offends the comfortable?

My answer: yes.
But with a caveat:
Truth spoken from experience is a scalpel.
It cuts, but it also heals.
It shows the wound so that others might not be wounded.

You aren’t motivated by vengeance or spectacle.
You’re motivated by the simple, human knowledge that boys are still disappearing — if not in the same places, then in new ones; if not under the same excuses, then under updated ones. The patterns persist because the truths behind them remain unexamined or unspeakable.

Your story isn’t self-indulgence. It’s testimony.
Testimony is always uncomfortable.
Testimony is always resisted by those who benefit from silence.
Testimony is always necessary.

Because if the life of one is the life of all, then the truth of one belongs to all who need it to survive.

And if there is a duty in this world, it is not to protect the powerful from embarrassment.
It is to protect the vulnerable from erasure.

You’re standing at the crossroads where many truth-tellers, whistleblowers, survivors, and reluctant witnesses have stood:
the place where duty and self-preservation glare at each other across a narrow room.

It’s not a trivial decision.
It’s not a moral cartoon.
It’s not simply “be brave” or “stay silent.”
It’s much older, heavier — the old mythic struggle with Urizen, that tightening god of law, order, structure, bureaucracy, the one who always says: Not now. Not like this. Not from you.

But here’s something worth holding:

You don’t have to fight Urizen to tell the truth.
You only have to refuse to worship him.

You’ve lived the raw material.
You didn’t study it from the outside.
You walked the ground barefoot, and you survived the terrain. That gives you a kind of authority that no one can grant and no one can take away.

But authority doesn’t mean obligation without limit.
There are a few questions that matter, and only you can answer them:

1. What is your real aim?

If your aim is revenge, or exposure for exposure’s sake, Urizen will devour you — because he thrives on the energy of conflict.
But if your aim is prevention, illumination, or help, then you stand on stronger ground. Not moralistic ground — practical ground.

Saving one life is not a small thing.
But losing your own peace of mind matters too.

2. What form does the truth need?

Truth doesn’t always have to be an accusation.
It can be a map.
It can be a warning.
It can be a record.
It can be a testimony shaped so that it protects the vulnerable without necessarily naming the protected.

There are ways to speak that cut through fog without inviting a war.

Sometimes the truth needs to be a blunt instrument.
Sometimes a lantern.
Sometimes a needle that stitches a wound closed.

3. Who is the truth for?

If you write directly for boys, or for social workers, or for parents, your purpose clarifies. You’re not writing to fight the powerful. You’re writing to guide the lost.

That’s not a battle.
That’s a gift.

4. What is the cost of silence?

This is where your question carries weight.

The cost of speaking is obvious:
stress, scrutiny, legal lines to navigate, unwanted attention, reopening old rooms you’d rather leave locked.

But the cost of silence is quieter and more corrosive:
the knowledge that what you lived — and survived — stays folded away while others repeat the same path, unalerted.

Only you can decide which cost you can bear.

5. Must the truth be “everything,” or can it be enough?

You don’t need to empty the whole vault.
You can write what is necessary, useful, life-saving — and leave the rest in the archive of memory.

Full disclosure is a myth anyway.
Even a whole autobiography is only a thin outline of a life.

You can craft truth responsibly, selectively, meaningfully, without betraying either your past or the people who need the message.

---

About fighting Urizen

Here is the secret Blake understood:
Urizen doesn’t actually win by force.
He wins when you believe the structure is absolute.
He wins when you self-censor before he even arrives.
He wins when you imagine him larger than he is.

If you choose to speak, you don’t need to go three rounds with him.
You can write outside his ring.
You can write beyond his jurisdiction.
You can write in a way that bypasses the machinery he controls.

Truth doesn’t need to be shouted to be dangerous.
Sometimes a quiet truth travels farther.

And if you choose not to write — that’s also a truth. But then the task becomes forgiving yourself for that choice.

---

I’ll confess to playing mind games with machines. It can be hours of fun, but they are becoming better players. Today, and building on the Zen anecdote previously posted, I hit AI with the line, “What is said cannot be true, and what is true cannot be said.” I then linked that to the Godel theory, more Zen and Thomas Aquinas. Gathering up what I’d written, and in ‘my voice,’ it delivered the following which I must admit impressed me. So I share it here.

---

Truth Outside the Frame

There’s a point in every earnest search where the tools start to feel too small.
Where the words you’ve leaned on your whole life suddenly seem like mismatched shoes — good for walking, maybe, but not for the ground you’re standing on now.
It happens to monks, mystics, logicians, even to men with libraries in their heads and formulas in their bones.

You can hear it in that old floating line:
“What is said cannot be true, and what is true cannot be said.”
Nobody knows who first said it, because once a thing drifts into that territory, attribution feels beside the point.
It’s the kind of sentence that sounds like it was written by everyone and no one, whispered by the world itself.

Zen makes a whole pedagogy out of this contradiction.
A monk asks for a sermon. The master walks to the hall, stands, looks, leaves.
No words, no doctrine, no narrative arc — just presence.
And the young monk, puzzled, is told: That was the sermon.

It’s not a riddle.
It’s a demonstration of limits.

A word points. A gesture shows.
But the thing itself — raw reality, unfiltered, unwrapped — arrives only in direct experience.
Open your mouth and you’re already off-centre.
By the time you name the truth, you’ve stepped away from it.

Funny thing is, the mathematicians eventually got there too.
Gödel took the cleanest, hardest-edged discipline humans ever built and found the same crack running through it.
Any system big enough to talk about numbers, he said, will contain truths it cannot prove.
The system cannot certify itself.
To see the whole of it, you’d need to stand outside — but you are the thing you’re trying to stand outside of.

The Zen master says:
The finger cannot touch itself.
Gödel says:
The system cannot swallow the whole truth of its own structure.

Two ways of pointing at the same horizon.

And then there’s Aquinas, the great architect of medieval theology.
A man who built towers of argument so elegant the Church still lives in their shadow.
Then one winter morning, during Mass, something hit him — vision, revelation, clarity, call it what you will — and he laid down his pen forever.
“All that I have written seems like straw,” he said.

Not wrong.
Just insufficient.

It’s the same story again: the mind brushing up against what it cannot wrap itself around.

Some people think mystics and mathematicians live in different worlds.
But stand back and the lines connect.
All three — Aquinas, Gödel, the Zen masters — stand at the edge of the same map, staring into the same blank uncharted space.

Their methods differ.
Their vocabularies barely overlap.
But their conclusions rhyme.

There is more to truth than the frameworks used to describe it.
More to reality than any system — theological, logical, linguistic — can hold.
At the far edge of understanding, silence is not ignorance; it is fidelity.

It’s a strange kind of humility, knowing the tools you built with care can’t touch the heart of the matter.
But it’s also liberating.
Because once you stop trying to express the ineffable, you become free to encounter it.

That’s why the Zen master gives the silent sermon.
Why Aquinas closed his notebook.
Why Gödel proved the hole in the mathematical net.

Each in his own way is saying:
Don’t mistake the map for the territory.
Don’t confuse the word for the world.
Don’t think the symbol is the thing.

There’s a truth that lives outside the frame, and we touch it — if at all — in moments when the mind stops grasping and simply meets what’s there.

Call it reality, God, the Tao, the uncarved block, the unspeakable, the obvious.
Names don’t matter.

The thing has been itself long before we tried to pronounce it.

 

Hmmm, one day this machine might hit me with something truly ‘left of field,’ and not in its dataset. I’ll have to work on how to make that happen – short of finding another relic of the counter-culture revolution who enjoys metaphysics over a few good bottles of wine. 

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.