S Sorrensen
My place. Wednesday, 7am
It’s a perfect day here under the cliffs at the end of the world. The birds are going nuts as the sun pokes its head above the hill and goes ‘Boo!’ – a hungover forest blinking in the light, the valley chicks shrieking.
The teapot makes little clouds that drift from the deck to join larger drifts retreating from the valley as the sun invades in wave after warm wave from the east.
Elsewhere, in a land far away – where Western cultural roots lie, where emergent agriculture created the first Western civilisations, where accountants invented writing and businessmen the wheel – an angry pus is forming around a wound inflicted years ago upon that land by Australia and her bosses.
Religious types, never to be trusted, are playing murderous propaganda games to compensate for a lack of personal power and sexual adequacy. And that’s just in Australia…
Elsewhere, in a land far away, religious types, never to be trusted, are playing murderous propaganda games to compensate for a lack of personal power and sexual adequacy.
And everyone suffers.
I love tea. Especially in the morning. Being old school, I make tea in a pot with tea leaves. I use a strainer and – get this – I pour milk from a glass bottle. (What next? A paper newspaper?) Heaven smells like brewed tea in the morning.
I’m very lucky in this lucky country (as it was called by a sarcastic Donald Horne back in ’64, when Australia was helping turn Asian countries into killing fields at the behest of America). I live in peace on healthy land. (For the time being anyway…) What else could a sane person want?
A currawong, an old mate, lands on the railing and looks with one eye at my cuppa. I sip slowly making a big noise. It cocks the other eye. Like me, there are many things it doesn’t understand.
Like, who in this lackey country actually believes the furrowed brow and faked concern that is the hallmark of the lies that spill like blood from the mouths of politicians? Somebody must. Government support is rising.
Who falls for this most unsubtle manipulation of reality designed to achieve an outcome that is American, not Australian; corporate, not social; backward, not evolved? Somebody must.
Somebody must have actually been surprised when the Australian Iraqi mission went from humanitarian aid to military complicity. I certainly wasn’t.
Somebody must have actually been surprised when Australia’s terrorism level then went to high alert. And then – surprise, surprise – terrorism cells were found in Australia.
This valley is my home. In a valley in Iraq, I bet some bloke is sipping tea and wondering what the hell is going on. Who are these wackos in thawbs and suits who create such pain and suffering around the world?
These people are destroyers, dangerous shadows from an old world that was born in Mesopotamia; an old world that spread around the planet colonising with three religions, one god, a war plan and a marketing strategy; an old world that is returning to die at the gates of Eden; an old world whose time is done and made desperate by its growing irrelevance.
These people, these ghosts of times past, ponce about like cartoon characters, prattling on about justice and god, glorying in violence because it’s easier than love, dealing in stupidity because it sells, feigning sincerity in public, smirking in dark places, and wreakng havoc on a planet that has nearly had enough.
As Pete Seeger sang in 1961 as Kennedy was putting troops into Vietnam to win a noble war against evil:
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
