End the British occupation of Australia

Less than 300 years ago Australia was invaded and colonised by the British without regard to the people already living on the land. The British Crown obstinately instigated a government for a land which does not belong to them and through no other means but force and time is the government recognised today as the primary authority on this continent. There is a natural authority which is all-pervasive and undeniable, however not economically relevant. There is a human authority that is thousands of years old, developing with the planet's oldest living human culture. This is also not considered relevant because it does not strengthen the control and economic dominance of the regime.

In this enlightened age when we have massive institutions like the United Nations to make sure human rights are supported by other massive institutions with excessive amounts of power we recognise that it is not acceptable, not legal, to invade and settle any land, dispossessing, dislocating and destroying its people. However the Australian government is allowed to stay because it will be too difficult to hand the authority back to the people who possess it naturally. It has been 230 years and this institution is now an established and permanent part of this country. The previous authority barely lasted 100,000 years.

We are as arrogant as we have ever been and now is the time not to make public apologies but to withdraw the illegal occupation of this land and return the authority to the people who have walked this land for thousands of years, the people who respect and understand this land, the people who belong to this land. Whether our family has been here for five generations, hundreds of generations or we arrived yesterday, this is our world and we deserve to be here. However, we have no right, legally or morally, to then impose European law on a continent in the Pacific and use this arbitrary illogical law, which clearly does not work because it requires Police and prisons to implement it, to intimidate, control and disempower people.

Recently I worked in the cherry capital of Australia, Young, labouring in the major industry of the town, picking cherries. We were received with warmth and curiosity by the locals, contempt and suspicion by the police. We heard plenty of anecdotal evidence to back up our experience that every year when many people come into Young to pick cherries for $0.70/kilogram they are targeted and harassed by the police, who converge on the town from surrounding areas for the picking season. Our experience was of being threatened and fined by the police for committing the heinous crimes of swimming naked and not wearing a seatbelt. It is easy to recognise the deep sickness in any institution by simply observing their behaviour. The government-funded gang known as Police have targeted and intimidated economically-supportive international travellers in one particular case in Young, presumably because of the cultural diversity and sense of chaos we bring with us.

Aside from the obvious overwhelming importance of the economy, the government's responsibility is to maintain a static obedient European capitalist monoculture here in the Pacific. Any threat to this monoculture must be policied and Policed out of existence. We are not able to maintain, let alone explore and enjoy, some of the oldest and richest human cultures on this planet because it doesn't reinforce the quasi-European monoculture that we are trying to enforce and maintain at the expense of everything and anything.

We should count ourselves lucky that we live in an age of democracy and not anarchy, capitalism and not survival, regulation and not chaos. How can we possibly survive in this world if we are forced to depend upon the land, if we are forced into a culture that is fluid and dynamic? If we do not heavily regulate this land and enforce these regulations with threats of imprisonment, people will die everywhere. We will die.

What could possibly be more of a threat to our noble desperation for civilised mind-control and wage-slavery than a nomadic people who don't wear clothes or live in houses? What can we sell them if they don't recognise the concept of ownership and they eat insects and other non-processed non-packaged non-marketed foods?

God help all of us who subscribe to a democracy that must be enforced by Police.

Have you ever seen the rain?

Love is a scary thing and I guess we have to hide from it sometimes.  Sometimes I go to great lengths to avoid the exact thing that I want more than anything.  I am crazy, I know.

I fall in love far too frequently and the dangers of this sordid act of abundant love has finally manifest as violence.  As I told one of the Koreans at The Ranch, the one who told me I have "kind eyes", "I have a lot of love to give; maybe too much."

Just as water flows into our body through the mouth and out as urine, just as we receive stimuli and express ourselves, so it is that the more love we allow in the more love we have to share.  I am not deluded in my experience of a universe full of love.  This is what I naturally encounter and despite the conclusions of my ego I am not unique in this experience.

I do choose openness and I do not understand why someone would choose to include me in their game of opening themselves up and then guarding the door.  Sometimes it's too scary to become close to someone via intimacy and honesty, so obsessive confrontational attention is employed.  In this world the physical fight is the act of making love that all such intense relationships must eventually reach as a breaking of the tension, as a climax and release.

Sadly, in my world there is a fear of the fight and a revulsion of physical pain.  Otherwise perhaps I would have chosen to fulfill the destiny of my union with the self-proclaimed Alpha Male who has captured my mind more in my hate for him than in the love that preceded it.

And now that I have conveniently distanced myself from his violence and aura of hatred in some guise of self-preservation I find myself missing him more than anyone in that brief family of cherry-picking and joy-riding.

Did his love suddenly become hate or are the two not so different after all?  Is his behaviour any more strange than my responding to his "love" with "love" and my responding to his "hate" with "hate"?  I do know that the +/- designations we apply to things are arbitrary.

So many times I wanted to touch him and did not.  I never told him about my homosexual nature because I knew he would not relate to this word as I used to.  He sensed it all, of course, it was never invisible.

He finally manifest this apparently mutual desire to touch one another and establish our connection firmly in the physical world; he manifest in the way that he could; he manifest in a way I never would have; he manifest what we both desired and what I could not and I rejected his as he would have rejected my physical advances.

It never occurred to me until now that the hate might be love and that what I am running away from is perhaps not as honourable or justified as I thought.  My emotions are the best guide I have in this world but it's not until they  have passed that they make any sense to me.  It's not until I have made unalterable decisions, such as the decision to reject and escape his "inappropriate" attention, that I am able to reconsider the complexity of the situation and my morally neutral part in it.

I also realise that this beautiful linguistic realisation could not have been shared in the context of emotional repression both twins are in the habit of perpetuating.

I am a stronger man as a result of his love and a wiser man as a result of his hate.  I can only hope that my loving presence briefly in his life enriched his person, that my hate was the response he wanted to his violence and that he remembers me fondly.  Hopefully when I see him again my ego won't dictate my response and maybe I'll even get a hug from him and his brother.

If I am sorry for anything it is that I did not fight him.  Perhaps he would not have beaten me to within an inch of my life as he is likely physically capable.  Perhaps he would instead have drawn the line where we are evenly matched and our anger could have been channeled into passion.

Perhaps it is not so anomalous that in between the two times he physically attacked me he told me, "Your smile is a sign of true happiness and it brings happiness to everyone around you."  Or that as the rain poured, amidst the craziness and the flooding and the maggots of The Ranch, he pulled me aside to sing,
  I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain?
  I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain
  comin' down on a sunny day?