Hideout In the Apocalypse

John Stapleton

Description

Hideout in the Apocalypse is about surveillance and the crushing of Australia's larrikin culture.

In the last three years the Australian government has prosecuted the greatest assault on freedom of speech in the nation's history.

The government knew from international research that when it introduced the panopticon, universal surveillance, into Australia it would have a devastating impact on the culture.

When people know they are being watched, they behave differently. Dissent is stifled, conformity becomes the norm. This is the so-called chilling effect.

Hideout in the Apocalypse, in the great tradition of The Lucky Country, takes Australia's temperature half a century on from Donald Horne's classic cautionary tale.

Now the future has arrived. Forced by a plethora of new laws targeting journalists to use novelistic techniques, in his latest book veteran news reporter John Stapleton confirms the old adage, truth is stranger than fiction.

Hideout in the Apocalypse takes up the adventures of retired news reporter Old Alex, first encountered in the book's predecessor Terror in Australia: Workers' Paradise Lost. But as befits the times, this book is more fantastical, intimate and politically acerbic in its portrait of his beloved country.

Alex believes believes he has been under abusive levels of government surveillance since writing a book called Terror in Australia, and as a natural empath can hear the thoughts of the surveillance teams on his track, the so-called Watchers on the Watch. Alex also believes he is a cluster soul sent with others of his kind to help save the Earth from an impending apocalypse, and has the capacity to channel some of history's greatest writers.

Australia might have the worst anti-freedom of speech laws in the Western world, but how can you sue a character like that?

Stapleton's essential theme: a place which should have been safe from an impending apocalypse, the quagmire of religious wars enveloping the Middle East, is not safe at all.

Ideas are contagious, and the Australian government is afraid of them. Australia is a democracy in name only.The war on terror has become a war on the people's right to know, justifying a massive expansion of state power.

Alex's swirling head, lifelong fascination with sociology, literature and journalism, and his deep distress over the fate of the Great Southern Land, makes him the perfect character to tell a story which urgently needs to be told.

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Sociology

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 09 novembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780994479129
• Langue: English

Extrait

Hideout in the Apocalypse
by
John Stapleton

Copyright 2016 John Stapleton,
All rights reserved.
 
Published in eBook format by A Sense of Place Publishing
 
ISBN-13: 978-0-9944-7912-9
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Copyright A Sense of Place Publishing 2016


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
 
I would like to thank Peter Binning, Leigh Dayton, Max King and family, Peter van de Voorde, Nola Stapleton, Kylie Picket, Cara McDougal, Tim Cribb and Tony Candito for their hospitality and support during the writing of this book. I would also like to thank Jessica Bell for her cover design, Stafford Sanders for his editing, Mary Elizabeth for her formatting skills and Melissa Levesque and her publishing team, from whom I have learnt a great deal in recent years And last but not least, Anthony Reale, owner of the Village Fix in Shellharbour. His excellent coffee saw me through the final drafts.
ONE BIG LIE
THE NEWS WAS all bad, there in those fading days of summer.
The darkness came early, settling in over the back fence, making the cluttered, indiscriminate garden instantly cold.
For Old Alex, a retired reporter, every day could seem like a century. This time around he knew there would be no mercy, not for him, and certainly not for the thousands who would die.
His head had begun to swarm weeks before. Frightened of the consequences, of all the things he wished he could not hear, of the fantastical things that swirled through his head, he had done everything he could think of to stop it, smoking too many cigarettes, hiding out deep inside the recesses of his own life, his all too desperately human form. He inserted into random conversations the comment: “A dive into the ordinary.” He did not want to be found.
In his waking dreams, his species had lived in fright and flight for millennia, and his most overwhelming desire was to be invisible. Unfortunately, the times, destiny, this incarnation had chosen the wrong profession for that, journalism, and there were always whispers in the wind. The world had never been a safe place, not for his kind.
The English had invaded the southern continent on the edge of Western consciousness, killed the indigenous, raped the land for profit, invited the world to trample across the sacred hunting grounds, and sold what was left to the highest bidder. The white ghosts were a cruel race and they brought with them their own gods to pour scorn upon the ancient spirits, to smash the land and its peoples - not just in the physical realm, but in the spiritual. The invaders built their own societies, only, in the end, to destroy themselves. The land would have its revenge.
At the same time as the days began to shorten in the southern hemisphere time, or more precisely events, began to speed up in other parts of an increasingly hyper-connected, image-saturated world. With the advent of internet technologies, the species was busily turning itself into a hive mind. The ancient gods were taking full advantage. As were governments, gifting themselves powers of mass surveillance and control over their populations. Individual privacy was massacred, public interest journalism also.
Every day might seem like a century, but equally the months were collapsing in on themselves. The beginning of summer had barely been a rain-drenched five minutes ago.
Old Alex could make a shopping list sing if he wanted to; but after writing two books in rapid succession he was burnt out, and unusually for him, lacked the emotional coherence or motivation to write. The lyricism which once flowed so readily through his head, the storytelling which had been one of his sole methods of expression, vanished.
Now he sat barely speaking in the backyard while above the heavens were burning, just out of sight. As if the upper atmosphere had caught alight.
He told no one what he was really thinking.
“In a flash of recognition an old mentor once said: “You’re like me. You think in pictures.”
“Yes.”
“Can you imagine what it’s like to be an ordinary person? One thought following another. It must be like walking through a large empty warehouse.”
They both laughed, although it was no comfort.
But at that point in time, beyond the incendiary sky, there were no pictures at all, just a terrifying blankness.
Alex had not intended to be back in Australia at his age or stage of life, in this remote place. As he had written before, like the convicts of yore, he had done his time.
An unravelling world was portrayed in short, ideologically filtered bursts on television screens, distant events of which he was not a part and to which most people in the area paid zero attention.
All around Sydney’s inner west the streets remained quiet, the workers’ cottages of days gone by selling now for more than a million dollars each, sanctities of silence, good behaviour, ordered belief, middle class welfare. There were few points of commonality. Students gathered in clots in the park to drink, smoke, gossip and while away the afternoons in the thin winter sun. Middle aged women and gay couples walked their dogs. The only sign of creativity was the graffiti which, being neither political sloganeering nor creative expression, bore little purpose. Sleep in slumber. I anguish, you yearn.
The population had slumped into a zombie-like state, their society deadened by obsessive, overarching regulation.
Ceaseless indoctrination pumped from government-controlled media and the mouths of elected representatives.
“I can’t understand anyone who criticises Australia,” went the mantra. “We’re lucky to live here, why would you want to live anywhere else?”
By 2016 Australian culture had become a whimpering desert, redacted, flattened, crushed into a shadow land. The truth was, Australia’s egregious, shameless political castes had failed to act or been complicit in the destruction of the county’s traditional culture, betraying the public at the deepest levels.
Rules, pointless, stupid rules, covered every waking moment. The bars were dead, the nightlife non-existent, the streets swept of protest. Conversations were conducted in whispers, within a narrow band of social justice concerns in a land where there was no justice. Nobody wanted to be caught holding an unacceptable view.
“It’s a Police State,” Australians frequently said of their own country. The citizens, subdued under excessive levels of bureaucracy in a failing democracy and brainwashed with layers of anodyne, anaemic media, had nothing good to say about their country or their politicians, much less the swathes of government machinery their taxes supported. A defeated population.
Data retention laws and expansion of the Surveillance State, under the threat or excuse of terror, meant the actions of every citizen could now, legally and without warrant, be monitored by a plethora of state agencies. Nowhere to Hide. Bureaucrats without heart or conscience toiled for Big Brother. In a twinkling the society had changed, the only thing to keep the citizens safe a malevolent, suffocating blanket.
The government knew perfectly well when it introduced the panopticon, ubiquitous, universal surveillance into Australia, what the results would be: a frightened, conformist population; a place where dissent and protest was hard to organise under the ever watchful eyes of the county’s oft-hated and increasingly questioned secret police, including the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.
A population that was not just less inquiring, but sicker.
For Alex, “panopticon” was a word he had never heard before.
 
Philosopher Jeremy Bentham conceived of his “panopticon” in the late 1700s as a way to build cheaper prisons. His idea was a prison where every inmate could be surveilled at any time, unawares. The inmate would have no choice but to assume that he was always being watched, and would therefore conform. This idea has been used as a metaphor for mass personal data collection, both on the Internet and off.
 
On the Internet, surveillance is ubiquitous. All of us are being watched, all the time, and that data is being stored forever. This is what an information-age surveillance state looks like, and it’s efficient beyond Bentham’s wildest dreams. 1
 
The Australian Panopticon had been put in place without consulting the population - those whose every move was now a matter of record, every location they travelled to, every website they visited, every term they searched, every phone call they made, every email they sent, every Facebook post they made, every liaison entered into.
The research was already in. The government knew full well universal surveillance would have not just a serious chilling effect on public debate, but broader consequences for the democracy. It also knew universal surveillance would have a serious impact on health and wellbeing.
 
There’s a strong physiological basis for privacy. Biologist Peter Watts makes the point that a desire for privacy is innate: mammals in particular don’t respond well to surveillance. We consider it a physical threat, because animals in the natural world are surveilled by predators. Surveillance makes us feel like prey, just as it makes the surveillors act like predators.
 
Psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, novelists, and technologists have all written about the effects of constant surveillance, or even just the perception of constant surveillance. Studies show that we are less healthy, both physically and emotionally. We have feelings of low self-esteem, depression, and anxiety. Surveillance strips us of our dignity. It threatens our very selves as individuals. It’s a dehumanising tactic employed in prisons and detention camps around the world. 2
 
If Modern Day Australia was not a