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Content note: This piece includes graphic discussion of suicide and reference to abuse
Just as I said I wouldn’t, I forgot them, and their stories got tangled up with all the other distant horrors. In May, last year, two young refugees under Australian care set themselves on fire. Omid Masoumali, an 23 year old held in indefinite detention on Nauru, doused his body in petrol and burnt himself alive. Three days later Hodan Yasin, a 21 year old Somali woman, also set herself alight. Unlike Masoumali, she survived; with burns covering seventy per cent of her body. She lost several fingers in the blaze.
“Me and my friends sort of used to run through the fields of wheat…” the Prime Minister says, a gleam of merriment finding her eyes, “the farmers weren’t too pleased about that… Their cries were sort of like those of animals. Gosh, they ran and ran… their filthy, skinny haunches carrying them as best they could. But we were faster, of course – children often are – and because we were quite small they could rarely see us beneath the golden heads of wheat. We laughed a great deal when they swerved or swore or prayed. Blood takes on a different odour when it’s agitated, sort of like… marzipan. My friend April would always reach them first, then myself, then June. Farmers are rather well acquainted with dying. I imagine they learn it from their livestock. Goodness me… Nobody is ever perfectly behaved, are they?”
For UK readers who aren’t volunteering for Labour in today’s election because victory is still a long shot, even with the tightened polls, here’s a short letter from an Australian perspective.
Continue reading “Fields of Wheat”
LUCIFER, Prince of Darkness and Emperor Apostate of hell, has officially disendorsed Republican presidential nominee Donald Jeronimo Trump.
“His actions comments are beyond the pale,” announced Satan, a key backer of the Reagan and Bush administrations. “On behalf of all of the legions of the damned, I’m cutting all ties to the Trump campaign. I may be the cloven-footed embodiment of evil, but being assosiciated with this blabbering fascist is starting to hurt my brand.”
Lucifer claimed that his stunning denouncement was inspired by Trump’s recent rise in the polls. “We put him up as a bit of a joke, but we never expected it to go this far. He’s facing over a dozen unresolved rape allegations, including from his ex-wife, and is still on the brink of becoming president? How can I support him when I myself am a father? How could I look the abstract concept of lies in the eyes?”
There’s worse news every day.
Thursday, 15th of September: in her maiden speech to the Senate, Pauline Hanson declares that Australia is “in danger of being swamped by Muslims”.
Sunday, 18th of September: speaking to a forum of European conservatives, former Prime Minister Tony Abbott describes the influx of refugees to Europe from “Middle East and Africa” as a “peaceful invasion”.
Wednesday, 21st of September: an Essential poll of 1000 people suggests that 49% of Australians want to ban the migration of people of people of the Islamic faith to Australia. A further 11% aren’t sure either way. If the poll is accurate, those of us who oppose such a measure are in the minority.
In the three months since I wrote the first half of my musical profiles on the Crossbench Senators (which were pretty obsolete even at the time) a lot of crazy shit has gone down in Canberra. Australia’s Woodstock Floriade has come and gone, Australia’s Disneyland Cockington Green has done a roaring school holiday trade and Eric Abetz has learnt to control silver with his mind. So where the Corangamite have I been? Well, mostly stuck on a horrible writing procrasticoaster, riding in circles around the rickety well-worn tracks of my limbic system while a sneering coat-hanger of a carny refused to budge the breaks. But the other reason for the wormwood-bitter pang of my absence is that each of the dozen times I’ve sat down to patter out this post I’ve been so overwhelmed with tedium and despair at the state of our Parliament that I’ve shut down into a drooling Palmeralysis. So, after a not-insignificant amount of pulling with the aid of needle nosed pliars and fermented grape juice, I present to you – my teeth.
Jacqui Lambie (Palmer United Party)
We must stop at nothing to prevent death-cult jihadists murdering innocents on our own soil. That’s why anyone who isn’t a covert member of ISIS will support the Government’s new, recently announced anti-terror legislation: the distribution of mandatory “Freedom Collars” to protect Australians from beheadings.
