ID #2

On my return from South East Asia I inventoried what I had witnessed. I had seen:

- A benign dictatorship (Singapore).
- A successful democratic multi-ethnic muslim state (Malaysia).
- A buddhist monarchy (that only one left, Thailand!).
- A failed communist state (Laos).
- A successful multi-ethnic communist state (Vietnam).

Not only that but I had travelled with a Swedish journalist, South African clothes importer, with the proverbial buxom Swedish twins and with the embittered anti-capitalist Malay banker-dropout. In Bangkok I had drunk with Belgian mechanics and female Australian soldiers with post traumatic stress disorder and Thai schoolteachers and gone out dancing with the buxom thai girls who worked at the lobby of the hotel I stayed in.

I had grieved over the shattered demilitarized zone in Vietnam, been repelled by the sleazy corruption of Laos, had visionary experiences in the jungles of Thailand, discovered politics in Malaysia, and fallen in love with the Chinese people in Singapore. I was a changed man.

But I returned home to a country which had also changed. It was like going back into the womb to come back to Australia, and yet the accent and the easy relaxed welcome I got!... well, it reduced me to tears to hear my countrymen's funny twanging English.

Back to the Australian summer, with the too-bright sun and the too-dry bush turning brown on the side of the highway, I wondered what I was going to do here.

I knew I wanted to leave again, and soon. Within the year. And I knew I wanted to be where the rest of the world touched Australia... Sydney.

But I had created a lot of writing while I was away, and I first went back to country Australia, to my mothers' house, and spent two weeks creating a slim book of stories and poems I had written while I travelled. I still have it here somewhere, first impressions of a new world. Then I plunged back into Sydney, Australia.

I stayed in King's Cross, the center of travellers and Sydney decadence, above the strip parlours on the street level.

(If you have seen the film, "Moulin Rouge" you may have a good idea what it was like for me to stay in such a place; in fact that film is the archetypal patriarchal melodrama, where the Goddess Satine is needlessly sacrificed for barbaric male ambition.)

And I remember how, one night, in a profoundly detached state, I sat at the window of the backpackers unseen and unnoticed and observed the bouncers going about their work.

At the strip joint door was Big Gorilla and little Ape. Big Gorilla was ebullient and welcoming, then warning and even cruel, to the incoming crowd. Little Ape was subservient to Big Gorilla and arrogant and cruel to incoming men, and sleazy and needy to incoming women.

I watched as Big Gorilla sent little Ape in for something. Little Ape returned with a "woman", and a certain chemical reaction shot through the men milling about on the street. I watched it from above. The men spun like electrons catalyzed by the proximinity of a magnetic field.

The woman was extremely beautiful, her beautiful heightened by the surroundings and the vulgar men around her, and yet... something was amiss, somehow.

I looked and looked, relaxing my body to observe dispassionately. She lit a cigarette and stared about her coolly. I saw in her shoulders that she was a slave. Her eyes shone like a queen but I caught the look of oppression... a slave, here! in Australia! Disgust filled my heart. And then I noticed something else.

As she looked around she NEVER ONCE looked at the Big Gorilla. In fact, she ignored him and focused all her energies on the little Ape. But when I looked, the men milling around excitedly were focused on Big Gorilla, and not on her! It was as if the alpha male had stolen her feminine radience and perverted it.

And then I saw to the heart of what was wrong here... the feminine was dishonored and enslaved to the masculine. Power was misused. I had witnessed half a dozen different power systems in the last four months and now I was witnessing the most basic misuse of power in human nature, the misuse of the feminine, common to every system I had witnessed. And now I saw it in my home country!

As you may recall, in my visionary experience in Thailand, as I related to you, I told how the higher being had witnessed his civilisation overrun by barbarians and he himself murdered in war. Now I witnessed the enemy barbarians in our midst, insulting and overruling the feminine energy for their own ends. And what I witnessed galvanised me to an overwhelming sense of purpose.