Goodby Road is an utterly compelling collection of essays from the founder of Cafe Locked Out.
It is of significant historical interest for the fact that Michael Gray Griffith is the only citizen journalist to have travelled Australia interviewing people from all walks of life in the wake of the Covid epidemic. It is humane, funny, sad and shocking in equal measure. It is a gritty record of the personal and social devastation foisted on the country by career politicians.
All based on a lie.
Goodbye Road by Michael Gray Griffith is the latest book from A Sense of Place Publishing. It will be published on 9 October.
Here is the Introduction by veteran Australian journalist John Stapleton.
Michael Gray Griffith is Australia’s leading contemporary historian. He is the founder of the collective Cafe Locked Out.
His stunning work documents not just the national derangement which overtook Australia during the Covid era, when the country became notorious internationally for having the worst response to the so-called “pandemic” of anywhere on Earth, but the way a nation once renowned for its easy going character became an authoritarian cesspit.
Thousands of Australians endured government censorship during the Covid era, many were forced to have a “vaccine” they did not want in order to keep their employment, and many thousands of others lost their jobs for refusing to go along with the government’s outrageous mandates.
Michael received a ten year ban on Facebook and YouTube for daring to go against the government narrative. To this day not one Australian mainstream media outlet covers the outrageous collusion between the government and American based big tech companies to censor the sincere, genuine, authentic voices of Australian citizens.
And to this day Australia’s parasitic political class have refused to apologise or even acknowledge the damage they inflicted on their fellow countrymen, including loss of businesses, loss of employment and numerous vaccine injuries, now a widely acknowledged international scandal.
But one voice could not be silenced, and that was Michael Gray Griffith. In speaking out so fearlessly, and by interviewing such a vast array of people as he travelled around the country, Michael became the de facto leader of Australia’s freedom movement, a comfort and an inspiration to his thousands of followers.
In the process of recording the reality on the ground, and the protest engendered by government overreach, Michael became one of Australia’s most censored writers, attracting a 10 year ban on Facebook and suppression on other platforms. Facebook has a long history of collaborating with the Australian government to censor the nation’s citizens on issues ranging from mass migration to multiculturalism to lockdowns. Griffith wears his Facebook ban as a badge of honour.
If you were of no consequence, if, essentially, you were a fantasist without influence, nobody would bother banning you. Rather you’d just be dismissed as another blip in the wild uplands of the internet.
With the extensive censorship which Michael Gray Griffith has endured, his controversial although subsequently vindicated stances against lockdowns, vaccines and other aspects of Australia’s Covid tyranny, combined with his ability to attract a following of the like minded, there is zero doubt Michael was the subject of considerable interest from Australia’s intelligence agencies.
In March of 2025, following a Freedom of Information request, Australia’s online censor, the eSafety Commission headed by former Bill Gates employee Julia Inman Grant, confirmed that he was being censored by a “third party”, presumably another unnamed government agency.
The relationship between the agencies and Griffith’s banishment from various online platforms, along with his ceaseless persecution by online trolls, presumably government funded operatives, is an open scandal already known to thousands of Australians. The aim of trolls operations is to disturb, disrupt, discredit and ultimately destroy, and is perpetuated by people without honour or morals or loyalty to the truth – people driven, one can only speculate, by the same vice-like trap as almost everybody else caught in this terrible mess, the need to work to feed your family and pay your mortgage. The same reason many people adhered to Covid tyranny in the first place.
Even now, in 2025, despite Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s declaration of the end of political censorship, the pages for which Michael was banned have not been reinstated. In reality there was little controversial about them. They simply reflected widespread cynicism in the broader population over Australia’s truly absurd pandemic measures. But in the increasingly authoritarian, if not totalitarian, drift of Australian culture, disagreeing with government policy is now enough to get you censored.
Michael also built not just a dedicated following, but a team which helped him run Cafe Locked Out, as well as a significant number of podcasters which fell in under the same banner.
As late as October, 2024, YouTube, owned by Google, a social media company closely entwined with the world’s military and intelligence agencies, deleted Cafe Locked Out’s Kulture Page, dedicated to Australian Protest Songs.
This outrageous manipulation of the Australian story, and outrageous censorship of the Australian population, attracted not a single word of protest from Australia’s main political parties, including Labor, Liberal and the Greens.
Here’s what the Cafe Locked Out team had to say about the YouTube suspension: “Cafe Locked Out has been online for over three tumultuous years, premiering a few weeks before the ‘Siege of the Shrine’, where Michael was present as a protester. Much has unfolded since, with numerous journeys, thousands of interviews and ideas explored to encourage people to join us.
“Literally from the start, we have been dealing with unprecedented levels of censorship across all our social media platforms, except Rumble.
“Regardless, we have continued to push ahead and share the discoveries from professionals, and recorded thousands of interviews, stories, and real experiences from us, the people.”
Michael himself has written: “The war on truth is silent but deadly. Cafe Locked Out has been fighting it since 2021, and the scars are real – a 10-year Facebook ban, 23 YouTube videos deleted, our Kulture page wiped in October 2023.
“Why?
“Because we dared to question vaccine mandates, share stories of the fired, the injured, the silenced. They call it “misinformation,” but it’s censorship, plain and simple – a tool to protect the system that forced jabs on millions. Our Substack posts vanish from feeds; our X followers see shadowbans.
“Yet we persist, because truth isn’t theirs to bury. Every night, we broadcast, giving voice to the nurse who lost her job, the dad who can’t see his kids, the Aussie who won’t bow.
“The mandates weren’t just about jabs – they were about control, silencing dissent to keep us compliant. Trolls attack us, calling us “anti-vaxxers,” but we wear it proudly, knowing it disarms their hate. If we were irrelevant, they wouldn’t bother. Cafe Locked Out is a beacon for the forgotten, and we’ll keep shining until freedom’s back.
“Join us – your voice matters.”
Michael never shied away from the spiritual nature of his quest. Indeed some might accuse him of being overly sentimental in his diatribes or evocations of a God of his understanding, but that was a part of who he was and indeed, for a significant number, a part of his appeal.
As he put it in his beautiful piece The Scrub Bulls of Mildura: “But we are not scrub bulls, for we are not livestock – unless we volunteer to act as though we are. What we are is unique slivers of the divine, each a possible hope for all of humanity. But that hope can only be seen if we allow it to shine. The best way for it to shine is to speak.”
When he ended up in hospital after a heart attack in April of 2025 there was an outpouring of grief and a regalvanising of Australia’s freedom movement. Griffith’s voice, through art, continues to challenge, heal, and inspire, even from a hospital bed.
One of his followers wrote: “For the past four years Michael Gray Griffith has traveled across our great country, capturing the harrowing stories of a nation with a broken heart.
“Last week, his own heart gave out.
“And over the Easter weekend, he died-and was resurrected. Doctors literally stopped and then restarted his heart to perform a triple bypass.
“I don’t know about you, but that sounds like an Easter miracle to me.
“Perhaps God hasn’t forgotten Australia after all. Perhaps He’s just telling old stories in new ways.
“And perhaps Michael, the man who gave his heart to Australia until the moment it finally broke too, has been given another chance – by God – to help finish our story.”
Fanciful or not, that is the level of devotion this one man generates.
Much of what Cafe Locked Out and it’s associated Kulture movement was about encouraging local Australian talent in the face of the overwhelming weight of Hollywood, which has done so much to destroy Australia’s native born talents, crushing them in the tsunami of high budget low intellect content, starving them of exposure, recognition, status and money. As Michael once put it: “Art is the soul’s self-healing tool, but it can only heal if it’s free.”
Here, collected for the first time, are the essays and short stories he penned beginning in 2020, along with extracts from interviews of him or interviews he conducted.
The extreme level of censorship which Michael has endured at the hands of the Australian authorities has made this project challenging at times.
Yet his work places him among the very best of Australian writers working in the 2020s. In the end it took this one man to demonstrate for all to see the unconscionable malfeasance and outright fraud at the heart of the Australian story.
