Tag John Stapleton
People crawl across India to die in Varanasi for one reason: according to the Hindu faith if you die there, on the edge of the sacred Ganges River, you will not be reincarnated. The cycle of life, and therefore of… Continue Reading →
By John Stapleton. Extract from Hideout in the Apocalypse. “The world’s gone mad,” the old reporter said as he passed people on his morning walk. “Didn’t make any sense anyway,” comes the response. Australia is shutting down. Extreme measures introduced… Continue Reading →
John Stapleton. For years the biggest story in the country has been the slow motion collapse of the Australia of old. Now, with the country only slowly stumbling out of lockdown and insane levels of social restrictions introduced without parliamentary… Continue Reading →
The Family Court of Australia is finally being abolished, dissolved Into the Federal Court. There Are Very Good Reasons. The misuse of expert witnesses is a problem throughout Australia’s judicial system, but no more so than in family law. Here,… Continue Reading →
Pearls and Irritations Who among us, eighteen months ago, could have believed the mess this country is now in? Few can doubt Australia is at a turning point in its history. The debacle is writ large. The current Cabinet reshuffle will please… Continue Reading →
The devolved state of journalism at the $1.2 billion Australian Broadcasting Corporation is now on full display. The current witch hunt of the nation’s Attorney General over entirely unsubstantiated claims of an alleged rape 33 years ago, when he was… Continue Reading →
By John Stapleton. A dark stain on the nation’s legal, social and political history is finally being removed. Known colloquially as the Palace of Lies, the Family Court of Australia was established in the mid-1970s, at the height of the… Continue Reading →
Unfolding Catastrophe: Part III. By John Stapleton. Early in the “pandemic”, or “plandemic” as sceptics were already calling it, both mainstream and independent commentators queued to attack Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison, whose mishandling of Covid-19 was likely to be… Continue Reading →
By Paul Gregoire: Sydney Criminal Lawyers Blog Tensions are high in the Sydney region as the population looks towards its tenth week in lockdown, without any clear understanding of when it will be coming out of the home confinement it’s… Continue Reading →
John Stapleton. Originally published 16 September. Shellharbour is a small coastal town two hours south of Sydney. Only a few short years ago a lost in time surfing village, it is now surging ahead as young families flee the nightmare… Continue Reading →
Photography by Dean Sewell The Carlisle Hotel in the back streets of Newtown in Sydney’s inner-west is one of the few places left in Sydney where the wowsers have not won; an old-fashioned pub in an increasingly strictured, shuttered country. Hotels… Continue Reading →
John Stapleton: The Sydney Morning Herald. It was an honour to be appear in The Sydney Morning Herald again, under a piece headlined: From the Archives, 1991. Curiously, there was a story behind this story; and of all the many… Continue Reading →
For Old Alex, on the cold but picturesque south coast of NSW, it was an entirely inflamed time. The Land of the Long Weekend was being destroyed. The population accepted it all as one bizarre edict after another flattened them… Continue Reading →
BY THE AUSTRALIAN autumn of 2020, following straight on from a Christmas of bushfires and extreme loss, the warning signs were clear. An uneducated public makes for easy victims. Australia of 2020 faced not only plummeting educational outcomes and a… Continue Reading →
By John Stapleton. Photography by Dean Sewell. There is an old saying about journalism; it is the first draft of history. Part of the problem with the deteriorated and manipulated state of legacy media was that this noble function was… Continue Reading →
Paula Matthewson, senior reporter with one of the nation’s few mainstream news outlets not behind a paywall, The New Daily, wrote way back in early 2020: “If there’s one clear message to emerge from Australia’s efforts to combat COVID-19 it’s… Continue Reading →
The first person in Australia to die with COVID was James Kwan, a 78-year-old man from Perth, on 1 March, 2020. He was a passenger on board the cruise ship Ruby Princess. The ship later became infamous as the single… Continue Reading →
By Paul Collits: UK Conservative Woman THE British historian Guy de la Bédoyère claims that ‘Australia is falling apart’. Off Guardian suggests that we are ‘going full fascist’. Daily reports in France, Russia and everywhere in between and beyond, hover between pity, amusement and disbelief. How… Continue Reading →
By Nick Asia. MGTOW Chats. Unfolding Catastrophe: Australia aims to dismember the political, administrative and social derangement which has overtaken Australia since the early days of 2020. Australia’s democracy has proved virus thin. There has never been a more politicised… Continue Reading →
By John Stapleton Public servants like to talk about “evidence based policy”. Well, where is the evidence that lockdowns work? Australia’s democracy has proved virus thin. There has never been a more politicised and thereby more disastrously mismanaged disease. Eighteen… Continue Reading →
Photography by Dean Sewell. There in that frightened time, Old Alex had believed he was putting his best foot forward, almost as a military instruction, a belief that reason could survive, that democracy, despite all its deformities, was worth saving,… Continue Reading →
By John Stapleton Mehi means girl in the gamilaraay dialect Miyaay. Moree is Mari and Mari means man. That is just the way whitefellas take our language and put it in their phonetic context. Because our language is not written,… Continue Reading →
Amazing to me, now that I’m old, is that for such an impatient person I was able to devote the thousands of hours to playing guitar that it takes to become competent on the instrument. It seemed when I was… Continue Reading →
Compiled by John Stapleton Apart from walking, one of the slowest ways to travel the 794 kilometres from New Delhi in the state of Uttar Pradesh to Varanasi on the Ganges is the Kashi Vishwanath Express. Multi-award winning Australian news… Continue Reading →
By John Stapleton Crisis turns into salvation at every step. For Tim Ritchie it is literally true. “I am a diabetic and eight years ago my doctor told me to walk 10,000 steps a day, but even then my blood… Continue Reading →
Terror in Australia: Workers’ Paradise Lost On Oxford Street in Central Sydney, where I lived for some months while researching Terror in Australia: Workers’ Paradise Lost, the homeless, were regularly moved on; rough sleepers driven from public view. Drunks, wayward, schizophrenics, Sydney’s… Continue Reading →
This is not your standard white-girl-in-Africa tale. I fed no babies, I built no schools, I saved no rhinos. Self-discovery came a distant second to self-preservation on this particular adventure. So says Kirsten Drysdale, who is better known as a… Continue Reading →
Luminously intelligent, gifted with a great eye and a startling, incandescent love of beauty, the already celebrated Maria Popova has finally put out a book. Figuring, is now available. For twelve years now Popova’s weekly newsletter Brain Pickings has dazzled,… Continue Reading →
By John Stapleton Not every famous person has a name. And almost no one knew the name of Sandor Berger, one of Sydney’s best known eccentrics. For many years notices appeared on telegraph poles across inner-Sydney: “Psychiatry is Evil, It… Continue Reading →
By John Stapleton He could feel the interest gathering; there to be used and reused and discarded, a threat that could neither be eliminated nor controlled. He was trying to make alliances, there in that place, there in those hours,… Continue Reading →
The onslaught of Covid incompetence came at a time when the nation itself was on rocky ground. Those who would doubt Australia’s democracy were spread far and wide. Trapped in circumstance, Old Alex was reliving his own version of The… Continue Reading →
Old Alex was alive to the whole End of Days narrative for multiple reasons, including his own childhood. Having grown up in a Christian cult, members of his family were preparing for the end of the world way back in… Continue Reading →