By John Stapleton. Legendary author Salman Rushdie has been attacked and repeatedly stabbed in the neck and torso as he was about to give a lecture on artistic freedom in western New York. He was airlifted to hospital. In 1989, Iran’s first… Continue Reading →
The humanitarian crimes committed by Australian authorities against their own citizens, beginning in early 2020, will live on in infamy, but it is the people themselves who create a nation’s history. On the 12th of February 2022, the largest gathering… Continue Reading →
The Black and White Photography of Russell Shakespeare India’s Holi Festival celebrates the triumph of good over evil. It lasts for a night and a day and erupts in vivid display of colours across the villages, towns and cities of… Continue Reading →
Oak Flats is a working class suburb south of Wollongong on Australia’s east coast. Its demographic of tradies, electricians, plumbers, tilers, truck drivers, school teachers and nurses do not like or trust the nation’s politicians and to a man and… Continue Reading →
With Photography by Tim Ritchie There is no more historic, more superbly located or visually rich part of Sydney than The Rocks. Tucked in under the southern flank of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, from the earliest days of the colony it… Continue Reading →
Death triumphs over the mundane. An army of skeletons raze the Earth. All life is extinguished. The background is a barren landscape in which scenes of destruction are still taking place. In the foreground, Death leads his armies from his… Continue Reading →
The spooks were easy to spot. Most Australians couldn’t afford a new iPhone, and certainly not in that part of town. Old Alex felt decidedly unsafe, packed up the apartment, both glad to be out of there and angry at… Continue Reading →
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 →
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