I was in the US when Australia closed its borders but foresaw that if I returned home I would be indefinitely trapped there. I rode out the northern summer in the UK, hoping to return home for Christmas. 14 months later and I’m still unable to see my family or my friends. The latest I’ve heard is that I might be allowed into Melbourne for Christmas 2022. The Australian government seems determined to keep me from my family and my family from me. By December next year I will have missed 3 years of their life and they of mine.
After that tear-inducing distant day when I am again permitted to see my parents, my siblings, my friends—I will spend as little time as possible in Australia. I have seen now that three levels of Australian government will at the breath of a security guard take away all vestiges of everybody's freedom, will enforce that theft with the vehemence of a pogrom, will denounce the unorthodox with the zeal of an inquisitor.
I will not again live in Australia for no other reason than that I have an aversion to bigotry, authoritarianism, and superstition.
The country I was once proud to call my home, the country for which two generations of my grandparents soldiered, the country whose culture I once rammed down the throats of all who were unfamiliar with it—has become a 21st-century theocracy. Its decisions are made by conclaves of bureaucrats hiding behind advisory rood screens; its priests are sinecured scientists; its God is an untenable, unattainable, and (of course) incorporeal deity: Covid-Free.
I’m tempted to coin a new word for Australia 2.021. It could be “anhygiocracy”, a state ruled by absence of ill-health. Statistocracy, self-explanatory. Fragilocracy; phobocracy—the snipes veiled by new ocracies could go on all day. The religious analogy holds up best. And unlike any church before it this neo-Australian congregation appears to believe that it has managed to enter paradise not in the next, but in this life.
All I see are news stories exulting as miraculous Australia’s covid “success” or claiming that Australia is the envy of the world. All I hear are consolatory arguments which amount to, “We may have no freedom but at least we’re covid-free—and it’s all temporary anyway”.
I can tell you truthfully that the world is not jealous of Australia. The only response I now receive when it comes up that I’m Australian is, “That country has gone crazy over Covid right? Is it a $50,000 fine if you return home?"
Friends and family inside Australia tell me that neither do they like or understand what their country has become. They plan on leaving for as long as possible, hopefully permanently, when eventually their government allows them to do so. I cannot imagine that this view is limited to my circle.
To replace the coming exodus Australia will be able to appeal only to those people who are already inured to having their government track their every movement and curtail their every liberty—decide for them according to narrow dictates (though in their case not of hygiene, statistics, and fear)—their individual fate. Where those few new neo-Australians will come from is your conjecture to make. But I foresee that very few intelligent people will opt to return or move to a country that in an instant and on illogical premises will take away all that makes their lives worth living.
That last is a line from Juvenal. It's been pounding my brain for 14 months. “It is the greatest of all sins to lose for the sake of living all that makes life worth living.” I’ve just spent 8 weeks in central Ukraine researching my next novel. Ukraine, the former Soviet Republic whose GDP sits snugly between that of Sri Lanka, Iran, & Mongolia. Ukraine lifted all covid restrictions when its rolling average of new cases lowered to 5000 a day. There were no internal travel bans when Ukraine was at 10,000 cases a day. Apparently somebody in Ukraine values living more than life and fullness rather than duration of existence. (Perhaps it’s indicative that they have bigger, tank-related, things to worry about than a largely non-lethal virus.)
Further, I've just returned to Greece to spend the summer writing said novel. Greece lifted its lockdown on the weekend, when new cases were around 2,000 a day. My point being, the last 14 months have convinced me that as well as there being more freedom in Ukraine than in Australia, most other countries have a greater sense of what it means to live and are in less denial that life also involves (I’m sorry to break it to them: inevitably) death—that isolation is desolation—even that covid-19 exists.
That is, they worship at the altar of life and not of death.
I acknowledge that there is value in valuing safety. But safety is only gotten, then held, in a linear detriment to freedom. Let those be safe who wish to; but a country that does not at the same time allow freedom to those who would have it, is despotic. Shutting one’s country off from the world, barring entrance to all who outside it—though they be kin—and silencing, berating, and vilifying all who do not worship as they do—such supplications have turned Australia into something it simply was not.
With a distaste for dogma, phobocracies, and autocracy, the country I’m not currently allowed to call home is not anymore somewhere I would wish to call home.
“Good riddance! Be gone! If you don’t like it, stay out!” I can hear the poppy-cutters. Very well. But Australia needs to accept two premises, and consider one conclusion:
P1) Covid-19 is not going anywhere anytime soon.
P2) To adhere to their current liturgy and to go on placating their false god, Australia will need to keep me from my family and my family from me for years to come.
C) In that time not only I will become increasingly embittered and estranged towards my dear old southland.
I was in New York when Australia closed its borders but foresaw that if I returned home I would be indefinitely trapped there. I rode out the northern summer in London, hoping to return home for Christmas. 14 months later I’m still unable to see my family or my friends. The latest I’ve heard is that I might be allowed into Melbourne for Christmas 2022. The Australian government seems determined to keep me from my family and my family from me. By December next year I will have missed three years of their life and they three years of mine.
After that tear-inducing distant day when I'm again permitted to see my parents, my siblings, my friends—I will spend as little time as possible in Australia. For I have seen now that three levels of Australian government will at the breath of a security guard take away all vestiges of everybody's freedom, will enforce that theft with the vehemence of a pogrom, denounce the unorthodox with the zeal of an inquisitor.
I will not again live in Australia for no other reason than that I have an aversion to bigotry, authoritarianism, and superstition.
The country I was once proud to call my home, the country for which two generations of my grandparents soldiered, the country whose culture I once rammed down the throats of all who were unfamiliar with it—has become a 21st-century theocracy. Its decisions are made by conclaves of bureaucrats hiding behind advisory rood screens; its priests are sinecured scientists; its God is an untenable, unattainable, and (of course) incorporeal deity: Covid-Free.
I’m tempted to coin a new word for Australia 2.021. It could be “anhygiocracy”, a state ruled by absence of ill-health. Statistocracy, self-explanatory. Fragilocracy; phobocracy—the snipes veiled by new ocracies could go on all day. The religious analogy holds up best. And unlike any church before it this neo-Australian congregation appears to believe that it has managed to enter paradise not in the next, but in this life.
All I see are news stories exulting as miraculous Australia’s covid “success” or claiming that Australia is the envy of the world. All I hear are consolatory arguments which amount to, “We may have no freedom but at least we’re covid-free—and it’s all temporary anyway”.
I can tell you truthfully that the world is not jealous of Australia. The only response I now receive when it comes up that I’m Australian is, “That country has gone crazy over Covid right? Is it a $50,000 fine if you return home?"
Friends and family inside Australia tell me that neither do they like or understand what their country has become. They plan on leaving for as long as possible, hopefully permanently, when eventually their government allows them to do so. I cannot imagine that this view is limited to my circle.
To replace the coming exodus Australia will be able to appeal only to people who are already inured to having their government track their every movement and curtail their every liberty—decide for them according to narrow dictates (though in their case not of hygiene, statistics, and fear)—their individual fate. Where those few new neo-Australians will come from is your conjecture to make. But I foresee that very few intelligent people will opt to return or move to a country that in an instant and on illogical premises will take away all that makes their lives worth living.
That last is a line from Juvenal. It has been pounding my brain for 14 months. “It is the greatest of all sins to lose for the sake of living all that makes life worth living.” I’ve just spent 8 weeks in central Ukraine researching my next novel. Ukraine, the former Soviet Republic whose GDP sits snugly between that of Sri Lanka, Iran, & Mongolia. Ukraine lifted all covid restrictions when its rolling average of new cases lowered to 5000 a day. There were no internal travel bans when Ukraine was at 10,000 cases a day. Apparently somebody in Ukraine values living more than life and fullness rather than duration of existence. (Perhaps it’s indicative that they have bigger, tank-related, things to worry about than a largely non-lethal virus.)
I've also just returned to Greece to spend the summer writing said novel. Greece lifted its lockdown on the weekend, when new cases were around 2,000 a day. Point being, the last 14 months have convinced me that as well as there being more freedom in Ukraine than in Australia, other countries have a greater sense of what it means to live and are in less denial that life also involves (I’m sorry to break it to them: inevitably) death—that isolation is desolation—even that covid-19 exists.
That is, they worship at the altar of life and not at the altar of absence-of-ill-health.
I acknowledge that there is value in valuing safety. But safety is only gotten, then held, in linear detriment to freedom. Let those be safe who wish; but a country that does not at the same time allow freedom to those who would have it, is despotic. Shutting one’s country off from the world, barring entrance to all who outside it—though they be kin—and silencing, berating, and vilifying all who do not worship as they do—such supplications have turned Australia into something it simply was not.
So with a distaste for dogma, phobocracies, and absolutism, the country I’m not currently allowed to call home is no longer somewhere I wish to call home.
“Good riddance! Be gone! If you don’t like it, stay out!” I can hear the poppy-cutters. Very well.
But Australia needs to accept three premises and consider one conclusion:
P1) Covid-19 is not going anywhere anytime soon.
P2) To adhere to their current liturgy and to go on placating their false god, Australia will need to keep me from my family and my family from me for years to come.
P3) In that time not only I will become increasingly estranged from my dear old southland.
I first started smoking a pipe after the death of my grandfather, one (but not the) John Muir. A life-long smoker and a personality much larger than his long life, still today one of my fondest memories is his early emergence from the hallway to the kitchen, in dressing gown and slippers with first pipe between his smile, to squeeze his orange juice and sugar his cornflakes.
He died when I was first starting to move from stand-up to comedy novels and at first a pipe was merely a wistful and occasional accompaniment to a glass of Strega cream on my Brunswick porch.
Five years later, I took my pipe with me to Vietnam, where I would make my first attempt at writing a novel whose style was wholly my own. I smoked it each morning at my desk and quickly it wafted its way into my writing routine. After three aborted attempts at writing a novel this new one found itself finished. I cannot discount the contribution of smoking tobacco to its pages. Five years later again and I can not write without smoking my pipe. As well would you ask me to do so without coffee and a desk as without my Savinelli Straight and a pouch of cherry cavendish.
For you see the last thing the body wants to do is write. While the mind wishes to do nothing else, truly the body would attempt to kill itself before it were forced for five hours to sit down and still. So in smoking a pipe it does.
Once a year some Christians have their foreheads crossed with ash—remember thou art dust and into dust thou shalt return. The writer does not need to be reminded of his mortality; it is what in the first place has made him sit down to write. Rather the writer smokes because he must prove that he does not care that he will return to dust, and must assert that death probably will not take him because he is always attempting to take it. Death, Richard Aurelius tells us, smiles at us all. Every burning pipe is a writer's insolent smile back.
Death and utilitarianism, the unavoidable madnesses of the age—and every pipe put to the mouth is a grin to the first and a middle finger to the second. The pipe states and proves that what is unhealthy might in fact be good, that renouncing what is not makes writing, and so life, impossible. Merely by smoking a pipe you have joined the resistance. You are with each poisoned breath telling the virtuous world that though it may urge you to think one way, even apparently for your own benefit, this mind is not to be bought, and cares for other things. Without moving you are both violent reactionary and radical revolutionist.
Though in fact you are moving, for smoking is a kind of trick. The very last thing the body wants to do is write and in smoking the body moves without moving. Smoking limits the body’s range so that it is never without reach of the keyboard. By tricking the elbows into thinking they are active it is an essential part of the balancing ritual that must be performed in order to get words onto a page. Were the pipe not lit the arms would much prefer to do the hula. In the absence of fire above, the feet (and I have many times witnessed this) begin to tap and soon to dance. Within minutes they are outside walking and one’s legs are not in any way below one’s desk.
This touches upon the neuropsychology of it all. Most people’s minds are wandering at least fifty percent of their waking time. (This is a fact, not an insult—or a compliment.) It takes the average person half an hour to achieve the focus required to do work they don’t care for and, if distracted, fifteen minutes to regain that futile focus. Even then they can hold it only for thirty minutes. This, the brain as slave.
But the writer’s brain is free, and to him the last paragraph is repugnant.
A pipe smoulders upon the difference between science and art. The scientist must prove to you the benefit of things before consenting to your doing them. The artist proves their goodness while he does them. This has always been the way of the artist. So as the first pipe begins to puff you have already your focus. Twenty minutes later, as you find it less and less productive of smoke you find yourself more and more productive of words. You may lay it down, drink more coffee, write clearly for an hour. When later you find yourself embroiled in a matter of style and have to stop to chase a synonym, you might look to the spines on your desk—those efforts that have preceded yours—and if the synonym comes easily you go on. But if you cannot admit the greater lucidity of your second word you alight upon the pipe. It is resting, ready, waiting—and pregnant with clarity.
You tap out its ash, scrape clean its bowl, and again the rustle of the pouch and the soft and careful loading. The room refilled with smoke, the synonym is either deemed ideal or you admit that before you die you shall have the chance to switch it out again and the writing once more flows.
There are musical things in smoke. There ought to be many musical things in writing. There’s something very personal to one’s pipe and there ought to be quite a few things personal to one’s writing. Here the pipe’s cloud, more voluminous than a cigarette’s, acts as a kind of force-field, a marking off of one’s mind—this is my book and my characters—this, is my world, and you out there shall carry no smallness beyond these billows nor impinge upon the freedom of what breathes within. For free it hopes to remain.
In Vietnam smoking is not yet frowned upon nor preposterously taxed. When compared with my own country that socialist republic is found a land of liberty—or phúc, as Vietnamese would have it. John Patric switched from cigars to a pipe in order to save money for travel. Evelyn Waugh switched from a pipe to cigars once he could afford it. In London a pouch of my cherry cavendish costs $34. In Melbourne they are, and I neither exaggerate nor round up, $95. In Vietnam, they are $6. One sixteenth of the price. So Australia is not productive of writers and of all the meagre indications that exile is my lot and that Vietnam shall remain my Elba, this is one of the simpler reasons for my embrace of banishment.
I wonder, if you were asked to choose personal or political freedom, which you would prefer. In one country you have no political liberty—no freedom of speech under a one-party state ruled by bribery and decree. But you may possess unlimited personal freedom as well as procure pipe tobacco at its actual cost. In Australia you have no freedom of speech and are ruled by an institutionalised bribery that is unquestioned by two parties. You are filmed several times while trying to cross the street at any point other than that which the ruling party deems safe, on your way back from wage-slavery to a tiny home that is tobacco- and alcohol-free not out of choice, but because the government deems you unworthy of enjoying such things unless you make a great deal more money than does a writer.
So he remains in his Vietnamese village and each morning takes up his seat at his desk. He places the stem of his pipe between his teeth and upon the day's first lighting has in place his freedom and the corner-thread of his routine as he gently smirks back at death and the blank page.
Hours later, after three, maybe four, such rituals of rebellion and 3000 words the writer’s mind is euphoric, empty, and exhausted. He might even feel ill, for he has smoked too much and has literally poisoned himself with smoke. He lays down his pipe and closes his laptop and goes for lunch, where he takes to the bottle—of beer if he is smart, for it is barely midday.
