The Global Savage © 1999

The Global Savage
Chapter One: God Knows what the Neighbours

Think!
It was a dark and stormy night1, the prophetic Edward

Bulwer-Lytton remarked triumphalistically to his servant, whom he was sure
must have been born with a full set of teeth. The man was obviously lacking in
elan vital and vril. He screwed up his chimpanzee-like visage and bounded about
the dining room, bottom lip extended, going “Uh uh uh! I am the Prime Minister.
I’m little Johnny Howard. Uh uh uh! Eeek!”The penniless servant, of Pictish
height, of Rwandan width and a voracious reader at the circulating libraries (he
heard them coursing through the streets outside), looked on in disgust through
his French-made pince-nez2. Was his nihilistic Master Irish or, worse, an
Australian? Bah, humbug, and damn the Longobard succession. He flicked an ant
from his specs and it landed on the table to glare insolently up at the bizarre
aristocrat, who at least hadn’t managed to turn himself into a globetrotting
billionaire like the renowned and hated ‘Dr’ Francis J. Savage (PhD, Hog Bottom
U, Idaho)3. Mr P. Piper, who had buttled for the biggest sharks and the nouveau-
riche pilot fish which swam with them, people who really counted (they were
capable of little else), couldn’t abide the oppressive, though hardly bulletproof,
World Market, currently in his opinion spiralling down the toilet. Freeman and
slave, patrician and plebeian …
The working-class ant lowered its compound eyes,
misguidedly turned to the left, and was devoured by a fundamentalist praying-
mantis.
It was 1899 and poverty and misery were endemic. Mr

Karl Marx had spun in his grave at Highgate for sixteen years (generating much-
needed electricity for starving aluminium manufacturers), Bolshevists from
Moses to Lenin were on the rise, the British Labour Party had not yet betrayed
its constituency (but then it wasn’t founded till 27 February 1900), and the point
was to change the world. Truly, he imagined, staring in horror at the chiselling
Baron who employed him, the Global Proletarian Revolution could not be far
off. Surely, a hundred years hence, the lap of social labour would give birth to
1 Lord Lytton was thinking not of Snoopy but of February 1848 and
extrapolating somewhat, but he didn’t elaborate to anyone (such as the narrator)
who supped below the salt.
2 Chief product of the National Tananarive Progressive Ant Farm but not
particularly nourishing. Readers will also note that the above scholarly reference
to Roman Jakobson was inspired by a casual peek into Language in Literature at
the University of the ACT Library on 25.7.97. Plagiarism and sloppy research,
foibles of the narrator, will not be tolerated by the author. And, if you didn’t ‘get’
the reference you obviously will never make a reader, let alone a writer on such
pressing questions as the Death of the Subject (sûjet), Majakovskij’s ‘fanatical
belief in tomorrow’ and anything to do with ‘heating up ice-cream’ or ‘shattering
the boundaries of the present’ (flounce).
3 See http://www.alphalink.com.au/~agp/poetry.htm.
One: Yes, God know what the neighbours think 2
more wealth than ever before, there would be no masters and servants, and all
humanity would be living in an earthly paradise on sixty pounds a year.
The praying-mantis angled its head and began a
disquisition, in a voice like that from Mr Edison’s American phonograph, on the
duty of a good Employé. Piper, stomach growling, surreptitiously squashed it.
Perhaps he should have eaten it.
“On such a night”, panted Lord Lytton, who’d expired
in 1893 and most of his many novels shortly thereafter, “a great White Saviour
shall erupt from beneath the earth, clad in a white sheet because we know they
all love dressing up.”
Now motionless and dwelling on Mr HG Wells’s
portentous story The Time Machine, Piper strove to suppress a snort of laughter,
suspecting that by the Millennium such a ‘saviour’ would instantly be replaced
by a machine. His Master sat again, wiped his dripping brow with a pale, well-
bred hand, and began to open his many letters of rejection from the great White
publishing houses.
(The telephone rang; it was Mr Alexander Graham
Bell, quite drunk, blustering about working class revolutionaries using
goddamned party lines to organise strikes. Lytton left him to the mercy of the
answering machine, a tweeny.)
“Of course, my Lord.” Piper thought of all those
layers of policy formation and decision-making that loomed above him, and for
a second was almost relieved that he was only a butler.
Lytton left his chair again, and went down on one
knee. Piper backed away, thinking his employer about to propose. (To be on the
safe side, he took up the diamond-encrusted letter-opener and dubbed him Sir
Edward.) The humorless literary aristocrat parried that, and, while humming a
popular snatch of The Ring cycle — the version by Offenpiszt — in counterpoint
with the groans of the starving homeless and the slosh of the circulating libraries
outside, devoured a sterling silver ice-bucket of locusts and wild honey (he had
strong teeth himself). He then turned three increasingly deeper shades of blue
and fulminated in copperplate:
“Yea, and he shall be called

the Ancient of Days (amongst other
things), and he shall be as White as
Cocaine, and he shall trot about the
Globe, and exploit the abolition of
international exchange rate controls and
the burgeoning worldwide State-
instigated come-peter networks, and lo,
2
he shall Gamble with other people’s

money across the whole face of the
earth.”
After that mouth-frothing effort which caused his false
teeth to be ejected at supersonic speeds, rather like bits of Canberra Hospital
circa 1997, he lapsed into a laudanum stupor reminiscent of St John the Divine’s.
(St John’s solicitor has contacted me for bringing ‘hatred, ridicule and contempt’
to bear on him. I assured him that Bob Ellis wrote the offending sentence.)
Irish-Australian, decided his servant. And a right
bloody fascist. He sighed and dusted the man’s fragmented dentures. The Master
Problem (with its vile maxim4) was getting serious.
As Piper shambled home from work along a roughly-

cobbled street lined with waifs, billboards and horseshit, the clammy London fog
clung to the hair-draped collar of his threadbare overcoat. He wondered what to
do with his life; he thought of writing self-help books in the tradition of Samuel
Smiles, Norman Vincent Peale and Barbara Schirr, with titles like I Can Build a
Gulag in America if I Only Know How to Create Sufficient Downward Envy, but his
collectivist Celtic background — such as bathing in a tin tub in front of the fire
with the whole extended family of three generations chomping on laverbread
and cockles around him — forbade that. A place for everything, and everything in
its place, indeed. Read your Bible, Sir! Clearly Lytton had, though his interpretation
was that of the deprivationist nomenklatura. As the butler was having these
momentous thoughts, a woman of the night rustled up in dripping mauve
period cast-offs. She shocked him to the marrow by adjusting her furbelow
saucily and asking for a light. He thought, naturally, of the famed Michelson-
Morley experiment.
“Nah, it’s just that I’ve just run out of lucifers, duckie.”
she said nineteenth centurily, devoid of a Zippo, that portable burning oil well
(Red Adair and Saddam Hussein would have envied it), and imbued (despite
having once narrowly escaped Jack the Ripper) with a degree of faith in healthy
competition that would have dismayed Adam Smith. A last thunderclap
sounded, far away. The ether … but he put that long-held delusion out of his
mind.
4“ But what all the violence of the feudal institutions could never have effected, the silent and insensible
operation of foreign commerce and manufactures gradually brought about. These gradually
furnished the great proprietors [nobles, and landlords] with something for which they
could exchange the whole surplus produce of their lands, and which they could consume
themselves without sharing it either with tenants or retainers. All for ourselves and nothing for
other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of
mankind. As soon, therefore, as they could find a method of consuming the whole value of
their rents themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other persons.” (Wealth of Nations,
[Smith 1776, III.iv.10, pp. 418-19].
What red-ragging crap from that dangerous socialist Adam Smith.
3
“Oh.” he replied disappointedly to his shadow-cloaked

interlocutor — with a wary glance at the sky. He’d never been called ‘duckie’
before, at least not by a woman. Well, as far as he knew she was a woman. (She
had her own problems on that score, but we won’t go into that.5)
“Er — since we’re thrown together by Fate in this
fashion, perhaps you’d like to join me in, er, plotting a Revolution.” he went on
diffidently, leaning against the wall of a festering slum and thinking deeply about
Providence , and this from a man who’d never even been to Rhode Island.
(Hanging is too good for this writer, said Mr Cruelty.) “As long as the
neighbours don’t object, that is.”
“A rrevolyewshohn? Yeah, sounds like a bonzer idea,
brud.” she said as she lit up a Cuban cigar. Her neighbours were all objectionable
but she didn’t give a fuck.
He adjusted his pince-nez and stuck his pipe squarely
in his mouth. Better to live on your feet than die on your knees. As he
contemplated the Just World they would build, along with a recipe for ‘salmon
and onion puff pie’ gleaned from a packet of Mothers Choice®!self-raising flour,
a smile spread along his fleshy lips like flotsam from a pleasure-cruise upon the
grey, green, greasy surface of the Limpopo. The wall was quite comfortable; at
home, lacking a Little Woman or even a large one, he curled up with the
Communist Manifesto on piles of coal dust his Mam sent him from darkest Wales.
Get orf that bleedin’ wall!
Out of his skin he jumped, then grinned at the craggy
proletarian face at the window while tipping his topper. “Er, my apologies,
Madam.” He got back into his skin as it was a bit parky without it, then in
mollification trotted out some of his own poetry,
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me —
It failed to impress and he never wrote another line

again.
(Fancy the narrator — not of course the author —
using such a dated routine. Meanwhile, in Third Century Rome, Origen relocated
the earthly paradise to a point beyond the grave since they’d been waiting
absolutely fruitlessly and apple-free for the Messiah and Mom for three
centuries, but I (who never came face to face with Adolf Hitler during the Great
War) won’t bore you with such theological tedium.)
Piper — no thought in his mind about any Crisis of
Overproduction — turned back to the garish magdelen and squinted through
the oval lenses, trying not to sound superior. “Er — are you from the
Antipodes?” ‘Er’ was his favourite word.
“Strufe, yair. Me name’s Ruby. I come ’ere to furver
me career, ’n I? I couldn’t give a stuff about lookin’ at the bloody queen.” (Her
previous occupation will not be described here for fear of offending the sensitive
reader.) Her eyes scintillated with revolutionary fervour worthy of Che Guevara
5Nor the fact that baby oil is not made from babies.
4
and his famous late-90s commercial craze. (Secretly, she’d have killed for a solid-
gold Maserati — you couldn’t drive it but who cares. Think of the pose value as
you were photographed by it outside Claridge’s, especially in a see-through
skirt.)
“Um — jolly good. I’m, er, P-peter.” (Mr Piper, he said
out of habit, under his breath as the cardboard boxes along the Embankment
shook with laughter.) “My Master is a — right bastard, you see. Won’t even let
me live in.”
“Really?” (She too loved The Nanny.) “So’s mine.
Worse than Arthur Koestler. That’s why I dumped the geezer.” She came into
the glow of the gas lamp (the only one that hadn’t lost out to electricity, and
smug about it) and he saw the great welts and bruises on her face. He quailed.
For all his prejudices, he had a soft heart. Memories of his miserable upbringing
permeated his consciousness. His Mam (a native of the Isle of Man and designer
of the famous Laxey wheel) spent her days and nights scrubbing the extensive
parquet floors of English coal proprietors while his Dada worked more hours
underground than a pit-pony. Revolution was a messy business, but patriarchal
capitalist repression was perhaps worse — look at the Slave Trade and other
forms of labour market flexibility.6
Accidental Digression Showing the Author’s

Incompetence:
Dark as the Dungeon
by the late Merle Travis; also recorded by one Robert

Zimmerman, the well-known baby-boomer
Come all you young fellers so young and so fine

And seek not your fortune in the dark, dreary mine
It will form as a habit and seep into your soul
'Til the blood of your veins runs as black as the coal
Where it's dark as the dungeon and damp as the dew

Where the dangers are many and the pleasures are few
Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines
It's dark as the dungeon way down in the mine
It's many a man I have seen in my day

Who lived just to labor his whole life away
Like a fiend with his dope or a drunkard his wine
A man must have lust for the lure of the mine
I hope when I'm gone and the ages do roll

My body will blacken and form into coal
Then I'll look down from the door of my Heavenly home
And pity the miner a-digging my bones
6Such as Nike, the Nazi Holocaust and even Uncle Joe to some interpreters of the
historical record.
5
The midnight, the morning, the breaking of day

Are the same to the miner who labors away.
Where the demons of death often come by surprise,
One slip of the slate and you're buried alive.
He (humming Summertime as recorded by Janis Joplin)

hoped the war would be over by Christmas.
“ ’ere,” she said in the cockney accent she’d acquired

after eighteen years on the streets of the Empire’s capital, “I got a time machine
at ’ome. Wanna come and see it?”
He’d never heard that line before. Perhaps it had
something to do with the popularity of Mr H.G. Wells. But he was relieved, as he
knew nothing sophisticated to say about etchings.
“Er, love to, what what.”
He gawped at the veiled curve of Ruby’s bosom (well,
there were two veiled curves to be precise) and fantasised:
Liberty leading the people! Piper ahead of her, looking

back, washed on by the roaring of homosexuals and the clash of cold steel.
(The next Revolution they must hold in Florida.) Liberty trips on a
contradiction and falls on top of him. The crowds rush past them both and
storm the Stock Exchange, shouting mightily. A shred of t h e Neue
Rheinische Zeitung drifts by. But the crowds ahead are hanging someone
from a lamp-post. He scrambles to his feet (Liberty sloping off with Emma
Goldman) and stumbles closer. It has to be Mr Francis J. Savage. It isn’t. It’s
himself.
The Goddess-like fantasy didn’t get him far. Damn

buttling. Many people saw him as a quisling, though that word was, mercifully,
not yet in use. An ancient feeling of shame filled him, but was now transmuted
into anger. He’d show the bastards.
She just giggled and clasped his reddened hand.
“Come on, silly.” They shambled (it was all the rage) back to her basement
bedsit, via Highgate Cemetery. On the way, they were watched over by the
huge and ubiquitous hoardings of Mr Savage, his fist clasped round a bottle of
his renowned patent medicine, Dr Francis J. Savage’s Eee-lixir. The enterprising
Mr Savage owned everything hereabouts, and the knowledge stuck in Piper’s
craw (whatever that is).
Advertisement
6
In my youth, Father William7, we used two fingers,

but due to technological enhancement we now only
need to use one: that’s progress!
— Inserted by the All Forms of Known Snobbery Advertising Agency®, Purveyors of Stuff we Know Doesn’t
Work but which Many Idiots will Pay for.
The area was so base8 and common that the rising

damp sank. Her minuscule crevice, located in a former Zoroastrian cemetery9,
was an architectural catastrophe whose furnishings recalled Newgate Prison in
its heyday (if not Bergen-Belsen in its), while the bathroom was located in
Birmingham, Alabama. For many years the place had clearly been used as a blast
furnace and had since been declared a protected habitat for cockroaches the size
of bloated plutocrats who once worked for Leopold II in the Belgian Congo.
These — along with the Zhdanov Excelsior Bagpipe Orchestra — could be heard
munching and bombinating their egotistical way through the earth’s crust many
miles below the clay of London.10 No one knew what planet they were off (Pluto
sprang to mind).
Piper had never encountered anything so repulsive in
his rather sheltered life, unless perhaps it was the conduct of finance cowboys or
the smell of hot, wet hair outside the nearby barbershop (complete with off-key
quartet) — or such traditional Armenian customs as the forced march. In every
filthy nook and cranny of the flat — modelled no doubt after one of the less
salubrious septic tanks of the Empire — death-watch beetles knocked out ‘The
Ride of the Valkyries’, while neo-liberal borers bristled with jackhammers and
privatisation policies within the peeling, excreta-caked and bullet-scarred
asbestos walls.
He looked down and blenched. Good night Vienna!
Good morning Vietnam! Good bye Novi Sad! Along the disintegrating and
squeaking floorboards, tall, blond white-ants goosestepped toward him with the
local chapter of Wotansvolk11, as angry black widow spiders pelted petrol
bombs at them from the sidelines. Lawn bowls hooligans roamed about beating
the shit out of both.
7Clearly of the Orange Order.

8Bass and uncommon in operatic terms.
9It had since wisely converted to Episcopalianism.
10See John Oxenford,Punch, October, 16 1841, vol.1, p157, for geological details of London, an extract of
which is located at the end of this book.
11‘Willof the Aryan Nation’, set up by Col. Ray Cyste of Hog Bottom, Idaho. A
quote from the great man: “Ah lives down there in Hog Bottom with a mess of
decent whaht folks. We’re so whaht we glows in the dark — specially hafter the
haccident at the nuculear power plant last week. Ah knowed it was a mistake to
appoint Homer Simpson — Ah told ‘em so, Ah said ‘He’s a cartoon character’ —
they said ‘He’s cheap’. Well, sir, Ah’m a plain man and Ah don’t know nothin’ —
Ah jes’ knows Ah cain”t stand niggers, and they cain’t stand me neither, and that
makes it fair, don’t it? Feel the power of Hog Bottom!”
7
Surely, he thought, he was developing a serious fever

of the brain. But no. In the cobweb-choked corners of the ceiling, discalced
triantiwontigongolopes (having been luckily left uneaten by St Teresa) engaged
in Adult Potty Training when not watching the whole fiasco on tabloid television.
Meanwhile, lalophobic — yes, you heard the word here!— and pole-squatting
bull-ants, who’d been laid off from work-for-the-dole schemes (lecturing,
orating, hosting the Logies etc) because of their terror of public speaking and
pierced pudenda, multiplied in the single thread of carpet provided by her
generous landlord (Fr Thumbelina O’Christ, a very short transgendered priest of
1
18 Bogside Rd, Derry). The toilet — in Birmingham, Alabama, as you’ll recall,
4
and imported from Changi aboard the Titanic — was actually a jagged and
tetanus-rich thimble used by every passing dwarf (and also by unusually tall
people trying to pass as dwarves). The shower only worked when it was raining
as it was essentially a hole in the roof. There was dry rot and even the wet
variety. Only a private health fund could have looked in worse shape.Indeed, the
whole condemned and burnt-out pile, at the bottom of which the bedsit
languished in a miasma of ethnically-cleansed corpses, rattlesnakes and Abba
records, the entire ghastly edifice (not unlike Gormenghast Castle in its heyday),
the complete leprous structure, designed by Josef Mengele before he went into
medicine, the utter Ozymandiac and apocalyptic ruin, (bit of a distance between
noun and verb here), tilted sickeningly at a thirty-eight degree angle and
basically only stood up because it was leaning against the jerry-built hovel
nextdoor. (It made the Tower of Piza look quite upright by comparison but on
the other hand a grass hut in the middle of the Christmas Bombing would have
been more appealing.) Lord Lucan had once lived there while in hiding but had
perished in the Influenza outbreak of 1919, which itself had originated in the
bedsit along with the Black Plague, the Irish Potato Famine and the Great Fire of
London. Other notorious criminals who had hidden out there included Martin
Bryant, Dr Crippen and Heinrich Himmler.
To continue this vital if depressing description … the
curtains resembled voluminous underpants washed at least 3633 times, or would
have done had there been anything as sophisticated as curtains. The central
heating system was a failed Albanian fire-eater called, curiously, Slobodan
Milosevic — what a pretty name — who was presently on stress leave in Kosovo
(or rather just outside of it). The stove and food cupboards had been donated by
Josef Stalin. The shower, basic as it was, nevertheless when suitably stimulated
unleashed waves of Zyklon B together with an F-117 Stealth Fighter. Directly
above it, the stagnation-beset Japanese government built unnecessary bridges
and adventitiously sold them to Yugoslavia (possibly the point of that war).12
Or as one of my ancestors, a cinema projectionist, had
it: showing tonight — my arrrse; come early to see the whole of it!
Ahem. The light-bulbs, were this story to permit such
anachronisms, would certainly have been choc-a-bloc with hippopotamus dung,
rendering them somewhat inoperative. The whole neighbourhood, in fact, was
12See ‘UN outlines plans for rebuilding Kosovo’, The Canberra Times, 16 June
1999, p5: ‘In Tokyo, a foreign ministry official said that Japan would participate in
the rebuilding of Kosovo …’.
8
unhealthily dependent upon foreign multinationals which, in the spirit of

creating instant profits for their absentee shareholders by various forms of
plunder instead of through sales, had forced its few employed wildlife, all with
MBAs in Postmodernist Brain Surgery13, to set up automated bazooka-cum-
maternity wear factories to ‘stave off globalisation’. It hadn’t worked and her
whitefella domicile — a bush humpy would have seemed like Buckingham
Palace by contrast — was presently occupied by 35 000 Chinese troops.
Naturally, it was also under a flightpath and every
time the Concorde (this is 1899) broke the sound barrier the ceiling fell in.
She shared the bubonic mattress (a former slab from
the local morgue) with a psychotic gorilla which had fortunately been arrested
for possession of illegally-imported sugar bananas only moments before, and
also with half a dozen drunken lepers who farted professionally for a living and
had the disquieting tendency to leave bits of themselves beneath the sheets. On
top of that, old-age pensioners (without the pension at this point in history of
course) lay about all over the place sniffing their Deep Heat Extra Strength
arthritis cream and remembering, if only briefly, the (Eighteen) Sixties as they
toothlessly chanted Om mane padme om (it was the Buddha’s birthday after all, he
was at the time 2459 years old and generally a drooling wreck due to constant
self-abuse with a barrel-organ — but still a virgin if not THE virgin — who, after
sneaking ashore on a rusty ship, a bit like those boat people the Pilgrim Fathers,
hung out with Jesus and Mohammed smoking pot and hugging Bo trees on a
seedy commune on the north coast of New South Wales).Because of all those
excesses she generally slept on the floor, whose festering timbers barely
concealed a cesspit, a machine-gun nest and an active volcano. Arguably, she’d
have been better off homeless, but that sort of heterodox notion will not be
entertained by such a fundamentally conservative and sober writer such as my
good self.
Finally, the light from the single grimy window was
so poor it went out and washed windscreens at the traffic lights on a regular
basis.
At one end little blind orphan girls tatted lace in
suffocating gloom, terrified of a lightning house inspection by Serbian irregulars;
on the opposite wall there was an early Son et Lumière production running via
magic lantern showing the forced-labour construction of the flat — rare as hen’s
teeth! — by Kosovan Romany toddlers on work-without-the-dole schemes at
the height of the Spanish Inquisition (he actually was very taken with the
pathbreaking cinematography of Lumière and his son); doodlebugs from the
Great Carbuncle of America whooshed about making impressive explosions on
the horizon; the U.S. Seventh Fleet sailed through the pool of matzoh blood in
the cracked sink, its jolly tars crying port to port, red to red, keep ’er goin’ straight
ahead and other nautical aphorisms; Pol Pot cheerily counted his skulls by the
peculiar chimney piece; episodes of Baywatch and febrile ads for McDonald’s
genetically-modified hamburgers and the forthcoming Great Depression
flickered in every reflective surface; a rogue elephant with diarrhoea stood on its
head and, peculiarly, erupted in the middle of the room; rabid wolves with
13Forthe sightless on roller blades no less, and observed of course by Michael

Jackson.
9
sexually-transmitted ailments roamed freely through the kitchenette, which itself

was not unlike a mortuary in Argentina during the Dirty War and also played
the banjo; headless chickens — yes well, we won’t get into that sort of thing;
ahem (much clearing of throat and grabbing at lapels here in a desperate effort
to continue putting one over the reader) … bisecting the bedsit, a tsunami of raw
sewage coursed along an open drain beside the railway line down which the
Flying Scotsman steamed shriekingly; a mangy three-headed mutt stood guard
at the door; and a whole family of North Queensland crocodiles sat quaffing
Guinness and discussing Derrida and Debord with hundreds of humungous
slugs on the single ricketty table. Piper was off into reverie here, of course, but
the overpowering feeling that he was sitting shivering in a moon-crater
(somewhere beyond Pluto) was irresistable. Ruby’s rack-rented dump,
(reminiscent, he realised suddenly with some consternation, of the Black Hole of
Calcutta), was not exactly an Englishman’s castle and couldn’t have been darker
than Arthur Koestler at noon had it been six feet underground.
(Actually it was.) Truly, her squalid lodgings made his
gorge rise (how green was his valley!). The place made Hell look like a holiday
camp.
As he was thinking all this, laughing to himself guiltily
in case he threw up, Ruby simply bustled about making a pot of tea and
loosening her stays, while singing the following lower-class ditty, and not in an
Afrikaner accent:
When Fahver papered the parlour

You couldn’t see Pa for paste
Dabbin’ it ’ere
Dabbin’ it vere
Paste an’ paper ever-ee-where
Muvver got stuck to the ceilin’
The kids got stuck to the flo-or
Did you ever see such a family
So stuck up before!
He cringed, culturally, since he was sure he’d heard

the devil in music or at least the devil’s trill14 in there somewhere (thankfully not
the Cat’s Fugue by Offenpizst — to be played on a blunt instrument — or
Haydn’s Toy Symphony). Her penny-farthing built for three was propped up in
the corner, making him shudder — how proletarian. The fetching picture on the
wall of the tooth-scarred Bombay ratcatcher, bloodstained bamboo stick held
high against the moon, no doubt hating his filthy job (though rats on reflection
were preferable to aristocrats) was bad enough. Piper detested art and double-
bass trombones.
14Satan is the only person who can out-fiddle John Denver, and that while
trapped in a lake of ice. But he can’t sing ‘Any old Iron’. Ahem. ‘Any old iron,
any old iron, any any any old iron … you look sweet, you look a treat, you look
dapper from your napper to your feet, (something something) your fahver’s old
green tie on, I wouldn’t give you tuppence for your old watch chain, old iron, old
iron!’
10
While she was busy singing (and he muttering in his

blokey way — swathed in burnt cork and dressed in green for dramatic effect
—There was a young man called Racine / who invented a fucking machine / concave and
convex, to fit any sex / but Oh! what a bastard to clean), he noticed that she had a
copy of Sheikh Nefzaoui’s treatise The Perfumed Garden on the sole scabby
bookcase. Furtively he slipped it out and opened it at random.
Chapter 7
On Matters Which Are Injurious in the Act of Generation
Know, O Vizir (to whom God be good!), that the i l l s

caused by coition are numerous. I will mention to you some of them, which to know
is essential, in order to be able to avoid them.
Let me tell you in the first place that coition if performed
standing affects the knee-joints and brings about nervous shiverings; and i f
performed sideways will predispose your system for gout and sciatica [near
Kosovo], which resides chiefly in the hip joint.
Do not mount upon a woman fasting or immediately before
making a meal, or else you will have pains in your back, you will lose your vigour,
and your eyesight will get weaker.
If you do it with the woman bestriding you, your dorsal
cord will suffer and your heart will be affected; and if in that position t h e
smallest drop of the usual secretions of the vagina enters your urethral canal, a
painful stricture may supervene.
Do not leave your member in the vulva after ejaculation,
as this might cause gravel, or softening of the vertebral column, or the rupture o f
blood vessels or, lastly, inflammation of the lungs.
Too much exercise after coition is also detrimental.
Avoid washing your member after the copulation, as t h i s
may cause canker.
…
He who follows such a regime is protected against t h e

following accidents, to which excessive coition may lead.
Firstly, the loss of generative power.
Secondly, the deterioration of his sight; for although h e
may not become blind, he will at least have to suffer from eye diseases if he does
not follow my advice.
(The telephone ringing or being struck by a migrating
asteroid doesn’t help either.) 15
The tea was nice when it came.

“’ere, don’t read that Arabian tripe!” she went (being
more taken by underwater mountain climbing), and swiped it out of his hand.
“Get this dahn yer.”
With a guilty expression and much blinking and
squinting he took the cup and looked about at the London Pride-infested flat,
sipping demurely and feeling uncomfortably Celtic and socially out of his depth.
Now, mind how you go, Emlyn, his Dada had said as he left his blackened village
15He’d once done an intensive course in speed-reading.
11
of Ach-y-Fi and gone over the mountain with his worldly belongings (some
gunpowder, a compass and a printing press) tied in a handkerchief which hung
from a pole — I won’t of course resort to such peurile elaborations such as ‘a
pole that rested on a shoulder attached to his freezing body which stood upon
the earth spinning about a middle-aged star (Pat Boone — well it is 1899) in a
reckless manner on the edge of the known galaxy thanks to Mr Wells’. I
wouldn’t give my critics (Fie!) the pleasure.
‘Turn again Whittington’ were words he (though
making progress with Spinoza) waited in vain to hear.
Nor could he see anything remotely resembling a
time machine, whatever that might resemble — possibly an ophicleide on roller
skates. (Outside, a police box went errwoo errwoo and disappeared but he didn’t
notice.)
“Er — your, er, time machine … ?” As a boa
constrictor coiled round his neck and slithered out through a gaping hole in the
window — well, it was there after the thing had gone — he reflected that
perhaps he should never have adopted the English name Peter. Yet those who
did often did well, look at Peter Rabbit and Mr Pan. For too long he’d been
content to dree his weird.
“Yes! That’s it!” she said excitedly, slurping coarsely at
her own while lighting another cigar.
“What — the bicycle?”
“Yair. Just like in HG Wells.”
The native woman was plainly mad (though to tell the
truth he (plainly) couldn’t tell the difference between a Schizophrenic and a
Manic Depressive, not even by the way they walked down the street). He much
preferred Swinburne. The rain in Spain …
“No, I hain’t mad.” she said, deftly avoiding the
question in everyone’s minds as to whether Savage was wholly responsible for
his depredations or merely the pawn of capitalistic forces16 (he’d got the contract
for the Jubilee by getting his daughter to sleep with Queen Victoria). “You sits on
it, see, and rings the bell. You wanna go into the future, say to 2,008, you just
rings the bell Two Fahsend — well, 2,008 times. Ok, it could be more efficient but
this is 1899.”
He’d certainly — though certain that he was certain of
nothing — heard that line before. He never pinched gags; his were all paid for in
Swedish kronor and he hated to think what they’d cost in euros.
(A male-to female transsexual who hadn’t yet come
out but had developed Size D boobs after two years on oestregen that looked
odd on a person who was apparently a hyper-butch docker did not happen by at
that moment, nor ever will in this tale.)
“Er — and does it go back … ?” He’d always wanted
to meet Mr Julius Caesar the famous slaughterer of Celts, and warn him about
that treacherous, nasty and short Mr Brutus.
“Course not. That don’t make no sense.” she
protested, riffling through a stained copy of the Origin of Species and euchreing
16We wouldn’t want to make the Fundamental Attribution Error and bring
Social Psychology into disrepute, would we? (Well, we’ve all been to university…)
12
him thoroughly. “You’re not well up on Science, is yer? Occam’s Razor? Nature
abhors a vacuum? Early experiments on the Leyden Jar? Mesmerism? No such
thing as a failed Michelson-Morley experiment? Absence of evidence is not
evidence of absence? Chaos theory? Fermat’s Last Theorem (the one what killed
x
’im)?” She delivered a dissertation on and in Higher Mathematics, ! "ne =mc2
f u c k
n e o c
l a s s
e c o
i c a l
… ! "####### n o m. It didn’t make much sense (though a century later it
i c s
was discovered to be the key to the Unified Field Theory and the manufacturing
of the ideal McDonald’s potato which raised the hopes of so many starving
millions in Latin America, India, Africa etc, people crying out for fiscal and
monetary responsibility).
She picked up another book, one all too familiar. “And
of course, Karl Marx and all that?”
Piper shuddered faintly. That man — such long hair
(though he was fair-minded enough to think him a brilliant poet, his elegy about
the Falling Rate of Profit outshining anything Milton ever wrote — and why did
the latter go blind?). Piper’s secret life as a closet Communist in the privacy of his
own coal-hole was not something he could yet fully admit to himself. He well-
remembered the first night he’d read Marx, fighting against the notion that
Socialist Rays might emanate from the pages and contaminate him — and hadn’t
they? Yet for years he’d pretended to be a centre-reactionary.“Um — I suppose
not.” Science! The nearest he’d got to that was to arrange a list of the Bishops of
the Diocese of London since 1044 and the actual doges of Venice into alphabetical
order for an arthritic Mesopotamian cleric — his first job in the alienated labour
industry, in fact, and a challenge since it was all unaccountably in Japanese. (True,
he’d experimented with crystal sets and inadvertently invented the transistor 69
years before Schockley, but he and the rest of the world never became aware of
it.)
“B-but, why should one wish to travel into the
future?” The glorious triumph of Llewelyn y Llyw Olaf over Edward I could be
ensured with Maxim guns and a verse or two from Hillaire Belloc, thus changing
the entire course of History …
“Cor, lumme, that toffee-nosed accent’s really stuck to
the roof of your mahf, innit? You want a Scientific Socialist Revolution, right?
Well, there ain’t no point in ’avin’ one nah what wiv the colonies bestowin’ quasi-
aristocratic status upon the nice lily-white sons of Empire an’ all.” She took a
deep breath at the wooden dialogue that was to follow. “Look — the Russkies’ll
try it in 1917 and it’ll all go wrong, wiv much the same ’appenin’ in China in ’49.
Then there’ll be a bit of a lull, apart from Cuba and so on. But Australia, 2008 …”
The Venerable Bede couldn’t have faulted her cunning omission of his distinction
between ‘BC’ and ‘AD’ in the interests of political correctness.17
17Actually
a refinement of the scheme devised by the Scythian-born Roman
monk Dionysius Exiguus in c.527 (a year that didn’t exist until he’d cooked it up)
who possibly suffered from the ‘Scythian madness’.
13
As stirring revolutionary hymns struck up in his

subconscious and the ankles of Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud passed
each other on the pavement outside, their owners both scribbling furiously, he
began to see the possibilities the, er, narrator was so laboriously setting up in
irritatink dialect. They’d hardly be expecting it there.
“A social lavatory — er, laboratory!” he responded,
perking up. “I do see my brothers (and sisters) rahsin’! Yo … er, jolly good.”
“Precisely.” she said with a wink, and he reddened.
“And we’re going to be kicking up the stink.” She lit another cigar, proud of
introducing a jangling rhyme into the paragraph.
“Bombs.” he enthused, thinking of his drear English
Employer and gulping down his tea (pity he had no bread to dip into it).
“Yair, Fords are better than Holdens. So are you with,
er, wiv me?”
“Er — don’t we need a third person?”!
“Who, the ’oly Ghost?”
“No, God doesn’t come into this book, the um,
narrator — sigh — just said so.”
“You’re barmy.”
He denied this hotly, thinking exclusively in words
defined by other words which referred to other words and so forth, the whole
process eventually sending him back to the initial ones as in the dictionary or the
(not yet downsized) public service.
A piece of the ceiling proceeded to fall on his head.
Concorde wasn’t even in earshot.
“I mean, to ride that contraption of yours is b-barmy.”
he added, belching unintentionally and cursing his Cymric rusticality as a
gigantic but sickly black rat sniffed up his trouser leg. She poured him a glass of
‘dog’s nose’, a horrible concoction of gin and beer (not a patch on a Brompton
Cocktail)18. Sts Bridget and Patrick gasped in a celestial motel overhead, and not
because the names ‘Mr and Mrs A. Smith’ hadn’t convinced the rather Bible-
bashing proprietor.
“Well,” she said at length (about 3.2 Russian versts),
“there is my mite Anno. But she’s a bit spare.”
“Er — can’t anyone find a use for her?” he quipped,
but she like most people didn’t laugh. Awkwardly, he adjusted his Madagascan
glasses till they picked up the BBC, which hadn’t yet been set up. What a bargain
they’d been.
“Yair, she’s a lamplighter. All she could get, bein’
congenitally pimpled, and she’s nearly 40. But there hain’t much call for it these
days, outside Wales at least.”
A rugged-looking cockroach emerged from the
nearest hole in the floorboards and peered about haughtily. Ruby seemed to be
used to them and Piper resolved above the sound of his pounding heart not to
scream in terror. Fortunately it was the insect’s night out and it left the bedsit via
the wall.
18Nothing so crude as beer and moggies and folding bicycles will be entertained
here.
14
“Such a — er — a p-progressive woman.” he said,

relieved. The combination of cigar and dog’s nose were making him cough (the
rat later died of emphysema). But passive smoking hadn’t yet been invented.
(Anachronistic humour can be tedious. I shall restrain myself for the sake of
humourless bastards like you, dear reader, who are indulging in poisonous
mutterings and contemplating bad reviews of this book with insensate glee.
If you think that’s outrageously self-indulgent,
compare this extract from a story I wrote at the tender age of 23:
‘[Untitled]
Once upon a time there was a three-storey lung

inflammation called Vera Badde. Vera lived in downtown Buenos Aires with her pet pig
Superphosphate and her squashed budgie Reg. Her favourite dish was Iced Echidna or
porcelain and her idol was Silas Silage of East Cairo.’
The rubbish I wrote as a mere slip of a transvestite!
Isn’t artistic maturity grand.)
“Yair, she has impeccable revolutionary credentials —
earned of course during the time of the Paris Commune. She’s no friend of the
Bourgeoisie.”
That last word she spat at him in a fashion worthy of
her dark-bearded mentor. He pictured Mr Francis J. Savage and his fine gold-
plated whiskers. Then he began to slurp with excitement too, spattering his
glasses, all inhibition gone, and the neighbours started banging on the paper-thin
walls and yelling social Darwinist slogans about miscegenation like Archimedes’
famous screw is better done in the barf innit? The pair had a wild night of it; he’d
always loved Consequences.
(In Australia at about the same time, the great-

grandfather of a forthcoming character was, with some difficulty, being born
with a full set of teeth. Despite the fact that his parents were social scum who
busked on street corners with their very own all-female mariachi band, he grew
up to become a high-ranking public servant in the new capital, Canberra (a
Koori name meaning ‘gubbaville’). It was a great family tradition — along with
pituri addiction —!that his son and grandson continued (ie, being born) while his
daughters married important graziers19 and arse-barbers and bore strapping
children whose descendants were bankrupted by a 90% — and rising — GST. I’m
sure you were all hanging out for this bit of information. I wasn’t.)
Lord Lytton drummed angrily on the dining table

with his native Irish bodhran stick. The kidneys on the sideboard were getting
cold. Where in thunderation was his bespectacled Taff butler?
Piper entered in full livery. (He’d always been a bit
livery and his Celtic background in Alcoholism didn’t help.)
“About time, my man!” thundered his Master, then
tossed aside the metal sheet.
“Sorry, my Lord.” Piper covertly wiped his nails on
the seat of his trousers, since they were smeared with red phosphorus scraped
19Beneath each other and below the salt of course.
15
from match-heads. They caught fire momentarily and he winced, but Lytton
didn’t notice. “Er — I became entangled in my bedclothes this morning and it
took me an hour to fight my way out with the aid of the Welsh Fusiliers.”
(Leonie is suing.)
The ultra-celebrated Leonie Barmy from the author’s famous

tome Her Brilliant Career (Aberrant Genotype Press, 1998), — also on the cover of
the same author’s Leonie’s Ludicrous (Aberrant Genotype Press, 1999) — as scribbled
by the multi-talented Auntie Rhoberta.
His Lordship grumbled and looked black. Patently a

lie. He was as white as the next man, Mr Rastus ‘Mammy’ bin Chatterjee, a left-
handed violin-sawing cove hooked on watermelons, homosexuality and cross-
dressing. Thank God for the League of Rights.
Piper, rather mottled due to the coal dust and, oddly,
musically inept, forgot for the moment his Celtic anti-centralism and served the
Saxon his phosphorus-rich breakfast.
“Ah. Thank you, my man.” the Lord said whitely.
“Now,” he chewed, so commonly indeed, that Piper could hardly bear to listen
to the man slowly poisoning himself, “I’ve started on a new novel. It’s called The
Coming Race. I’d like you to get it down on paper for me. Then Mr Francis J.
Savage the ignorant globetrotting Plutocrat intends to publish it.”
Piper groaned. What school had the narrator gone to?
“Did you groan, Piper?”
“Er, no my Lord. I mean, yass, my Lord.” His stomach
rumbled and his mouth watered and his teeth played an out-of-tune marimba
classic due to not having eaten for a week and hypothermia.
16
Lytton scoffed his steaming kidneys and raised his

eyes to heaven or indeed even higher. The lower orders, particularly the boorish
Welsh, had no logical capacity at all, unlike his Underground Men.
“Sharpen up your quill, fellow. This is going to be a
blockbuster.”
“Yass, my Lord, bach!” Piper thought of Ruby (her
l a s t n a m e
McYarrabarrabidjeribarrajarrabajararrajarabajarabajarrabajarrabajarrabarra)
and her audacious plan. The Revolution, through the time machine, would (he
fantasised) abolish hierarchy throughout History. No more Morlocks, no more
Eloi! Eat the rich! But Mr Savage, should he get hold of it, might have other ideas,
mused Piper (uninspired by Psycho the muse of serial-killing), wondering if this
would come into the plot. (Even I’m not sure yet.)
“Yes, it’s about the Eternal Superiority of the British
Race.” added his Master snootily.
British! Piper, Welsh and Cornish and Sudanese to the
core, stepped back and trembled with anger at this Germanic interloper and his
imperialist drivellings. (He also wondered how monks shaved the tops of their
heads so neatly, it being difficult to see that spot in a mirror, however positioned,
but we’ll leave that for a forthcoming masterpiece.)20
“Yass, my Lord, I thought it might be.” he said, with
practised butlerian polish and a tug of his forelock.
“You see, my man, a Race of people exists in the
centre of the Earth, where they distil the vril of life.”
“Yass, my Lord.”
“Better than any of that Scotch lolly-water. It’s what
makes us Men.” he barked, thumping the table and sniffing at Piper’s behind.
“Gentlemen, that is to say, don’t you know?” He re-set his monocle and removed
the sauerkraut from between his teeth with a Prussian bayonet. Otto von
Lilienthal’s hang-glider flew overhead and crashed into the Thames. Other
nineteenth century things (horse farts etc) went on behind the scenes.
“Er — of course, my Lord, boyo.” Ruby, Anno
Domini (though presumably a wog giving to dancing the salterello while
covered in spaghetti bolonaise) and himself would put paid to …
Lord Lytton stood, belched and handed the plate to
his servant in a sharp, overweening motion. “Oh, my guts, I think I’ve overdone
it. Never mind. Well — I’m orf to hunt a few trades unionists. Come along … ”
Piper hated shooting, unless it was at the ruling class.
The tree of liberty is watered by the blood of tyrants, as Thomas Jefferson more
or less said, and Piper thought a revolution every twenty years was a good idea
too. But for the moment, he had little choice but to obey. He stuffed the plate
into the endlessly waiting hand of the geriatric tweeny and marched superiorly
and Prussianly after his Master.
20Woody Allen notwithstanding.
17
Chapter Two: The Time MachineChapter Two: The
Time Machine
Ruby pedalled harder, ringing out the changes. At the

highest point of the penny-farthing she sat, gripping the handlebars. Anno (who
unlike his Master believed the sword was mightier than the pen) sat below her.
Piper, as was ever his fate, occupied the position of tail-arse Charlie (and was
almost knackered in the process). He hoped she didn’t blow off.
“It’s working!” Piper exclaimed in disbelief as the
putrid, reeking bedsit dissolved and a montage of World Wars One and Two
(both fought in black and white21) rushed past them, which included Communist
Germany due to an alternative history bug. It felt (as Mr Wells had said) like
being on a switchback.
“Mr Francis J. Savage must never learn of this.” yelled
Piper into the cosmic wind. (Cosmic dyspepsia, like a Teletubby — eh oh! — was
not pleasant.) He was narrowly missed by a Phantom fighter on its way to bomb
Da Nang.
He reflected that he’d better confess pretty soon to
being a closet Marxist. The sight of the Soviet Union collapsing was not pleasant
either, to say nothing of Boris Yeltsin conducting an orchestra. (Bibi Netanyahu
we’ll ignore altogether, but instead here is a procession of world leaders whom
Piper did observe as they swirled through Time: Alan Greenspan, Michel
Camdessus, Rupert Murdoch … well, that’s quite enough for now.)
They landed in a field just outside Canberra. A
yellowed shred of (pre-Murdoch) newspaper drifted past. Piper gasped.
(On it due to Omnipotent, Omniscient etc Market
Forces, Providence, German Superiority and the cleaning out of the garage was
another irrelevant extract from the above-cited prelapsarian text ‘Untitled’, viz:
‘Oh Silas, you look so — appealing in that apple-peel kilt
with sidewhiskers. Please step into my banana-and-chrome hearing-aid and take your
ears off.’ Thinking with supreme relevance that the two bestriped ‘Bananas in Pyjamas’
looked as though they’d just emerged from a death camp, Silas decided against this.
‘Give me a space and a tin of salmon and I’ll show you how
to memorize “tiger”.’ he quoted from one of the author’s earlier dribblings.’
Reading that apology for a Goon Show script22 will
convince you of the need for even more Writers Centre workshops at the
expense of the Australia Council (I’m not holding any due to the brain injury
incurred when my ancient Mac exploded due to a System Error). What a long
haul it’s been to the currently-evident literary excellence of the author’s declining
years!)
Ruby lit a cigar (had she been on a Qantas flight she’d
have had to step outside), kicked out the bike-stand and caught it.
21At the insistence of Dr Mike Savage of the Ministry of Black and White
Propaganda. The trahison des clercs is shocking these days. (We’ve all been on the
dole for quite some time too.)
22Though better than Michel Camdessus’s script for Russia.
Two: The Time Machine 19
“What did I tell you! 2008! We’ve by-passed what is

harguably the worst century of all time!” She (who new little about the next one)
handed it to him proudly.
He (confessing to Marxism but hiding his status as a
closet urning) read about that and the bizarre antics of the hardline Liberalabor
Coalition Government and its attempt as an Agent of Foreign Capital to
consolidate 28 years of publicly-funded Grand Larceny.
“ ‘Surplus street kids sold off to Argentinian
billionaire’ … oh, and here’s a poem: ‘Treason doth never prosper, what’s the
reason? / For if it prosper, none dare call it treason … ’”
She ripped it from his grasp. [FX: gannets
disappearing into the air intake of a jetliner.]
“Don’t read all that terra nullius cobblers. And we
knew all along, sweetie. Now come on — we got work t’do (and not for the
Dole).”
Anno, picking at a pimple, downed another Scotch
and said in a thick Gorbals accent, “Where the heel are we?” Her lamplighter’s
pole (she was often up it) fell from the penny-farthing and into the grass.
“The Antipodes!” said Ruby, opening up the hamper
they’d brought. Her Uncle Chicka had provided a jar of high-class sun-dried
witchetty grubs imported from Catalonia.
“And all bloody electric I suppose. Christ, that fuckin’
cigar smells like the leftover haggis I shoved up the back of the icebox in 1874.”
“Stop whingein’. They don’t import that into Australia
’cos it ain’t fit for human consumption.”
Anno, who’d read the address to the haggis more
than once at her local Burns Club, fell off herself at that remark.
“I say, careful, ladies!” went Piper, wishing he was
curled up in his filthy cellar with a good copy of Das Kapital.
“Who are you callin’ a lady, ye useless great Sassenach
tonk?”
Sassenach! Steam came out of his ears. But her glare
made him quail. “Er, sorry.” Had she been a Jock, rather than a Jill, he told
himself, he would have felled her with a single blow.
“I should bloody weel think so.” Anno drained the
bottle and threw it at a sheep.
“Now, my map says there’s a city nearby.” Ruby said
firmly as Anno chorused, Here’s tae us; wha’s like us? Gey few, and they’re a’ deid!
“Ahem. A city that didn’t exist in our epoch.” She was a bit of a heidcase at times.
“I can’t see any city.” said Piper in his unfortunate
Swansea accent. He was looking straight at it.“You pillock, there it is. A garden
city. You see, Ebenezer J. Howard, influenced by the anarchist Prince Kropotkin
…”
He let the native woman drone on. As far as he was
concerned, he was looking at a few cottages in a forest.
“It’s called Canberra.” she finished.
“Says here that means a pair of tits.” roared Anno
lewdly. She fell on the food, literally and metaphorically.
19
“Well, that’s conjectural.” said Ruby, blowing a

syncopated rhythm or two on her didgeridoo. “It could mean ‘meeting place’. ”
“Between a pair of tits!” howled Anno, polishing off
the last of the cabanossi and blowing a raspberry.
Piper looked pained (he liked food on occasions and
couldn’t abide folk who talk with their mouths full). The burly Scotswoman dug
him in the ribs. He blew off unintentionally.
“Och, I know what you’re thinking.” she grinned,
showering him with food. “Weel you’re bloody weel right! A guid pair o’
knockers naer did anyone any harm.” He thought of Liberty again and felt
somewhat confused.
“ ’ere, leave orf you lot. Come on, let’s ride down to
it.” said Ruby, proud of her Aboriginality and the Oscar-winning blockbuster
Barbecuarea, but wishing she hadn’t lost the language and its many creative
insults. “They’ll never suspect this is a time machine.”
They did draw some attention, however. Kids looked

on in bemusement and adults smiled.
“Is it Canberra Week?” some of them could be heard
asking in their self-satisfied bourgeois tones. It certainly wasn’t the Tamworth
Country Music Festival.
Piper had never seen so many female legs in his life,
while Anno was disappointed at the lack of upthrust bosoms. Ruby was just glad
to be out of the damp and dangerous streets of imperial London — and
particularly her perverse bedsit, which had also served as a repository for
nuclear waste.
“I say, do we really need to make a Revolution here?
Everyone looks so — healthy, well-proportioned …” He stopped pedalling as his
legs were going at 300 rpm and his groin was in agony.
“Gawd, don’t go soft now.” said Ruby, hefting her
woomera and aware that they were already violating whitefella law due to their
lack of bicycle helmets. “Think of Lord Lytton.”
“The Oppressor.” he agreed readily. “Him and Mr
Francis J. Savage.”
“The Oppressors!”
“And these people, even those who’ve still got jobs,
are not happy. They fear that all the gains they’ve made since our time at the
expense of the Third World will be taken off them by madly-internationalising
capitalism and its local apologists and catspaws in parliament and that they’ll be
reduced to living like we do — did — but without our certainties. Without our
faith in the Future! (And possibly without Belgrade.)” Ruby lectured, standing on
the pedals of the big wheel at the front as they climbed a hill. Piper groaned
again. I mean, this is comedy, but … A police officer gave a friendly wave from a
passing patrol car, taken by the penny-farthing tandem.Piper waved back at
what he immediately recognised as the face of Authority, then hated himself for
such ingrained truckling conduct.
But they were approaching a lake. He breathed deeply
of its toxic algal vapours. It felt good to be doing something instead of having it
done to him. Why should we, the People, ‘adapt’ to some alien ‘reality’ when we
20
could adapt reality to our own needs? Why be subservient to some criminal
overclass? Strong and free people have no need of leaders. He began to hum the
Internationale.
“Where the heel are we goin’?” voiced the
Scotswoman predictably as they coasted down to a bridge whose design she
immediately deplored.
Ruby pointed out the strange flagpole on a squat hill
across the lake, a flagpole which surmounted a vast whited sepulchre
surrounded by seething crowds.
“That’s their ’ahse o’ Parliament.”
“Arse of Parliament?” said Piper but was ignored.
Anno pulled out her tartan bodice and made puking
noises. “I mean, d’ye call that architecture? All it needs is a bloody cauldron
dangling from it.”
“I suppose you’d know all about that — and
democracy and — and Scotch mist. Undoubtedly you’d be an accomplished
Vexillologist.” flyted Piper unsuccessfully, though his enthusiasm for Revolution
was growing with every breath of shit-free, monoxide-rich air he took.
Anno glowered in the mirror and also stopped
pedalling. A dishevelled drug addict offered to wash their windscreen and she
floored him.
“Stupid little man. Fuckin’ parliament’s got no
relevance to democracy in a world with massive disparities in wealth and pooer.
It’s no more than a den of thieves, an executive committee for managin’ the
affairs of the whole bourgeoisie, a — .”
“I say, turn it up, that’s a bit strong, they’re surely
elected by the People … ” went Piper, his acquired English sense of Modernity
and Pragmatism offended. Yet the poetry of it all touched his heart. He thought
of Mr Christ (though the Chap had been a swarthy foreigner) and again wished
they could travel into the past. Those money-changers had a lot to answer for,
doves at 40 shekels a pop, a shocking instance of the illegal trade in rare birds …
He vented his spleen and gall-bladder.
Ruby talked over him, aware too that the present
government’s popularity had sunk to 15% of the 30% who bothered to vote:
“We need to scout around and look for radical dissidents. There’s bound to be
some trying to break into that place sooner or later.”
“Who are all those fuckers, then?” asked Anno
incredulously, farting. Piper had broken out in a sweat; now he coughed
violently.
“Oh, they’re no good to us. The Pope is visiting, see.
Everyone’s mad about Peter II and the triumph of Opus Dei.”
“Shyte. I was hopin’ it was the Beatles.”
“But, er, when we come to power we’ll need a red
flag.” spluttered Piper eagerly, clearly out of his depth again. He’d seen one
being borne in front of the early horseless carriages, and a damn good thing too.
“I dinna think that’ll improve the look of it.” said a
cynical Anno.
“Perhaps we can ’old a flag competition.” he
suggested to the cigar-chomping Ruby, secretly glad he’d changed his name.
21
“This is a bicycle.” Ruby responded testily and with a

number of other adverbs stolen from the Saxon tongue. “Shut up the pair o’ you
and bleedin’ well pedal.”!
They didn’t get as far as Parliament House. A riot of

starving lumpenproletarians had broken out, and was met by zero tolerance
arrests and the immediate jailing of the lot for 20 years in leg-irons within the
grim razor-wired walls of the Alan Bond Corporate Correctional Facility Ltd, a
subsidiary of Hoffmann la Roche and a prominent producer of razor-wire. At
Ruby’s direction they took refuge in a suburban house, crashing through the
picture-window and falling in a heap on the lounge-room carpet.
“Sorry about the home invasion.” belched Anno
Celtically at the frightened-looking couple who thought the invaders might be
undercover cops (or possibly ophthalmologists) and were busily gathering up
their stash to flush it down the loo. “We’re from the nineteenth century.”
22
Chapter Three: Three Who Made a Revolution?
“And what are you going to make of it?” she added,

jabbing her pole and an ophthalmoscope at them.
They grinned nervously and offered the trio a bed
each.
“One’ll do, eh, Petey-boy?” She winked dangerously
and tickled Ruby. Strong Women were not his cup of tea, coffee, Bonox or
absinthe.
“Stop your ticklin’, Jock.” said Ruby, though she
enjoyed it. She lit yet another cigar and refused to go outside to smoke it.
Anno twirled her pole (smashing an expensive,
crystal-hung chandelier or two) and pranced about like a rather butch drum-
majorette while spouting jokes about razor-wire magnates, till they all (even
Piper with his masculinist nineteenth century obsessions and belief in a Single
Tax) fell about laughing.
As Ruby had planned, they all went for strange and

fatal interviews and got jobs in a nearby Internet cafe as apprentice
revolutionaries. Piper, though hardly computer literate, had had extensive
experience of waiting, having been waiting all his life to little avail, while the
other two forged their references. The couple, Mr and Mr Browne-Nose, were
former senior public servants (Ben has been cleverly if unnecessarily
foreshadowed above, in fact) who’d just been given ‘packages’ and were getting
by as artist’s models and the like (they were lucky they weren’t poet’s models).
“Oscar Wilde types.” sniffed Piper at the thought (he’d
been the only straight fellow in his old school), wondering why the pair weren’t
rotting away in prison and making millions for the people who counted. But no,
they surely couldn’t be, they were far too normal. They even listened to
Offenpizst, whose famous aria ‘Off with the Knickers, love’ was booming from
what he assumed was a fancy modern phonograph till Anno pulverised the
thing.
Josh and Ben, as they introduced themselves (though
their real names were Peter), had at first objected to their new guests, but were
swiftly seduced by Ruby’s convincing patter and Anno’s pole.
“Just as long as the neighbours don’t find out.” said
Ben. “They’re all homophobic Peterites.”
“Fuck the neebours.” said Anno, opening a bottle of
their best single malt. “And fuck the Pope and Bulwer-Lytton and Francis J.
Savage and — och, there’s too many villains in this book.”
Ruby and the narrator smoothed it all over. Secrecy
was essential. They’d changed into contemporary dress and Piper into a pair of
contemporary trousers, as he wasn’t having any of that sort of thing.
“So you know of some radicals?” Ruby asked Josh in
their embroidered-rubber lounge room while blowing smoke-rings.
Ben (a fantasy of mutual bottom-waxing in mind due
to his undoubted inheritance of the controversial ‘gay gene’ from his Aunt
Katinka — along with a leaky dacha in Slovenia) answered.
Three: Three Who Made a Revolution?
24
“Yes (cough), they’re all working in the (cough)
Peterite Coalition to fool people.”
“And are these stalwart, trusty fellows?” said Piper
gruffly to Ben, the more manly of the two.
“Women mostly.” replied Josh, revealing himself to
be more manly than Piper had judged despite having been born with a perm. He
turned to him instead.
“Yes, and itching for Revolution, as well as in other
respects.” added Ben, shaking his hands about and scratching while his trousers
threatened to slip off due to the wax.
Anno lay on the carpet and guffawed as her pimples
wept like old gelignite. Her black woolly hair gave her the appearance of a fierce
Scottish warrior, or a drunken gollywog. She was not completely Roman, indeed
she was hardly Roman at all outside of the gloamin’, for her ancestors had
included Rob Roy and Robert the Bruce, who’d also been something of a bruce.
There was also the Pictish side of the family, short people who painted
themselves blue too and possibly hailed from the wrong side of the Nile. Colour-
coordination was something she shunned, however, as it was so effeminate —
look at the Royal Horse Guards.
(Speaking of Rome: we include for the educated (well-
off) reader the following uplifting23 extract from Edward Gorilla’s Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire:
In the second century of the Christian Aera, the empire o f

Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion
of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient
renown and disciplined valor. The gentle but powerful influence of laws and
manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful
inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image
of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence: the Roman senate
appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all t h e
executive powers of government. During a happy period of more than fourscore
years, the public administration was conducted by the virtue and abilities o f
Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines. It is the design of this, and of t h e
two succeeding chapters, to describe the prosperous condition of their empire; and
afterwards, from the death of Marcus Antoninus, to deduce the most important
circumstances of its decline and fall; a revolution which will ever be remembered,
and is still felt by the nations of the earth.
Those of an unglobal temper who felt that digression

was uncalled for would make Pauline Hanson sound like a polymath.)
“And we are also.” Josh elaborated (ignorant of the
above flight of fancy), not wanting to repeat a word and failing. “We’re sick of
global savagery and the bloodlessness of ‘opposition’ to it. We want a New
Age.” He had personally hung crystals just everywhere. “Please help us defeat this
ruinous homophobic regime, Peter.”
“Er, they do have their faults, I admit — ” began Ben,
tweezing white hairs out of his nose and suppressing a rather musical fart, but
was drowned out.
23The author is believed to have also invented the underwire bra.
24
25
To Piper, it was clear that the name ‘Peter’ had taken
on a sacred dimension. The butler, surveying the prospect of an unaccustomed
life without servility, began to wish his parents had never called him ‘Emlyn’ —
which, he realised suddenly, was a fact he must never disclose.
“But how?” said Piper, belatedly wincing at the
cheeky use of his first name. He’d always wanted a Revolution and dreamt of
the elysian conditions and square-dancing that would prevail after it, but never
given much thought to the question of how to bring it about. It could be
dangerous.
“Despite all the hoo-ha and a tax bribe or two, the
Government of National Unity have been going downhill for at least a year.
They could topple any day now, according to Josh.” explained Ben, his nails
having dried. “The People are ready to rise, or so Josh says. (I’m a Liberal myself
but I’m worried about Hanson’s Disease even though she lost her seat and
became a shark importer.) You’ve come at exactly the right time.”
Piper looked blank, Ruby conceited. In the two years
since she’d invented the time machine with the assistance of an itinerant alien
called ET who made a living out of appearing in cryptic crossword puzzles as a
clue, she’d made many trips to 2008, incognito that is. She’d selected them well
(though both had long sworn off fish).
“Don’t you see?” continued Josh, sitting under an
imaginary bo-tree. “They need something to unite them, a catalyst, a — ”
“A social lav — laboratory!” went Piper. Nobody
noticed the iridescent puce flying saucer hovering over the house and it doesn’t
come into the story in any case. Nor do the six hundred bowls of death-adder
soup which were presently being trundled down the street in a vain attempt to
stamp out youth unemployment, itself on 101% outside prison.
“Well, that’s a rather dated notion, but I guess you’ve
got the idea.” said Ben.
Piper got a bit huffy. Dated! It was right up to the
minute as far as he was concerned.
“I’ll make a speech.” Ruby struck a virtuous pose. “I
disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” she
boomed, striking a match on her heel and lighting a cigar. “That’ll do it. I got
pretty sharp-tongued on the streets of London.”
“And I’ll bash a few heads wi’ me pole.” said Anno,
hefting it.
“All we need is a forum.” said Ruby.
Piper put in, “But we aren’t in Rome, are we …?”
“Shut it, you half-baked bannock.” Anno warned him
with arattle of her claymore. “If ye were dyin’ fae lack o’ breath I wouldnae fart
in yer face.” She let go a beauty. Though his masculinity was impugned, he
clammed up mightily.
“A forum. A platform. A manifesto … The hustings …
great band … agit-prop … a secret society … a campaign of terror … or of letter-
writing … a Great Debate … radical comix … Ramparts … barricades … paving
stones … Brecht and Weil (not Simone) … the Bastille … Tim McVeigh … an
Aboriginal Embassy with people tooting and being pulled up by the sows for the
25
26
illegal use of a safety device … an Intifada … the Warsaw Ghetto … a National
Razor-Wire … an ad in the Canberra Times under ‘R’ … hmmm … ”
“Och, I can see that — ‘a Revolution will be held this
coming Sunday. Bring a plate and petrol bomb’.”
“I say, fach, that’s a bit violent. I don’t see myself as
some sort of thug. I’m not Irish you know.”
“Even a coal-faced Welsh arse-bandit can pull a fuckin’
trigger.” She passed the moments of his speechlessness by reading chapter one
of Spike Milligan’s rib-busting Lady Chatterly’s Lover According to Spike Milligan
(1994) in which that antique war-torn author and trumpet-player accidentally
brings back to life Clifford’s father in chapter one (bitch bitch).
Ruby chalked a few pink triangles on the rubber
coffee table in protest at this inappropriate homophobia. “Just let me think … ”
To tell the truth, even she wasn’t quite sure of the next
step. (The author has been publicly compared to James Joyce you know.24) She
brazened the moment out.
“Maybe — I know, we’ll hold a rally.”
Ben said, “Oh, goody. All those lovely racing drivers.”
Josh rebuked him sharply for being such a stereotype.
Ben tugged up his geeky white jeans.
(Yasser Arafat did this too but that was in the Gaza
Strip. At the same instant, white-trousered Islamic aliens landed on planet Yccch
in the middle of the solar system of Omicron Ceti, sadly trousers made of ‘smart’
materials which flew off rendering them embarrassingly debagged in mid-
conquest due to their own particular Y2K bug.25 And some people tell you
there’s no such thing as coincidence.
‘So’, said Coco la Salle the celebrated Gigglebusterían
cross-dresser, ‘all those maughty nen and hairy people can go and boil themselves, coz I
would never wear foobtall boots or nasty, hairy shorts. I never eat rump steak or pay for
my own meal in a restaurant. And I’n mot nean, eitherwise. I often get soo upset about all
of this that I demurely cry myself off to sleeps, coz I am a girl at the same time, forever and
evermore and a day. So night night, I am sleepsy now.’
Will you get this ancient twisted fuck out of here?
Sheesh!)
“A big rally in the town’s main square.” concluded
Ruby, not one to waste her intelligence on mere fribbles.
“Garema Place?” said Ben doubtfully, caressing the
rubber carpet. “I don’t see there’s much point in harangueing heroin addicts.
We’re not into cyberpunk.”
(They’d once cleaned them out but the area had gone
downhill a lot of late. In fact many of the buildings had slid into a great pile of
rubble at one end. The place was now about as attractive as Omagh Town
Square.)
The Great Discussion would drag on into the night.
24See Mark Thomas, ‘Auntie Rhoberta’s story’, Panorama, Canberra Times, 15

August 1998, p23. No, favourably! (On microfilm for all time at the National
Library. Ask for Bill.)
25 This passage is sponsored by Wearable Computers Inc of Normal, Idaho.
26
27
“But they’re amongst the most Oppressed of people
…” Ruby was saying. Piper began to feel strange. Prostitutes, natives, lumpen
mobs, revolutionaries, and now heroin addicts. Where was his life heading?
Of course, he had heard of the drug and the Peace of Carlowitz. It (the former)
was Mr Savage’s finest product and in all his patent medicines. His mind drifted
back (as happens in quality novels where the author has been compared to
James Joyce) to the nineteenth century. As they went on excitedly discussing the
coming global triumph over what Josh and Ben called ‘economic rationalism’, he
slipped into a brown study of nostalgia fit to end the chapter.
27
Chapter Four: TreacheryChapter Four: Treachery
My cat needs a good fuck.
Dr Nato: I’m sorry, but your wife has an unexploded plastic land-mine in
her vagina, preventing the baby from exiting safely. They lay them everywhere you know. We want to go in with
a bombing mission.
Back in that very century, Lord Lytton was beginning

to wonder where his butler had got to. (Piper hadn’t thought of the hackneyed
SF device of whizzing back to a moment just before he left in order to fool his
Master.) He jabbed the manuscript of The Coming Race at Mr Francis J. Savage,
who sniffed violently, then took it with a bristle of his golden whiskers.
“Eeee, lit’ry mook. What are they cooming too, Lady
Astor’s bloody garter?” said Savage anachronistically but with some panache if
not chutzpah. “Well, so long as it brings in profits.”
“I can assure you it will, Sir.”
“I hope yer raht. Sir.”
“I can assure you Ah am, Sir.” Lytton hurriedly
dropped the Northern accent. “Er, Piper! Piper! Where has that dashed fellow
got to?”
“Well, ’e’s probably ’opped it for the colonies, Ah’d
say. With a load of kids, perhaps.” He laughed at this sad wheeze. “Can’t blame
’im, I made a fortune in rum and niggers out ther. You know, this ain’t bad
stoof.”
“Of course it ain’t — isn’t. But do you think the bit
about the time machine, well, works?” With his long pale aristocratic finger, he
pointed the relevant passage out to Savage.
“Oh, aye. Now that’s a thing I’d like to get me hands
on. Think of the grand investments I could mairk … the coontries of the world at
me feet like a brothel full of competing prostitutes.” He shifted his spatted plates
of meat and a stench rose from them, a stench rather like rotting money.
“Er, quite.” The man was such an insufferable boor,
but Lytton was a bit strapped for the ready at the moment. “Impossible, though,
except for Mr Wells.”
“Roobish, lad! Anything is possible — with Science!
Yes, I’ll have someone look into it. Scour the coontry for genii to build one!
Search high and low. Throw millions out of werk where they belong, the lazy
beggars. Oh, and do your book and all, of course.”
Lytton again wiped his brow.
Back in 2008, if that is the way to put it, Piper, having

just risen, looked on aghast as Anno, seated before a rubber-framed mirror in
Josh and Ben’s well-appointed lounge-room, shaved her cheeks with the
claymore.
“B-but — you’re a lady. ” he expostulated. “Why do
you shave your face?”
“I’m no trying to shave, you obseqious Saxon kilt-
lifter. I’m gettin’ rid of muh zits.” She, a woman of considerable facial hair who’d
had regular bouts of smallpox till the disease had decided to emigrate to
Hyderabad in defeat, had fallen easily into the current lingo and even seen
Four: Treachery
29
Trainspotting. “Bit of Science never did any harm. Have ye no haird of
neoclassical economics?”
Piper, wedded to the theories of the physiocrats, said
he had had never seen much sense in it, let alone all that Marxist stuff (the poet
personified the Jewish Question — why us? — after all).
“Er — I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”
“How aboot blackfellas? I’ve just formed a liaison
with a local tribe. This great Scottish mob called nin Ngunnawal.”
The notion turned his brain into frumenty. He
wouldn’t have been surprised if Lewis Carroll had popped through the looking
glass with one of his little girlfriends and Woody Allen in tow. How doth the little
busy bee …
A whooping police car in the street distracted them
both. It stopped outside the Browne-Noses’ elegant carven rubber door. A wild
banging ensued and what was left of the chandeliers rattled.
“Open up! Police! We know there are affluent poofter
clones in there.”
Though an ardent revolutionary, Piper, in his footling
desire to obey the Law (unlike a Lesser Breed), opened it.
A badly-dressed police officer, plainly an Asiatic, stood
there grinning apishly, proffering an open suitcase and pointing a gun in his face.
The man spoke:
“Er, good morning Madam. Er, would you like to try
a free sample? We’ve got heroin, crack (can’t get fuckin’ base cocaine I’m afraid),
ecstasy, formaldehyde as used by the Indonesian Security Forces and Electoral
Office … um, see your doctor if pain — ”
“No pain, no gain, you iatrogenic bastard. And we’ve
all seen Blue Murder by now.” snapped Anno, sneaking up behind Piper and,
with a swipe at the ‘Asiatic mode of production’, slamming the door in the man’s
face as he stammered “h-have a nice day” (luckily his tie wasn’t caught in the
door). Piper resolved to get a haircut.
Both stood stock-still, though their stocks were
currently plummeting. Then they heard the police car moving in its coloratura
fashion at 120 kph in a school zone to the lavish house next-door. They heard the
cop’s voice again,
“Er, good morning Madam … aaagh! H-have a nice
day … ”
It happened all down the street, whose numbers ran
up to 752.
“Damned funding cuts.” came Josh’s well-modulated
voice as he too sidled up behind Piper (the latter clapped his hands over his
bottom). “Oh, sorry.” The young man popped a coin into the swearing-box on
the telephone table. On the side it read,
Not for little cuss words

Such as ‘dash’ and ‘blow’
But for bigger wuss ones
That send you down below
29
Four: Treachery
30
“Heh heh.” said Josh. “Ben hates it when I give in to
profanity (especially since you can get two years in the jug for it these days). It
really fucks me off sometimes.” The resultant clunk of coins made Piper think of
Mr Francis J. Savage whom he trusted he would now never meet. He polished
his pince-nez on his cravat and seethed with hatred.
“I suppose he hates paying his half of the phone bill.”
sneered Anno cynically, beheading the rest of her zits while humming Le
Marseilleise. Madame Defarge knitted a few more shrouds.
“He was glorious in Bali last year.” Josh continued
primly. “Only rang his analyst in Pasadena twelve times.”
“That doesnae surprise me.”
“I guess it fucking wouldn’t. Oh, shit.”
Clunk, clunk.
“Och, what a little horseshit-artist he must be. Can he
no use fuckin’ e-mail? And no, you don’t think I’m going to be putting money in
that thing.” Anno waved her claymore and a sporran for emphasis.
“No, it’s just his love of Victorian Values.” A portrait
of Margaret Thatcher glowed like a tax-revolting icon on the wall.
Anno ran it through.
“Damn! Oh, sorry.” He deposited another coin. “That
was Ben’s favourite print. Still, you have made it look very ’90s. Might get onto
Ian at ANG …”
“Fuck Ian. Where are all the chicks?” went Anno.
“Too many fuckin’ Jocks in this production. Even Pauline Hanson’d look good
by comparison.” Piper wondered What Lesbians Did.
Josh, meanwhile, quailed at such un-pc language,
writing a cheque for $50 000 and slipping it unthatcheritely into the swearing-box
on her behalf.
There was a crash, one fit for 1929. It came from the
direction of the spare bedroom. It was not water hammer, nor a boilermakers’
convention, nor a wayzgoose or printers’ frolic.
“ ’ere, what do you mean by wakin’ me up at this
hour? Can’t the Revolution wait till I’ve ’ad me brekky?” It was Ruby, dressed in
a floral housecoat and fluffy slippers. Ben stumbled across the rubber behind her.
Josh turned and stared in dismay.
“It’s all right, ’e just wanted to know what it was like
to sleep chained to the bed-head in stilettoes.”
“You said you had to visit your sick aunt in
Wellington!” shrieked Josh, who by the way had never been over Niagara Falls
in a barrel. He belaboured Ben with curses and filed for bankruptcy.
The rogernomical New Zealander drove out the flock
of sheep that had crowded round him expectantly at that point.
“Don’t tell them all that I’m a Kiwi! They’ll cut me orf
the dole. How can I afford a mobile phone then?”
“Ask Winston Peters!” yelled Josh, sick of peters, for
the nonce. “He’s a traitor too.”
Piper shook his head, which was thick with the
preservatives and strychnine and radioactivity found in cheap red plonk. “Did
we decide on our next step, then?”
30
Four: Treachery
31
Ruby screwed up her dark, primitive face which Piper,
due to his compulsive reading, now knew she’d inherited from ancestors at least
40 000 years ago. (He was sure his own was far more modern.)
“Not exactly, but we can use the Time Machine.”
“What, not that old trick of goin’ into the future to see
what happened and then relyin’ on the 20-20 vision of hindsight if not Dr
Mahathir, och aye?”
“No, you can’t do that in socialist realism. The Machine
is limited in its ability to traverse the future, see.”
“Och, how bloody convenient. You ain’t a bloody
Formalist are ye?”
“No, I fucked the bell. All that ringin’”
Piper, with a dim memory of the night in her flat,
suddenly realised something of terrible significance.
“You — you said we couldn’t go back to the past
either. Does that mean …”
Ruby looked a bit sheepish. Ben gave her a come-
hither look but she ignored it. He was gay!
“Obviously I was ’avin’ you on since I’d been back and
forth more than you’ve ’ad ’ot dinners I can tell you. But now that I’ve gorn and
broke the bell … ”
They were stuck in this dreadful rubberised future. He
watched with nostalgia a much-recycled repeat of the Duchess of Duke Street on
WIN.
“Weel, can we no fix it?” said Anno, a woman of
action and thus speaking very much louder than all the others.
“We can try, but I doubt if the bicycle shops could deal
with such Advanced Technology even in 2008. But,” she brightened, “if we can
start a Revolution we can free the forces of Social Labour from the irrational
logic of Capital and then maybe the People can … ”
“ … fix our bike.” finished Piper.
“On yer bike.” said Anno and he ducked.
Ruby stroked the lamplighter’s enormous left bicep.
“He’s more or less right.”
Anno stroked her lamplighter’s pole. “I’m no’ so sure
I hold wi’ all this Advanced Technology. It’s nearly put me oot of a job.”
“Luddite! That’s under the still-existing order of
alienated labour …”
“The Luddites weren’t just machine-breakers! Some
would have been happy with steam-looms if they had o’ owned the fuckers.
Same with automeetion todee. Look at the solar-powered rowing-boat. ”
They began an argument which went over Piper’s
head and also visited the rubber step-pyramids of Tenochtitlan.
Josh cut in.
“We’re more into Tony Blair’s modern notions round
here. Re-skilling, flexibility of labour, outsourcing, equality of opportunity, an
avoidance of utopian Big Picture-type Grand Visions such as taxing the well-
heeled … ”
31
Four: Treachery
32
“And ex-President Clinton.” went Ben with a little
shudder of pleasure. “A Third Way between the other two or three Third Ways,
according to Thomas Aquinas26 and his Eurocommunist Party. So modern … if a
26 Ie, [FIX!]
The Argument
1.There are at present contingent beings.

2.Whatever can fail to exist, at some time does not exist.
Therefore,
3.If all beings are contingent, then at one time nothing existed.(2)
4.Whatever begins to exist is caused to begin to exist by something already
existing.
Therefore,
5.If at any time t nothing existed, then nothing would have existed at any later
time. (4)
Therefore,
6.If at one time nothing existed, nothing exists now. (5)
Therefore,
7.If all beings are contingent nothing exists now. (3)(6)
Therefore,
8.Not all beings are contingent; there is at least one necessary being. (1)(7)
9.Every necessary being either has its necessity caused by another or has its
necessity in itself.
10.There cannot be an infinite series of necessary beings each having its
necessity caused by another.
Therefore,
11.There is a necessary being having of itself its own necessity, and this all men
speak of as God.
(8)(9)(10)
Some Definitions:
x is a contingent being =df it is possible that x exists and it is possible that x

does not exist
x is a necessary being =df it is not possible that x does not exist
Criticisms:
I. What is it to be a necessary being having of itself its own necessity, and why
think that such a being is
God?
II. Why think that (2) is true?
III. Does (3) follow from (2)?

(2') For every contingent being B there is a time t such that B does not exist at
t.
32
Four: Treachery
33
little hyperactive in certain quarters.” (The current President was Ruby Wax and
wore teeny-weeny skirts all the time to distract susceptible Blairheaded
bourgeois journalists from reality.)
None of their blathering sounded modern to Piper.
They sounded worse than (shudder) Fabians, who in his view made ‘revolution’
by watering down their policies till those matched existing reality, apparently
these days composed of rubber.
Back in the nineteenth century, Mr Francis J. Savage,

having made a fortune from Lord Lytton’s book and the rubber trade, turned
his lustful mind and capital to the problem of building a Time Machine. The same
alien who had helped Ruby answered one of his many ads. A Pact was drawn up
with the aid of several high-flying foreign lawyers and saucers.
Soon he too (now a component of the intergalactic
labour-saving device known vaguely on earth as SATAN) was rocketing
forward, expensive coat-tails flying and huge watch-and-chain stomach
wobbling, into the poverty-in-the-midst-of-plenty years of the early third
millennium.
(3') There is a time t such that for every contingent being B, B fails to exist at
t.
(2*) For every person B there is a person A such that A is the mother of B.
(3*) There is a person A such that for every person B, A is the mother of B.
33
Chapter Five: Ruby Sees the LightChapter Five:
Ruby Laser Sees the Light
His employment, after first coming into the academy, was an

operation to reduce human excrement to its original food …
— Jonathon Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
He, a product of two hundred years of the

embourgeoisification of Advanced Technology, felt right at home. (The sub-plot
beginning here could be hazardous to your health if you’re a believer in pan-
tellurian finance piracy, so see your optometrist and bank manager before you
read it.) Unarrested beggars lying about everywhere, horseshit in the media if
not on the streets, wondrous advances by Industry, burgeoning National Wealth
concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, one man at the window and another
hundred at the gate … champion! Now he knew why, as a Whig, he loved rapid
neo-liberal change — it just brought the same, but more of it! Look at Eastern
Europe and Brazil. And especially Russia! 100 million out of work and living in
squalor — that had to be some sort of record and still they were pushing for
Reform.
Aye, Freedom was grand.
(In a distant galaxy, at the centre of the universe’s
largest and most salubrious black hole — position, position, position — a fallen
fellow with glowing horns and dollar-signs in his eyes tapped out a new
program and this was transferred via Supply and Demand to Savage’s unipolar
brain.)
From a corner stall the industrialist-cum-financier
bought himself a child or two and ate them with Swiftian pleasure and no irony
at all. Then he purchased a horseless carriage and kangaroo’d about knocking
over bag ladies and poets and other un-self-reliant riff-raff. Finally, he was taken
for a beggar himself and exiled to Australia in chains. Nevertheless, he’d never
been afraid of hard work (particularly if other people did it) and soon set himself
up in mobile phones.
One day, Ben walked into his modest store — one of a
chain of thousands — in the Canberra industrial and red-light area of Wishfyck,
and bought one.
“Mine’s been swiped.” he explained.
“Oh, aye. There’s a lot of light-fingered types around
here.” He picked nervously at his fingerless gloves, absolutely certain that such
pilfering had nothing to do with the starvation wages so popular these days.
“You’ll probably find it in Mr O’Sheaberg’s next-door — pawnbroker chappie,
don’t you know, has three balls — ahem — but mine are cheaper! That’s
competition for you, lad.” He was gratified to serve such a clean-cut, normal and
well-hung young man.
“You’re — very Victorian.” said Ben complementarily.
He told the whiskered gag about the man who had three balls, went up to a little
guy at a party and said in a deep growl, ‘hey mate, between the two of us we
have five balls’, to which the little guy responded in a high voice, ‘geez, mate,
you must have a cluster’ (and not an advertising one). It offended Savage’s
Five: Ruby Sees the Light
35
Victorian sense of decorum but though he lacked a sense of humour the
customer was always right and he forced out a laugh.
“Thankee, lad. I believe in two things — God, and
hard work.” His temples glowed a little. He rolled up his sleeves and spat on his
gloved hands, then sank heavily into his well-padded chair. The tv on the wall
showed Days of our Lives. Eee, they put his own century to shame, but profits is
profits. He smiled, said “have a nice day”, and downsized his 16 year old casual
who went home to her rack-rented cold-water flat and killed herself.
(In the distant galaxy, the Artificial Intelligentsian
smiled.)
Ben showed everyone his new mobile and was

roundly condemned as a ‘gross materialist yuppie’ by all but Josh.
“But it’s great.” he said, pressing buttons and making
beeps and flashes galore. “And the fellow who sold it me was so Victorian. Big
tum, watch and chain, top hat … and a brilliant salesperson.”
Ruby’s brow furrowed.
“Could you describe him in a bit more detail, duckie?”
Ben, offended at the term, reluctantly did so.
“We must start the Revolution at once!” Ruby
interposed, woomera raised threateningly. “The person you’re describing is
none other than — ”
“Hiawatha, Last of the Mohicans? Ale Feather, Last of
the Picts? Truganini, Last of the T — ” said Piper doubtfully and Anno’s pole
came crashing down on his skull.
“Tosser! It’s that misogynistic globetrottin’ parasite
Francis J. — or maybe I should say Frances J. — Savage.”
“In 2008?” said Piper, rubbing the lump on his head (it
had more intelligence than his brain) and tempted to add an exclamation mark.
“The alien — he must have found Savage.”
She’d never mentioned the alien to anyone, so they all
clamoured for an explanation.
“Well, all right, the Time Machine’s not all my own
work — be fair, I’m only seven hundred times as clever as Pauline. This alien was
put in the book by the narrator as a sort of deus ex machina. It’s actually an
intergalactic computer virus that replicates itself as Time Machines.”
“Fuck.” said Anno helpfully.
“Don’t worry, it’s so diffuse in the universe that there
are only likely to be two infections in a century for an out-of-the-way planet like
this one. Otherwise the narrator would lose all plausibility and readers would
stop suspending their disbelief tout-suit.”
“And tout-court.” added Piper, showing that he as a
virile fellow could bandy Frenchisms with any mere woman, especially a native.
The pole came down on his head again, sharpening his intelligence by a further
400%.
“But Mr S — Francis J. — he’ll buy up the World. He’ll
own more than Rupert! We’ve got to stop him.” he cried, rubbing his head
furiously till a genie flew out of his ear and stood bowing low.
“I am here to serve you, O Master.”
35
36
He had to stop watching re-runs of I Dream of Jeannie.
The hallucination, itself due to his consumption of
patent medicines, made a show of granting three wishes (a degree in
phrenology , women’s studies and the history of Latin American Marxist
revolutions foremost among them and damn useful for getting a job these days)
and vanished in some embarrassment.
“He’s a savage fellow.” Piper agreed in some
confusion.
“A Global Savage.” said Josh titularly and tittered
behind his hand. “There’s a lot of it about. If only they’d understand that with a
bit of labour market flexibility and re-training a stakeholder society could be — “
Now the pole landed on his head.
“Don’t talk so wet.” Anno jeered.
“Ow! Well, I’m not a dry.”
“He’s already made heaps from Bulwer-Lytton’s racist
book. He’s bought up the copyright and made it retrospective with a few bribes
in the right places. And he’s taken over One Nation Publishers.” said Ruby,
having finally lost her awful Cockney accent and adopted a Javanese one.
“How the heel d’ye know a’ that?” She hadn’t lost her
accent and didn’t intend to.
“I’m second-guessing with the aid of the Web. It’s the
sort of thing he’d do.”
“So, let’s unleash the Revolution.” roared Piper,
scenting a whiff of battle and the unemployed Lebanese family of 24 nextdoor
who were having lunch with all manner of foreign spices.
“Hey, Mahmoud, habibi, chuck us a slice of pita
bread.” yelled Anno out the kitchen window. Josh and Ben didn’t know where to
look. In flapped the bread, smeared in what to Piper was a revolting smelly
foreign sauce, and Anno devoured it.
“I love this Chinese food — the honeyed locusts are
awesome.” she chewed, sauce dribbling down her prominent chi’n.
“We all saw you down at Han Sen’s Takeaway in Peak
Hill last week.” said Ruby, raising her eyebrows as those rural towns Anno
didn’t visit shrivelled around the country.
Further servings flew in, including a bowl of falafel
and a threatening letter from Hezbollah.
“Well, you do overdo the freeloading.” said Ruby, as
Anno washed it all down with a Dewar’s.
“The Revolution … ” prompted Piper weakly,
possessed by a vision of central bankers dangling from lamp-posts in every
suburb.
“Oh, right. The trick, see,” Ruby said as they formed a
conspiratorial huddle, “is to get the People on side. Now what they want the
most?”
“Er, jobs?” said Piper without the stigma of an arts
degree, a little unnerved by the close proximity of female bosoms (there were
few male ones in sight).
“Yes, but more than that.”
“Consumer goods!” said Ben, and ducked.
36
37
“Love.” said Anno, and laughed till she almost
brought up her lunch.
“Respect, home and children.” said Piper and donned
a construction hat. (“It suits you reet feen.” said Anno, clocking him under the
chin.)
“No, no, no — what people need is a FUTURE!”
“Oh.” said Piper. “Is this where our Time Machine
comes in again? You know (if the reader doesn’t) that we haven’t been able to
get it fixed.”
“Put an argyle in it, wee mannie, wi’ all that
information-in-dialogue.” said Anno. “Let her finish.”
“A future that they have moulded themselves, not an
alien world they have to ‘adapt’ to.”
“But I was so looking forward to it.” wept Josh, who
cried easily and often wore cashmere jumpers. Even Mussolini cried when his pet
canary expired, he said in his defence. (Mine was eaten by the cat and I had to
bite my lip to keep from kacking myself with laughter.)
Ruby brushed this fatuous postmodernism aside. “A
future that isn’t gambled away on the Global Cock — sorry, Stock, Market, that
isn’t compromised by having predatory Capitalism — whether on the American
or Chinese model — squatting in its path. A future in which all people are equal!”
Josh and Ben, mirror-images of each other (save that
one voted Liberal and the other Labor), fainted in each other’s arms.
“Why don’t we just slit Savage’s gizzard?” said Anno,
unsheathing her claymore. It glowed blue.
“Must be Orcs about.” she said, and shrugged. One
tapped on the window with an armload of share certificates from the New York
Stock Exchange and she nipped outside and slew it, but that didn’t really advance
the plot. (But it happened, for Chrissakes! Pass that stack of Bibles …)
“And have him replaced by someone even worse?
Like Donald Trump? No, we must go to the grass roots of society, enjoining the
People in their homes and places of work to Rise … ”
“Don’t forget your Aboriginality.” said Anno,
staggering back in with the share certificates and wiping her sword on the
expensive carpet and thereby creating a tax-free cash profit for a local steam-
cleaning outfit.
“I haven’t. That’s where we’ll start. In Brewarrina, or
rather, just outside it.”
“But tha’ means the author — whoops, sorry, the
narrator — will ha’ to appropriate Aboriginal culture.”
“Or alternatively not write about Aboriginal people at
all, which’d be racist.” pointed out Josh as he revived.
“Same goes for Scotswomen.” added Anno
incomprehensibly. “And my old m-man is a speech therapist.”
“Pardon? Er — we know the narrator’s queer but we
all seem to be quite normal.” pointed out Piper, a bit slow on the uptake and in
every other direction.
“Speak fer yersel‘.”
Josh and Ben gave each other nervous looks.
37
38
Ausländer, raus! came from the street. A mob came
goose-stepping by, bearing banners with symbols Piper thought were Hindoo
and chucking rocks and firebombs at the house nextdoor.
“I think that this discussion’s getting a bit academic.
We’ll be on about words next.” said Ruby. “Don’t you see it’s time to act —
before it’s too late?”
Machine-gun fire erupted from the house’s kitchen
window. The crowd dispersed and re-formed out of range.
“Mahmoud’s not scared of a few rocks.” said Ben,
though it was actually his wife Fatima doing the shooting (she was rather plump
and hated Anno referring to her as ‘Fatty’).
The police were nowhere to be seen.
Ruby noticed a counter-protest coming from the other
direction, and decided it was, as the narrator says, ‘now or never’.
38
Chapter Six: The Revolution BeginsChapter Six: The
Revolution and Cryptic Crossword Begin
“Men and women — er, perhaps not, hard to tell these

days — People of Australia!”
A great cheer went up. Ruby stood on the rooftop,
waving the Aboriginal and Eureka flags. Petrol bombs flew overhead, but the
shooting died down.
She adjusted Ben’s miniature but very powerful PA
system, made cunningly by a firm of Communist tycoons and Captains of
Industry in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Slave Zone and tax-
shelter. Feedback squealed and drowned out the sirens that were now coming
closer.
‘“Shoot if you must, this old gray …”’ — er no, maybe
not. Um — I speak to those who are against all racism and rightist bigotry — ” — there
were catcalls and much booing and hissing — “ — to those of you who want to build
a better future for your children — to all of you who want a genuine people’s Revolution
…”
“Isn’t she grand?” said Anno, claymore drawn and
pole at the ready.
Piper, who was scared of heights, could only reel
(though not Irish) and nod feebly in reply. A rock and a strong wind whistled
past his ear.
“To all people who yearn to throw off the chains of ‘economic
rationalism’, to build a heaven in hell’s despair, to liberate your souls from the pitiful
squattocracy of the global finance bearpit, people who through their nihilism and global
banditry have — as we’d say were we to abandon all compassion ourselves —
disqualified themselves, time without number, from membership of the human race!”
“But she gets a bit mixed up at times, mind.”
whispered Anno, belting a satirist in a woolly wig who had climbed up with
them.
“To all of you who have borne the sufferings of belonging to
a stolen and stolen-from generation, to all who have been vilified, belittled, humiliated and
immiserated by savage and dehumanising imperialism, to all — ”
“I do wish she’d get t’ the fuckin’ point.”
“To all of you I say — ”
There was a gasp from one section of the crowd, while
the other half continued to lob missiles, mostly balloons full of AIDS-infected
blood.
“Don’t lose it noo, girl.”
“To — that we owe our solidarity to you alone!”
A tremendous roar of approbation went up,
drowning out the boos. Ruby shot her fist into the air and then tossed a
boomerang at her detractors, which came back and clouted Piper in the neck.
Suddenly the police were on the scene and started
wading into the melée: by the end of it, four leftist demonstrators were dead at
the age of 14. But the Revolution, Ruby was certain, had begun.
Six: The Revolution
40
About that time, Mr Francis J. Savage (an ex-client of
Ruby’s) got to hear of it. The program transmitted into his brain rid him of any
residual conscience.
He flew into a rage. So, he wasn’t the only man of the
nineteenth century in this new and wondrous world of rapid and pointless
Change? But, like Piper, he’d show the bastards. He had a new product to offer,
after all — a Time Machine that didn’t work (he’d buggered the bell too, and a
few choirboys in his time), but a Time Machine nonetheless!
40
Chapter Seven: The Time Machine (ok, ok, I’m not
much with titles)Chapter Seven: The Time Machine (ok, ok, I’m not much with
titles)
The One Nation fish ‘n‘ chip shop was agog with talk
of the demonstration, reported on commercial Australian television complete
with irrelevant file footage of the ‘terrorist’ Lorenzo Ervin from 1968 and a
perhaps unwise re-enactment of the secret Nixon bombing of Cambodia:
And then this weird gin gets up on the roof like a chimp and
makes this fucken speech …
Fucken mad wog-Arabs started shootin’ …
Reckon they’re some new fucken Commo party …
It was some fucken poofters who let ’em move in. The Scotch
one who looks like a coon is a dyke.
Eh? Look, Jim, fucken cops got stuck into my boy. Thought
he was a fucken Commo poofter.
Told you no good’d come of unisex hairdressers.
Fucken BHP’s layin’ off another 1000 men.
Fucken Yid poofters … um, I ain’t got nothin’ t’do with the
League, fellas. Just Rugby League!
Well, we fucken have.
All this enlightened repartee was matched at the

Morocco-upholstered Monarchist’s Club:
We have to loosen the screws a little. Take a lesson from

George Soros. Things are getting out of hand.
Rubbish. And don’t mention that man’s name to me. He’s
— Asian, I believe, and a dedicated Communist. No, it’s an absolute disgrace. I’m all for
downsizing their parents. They’re probably all dole-bludging drug-addicts adding
nothing to international wealth. Pass the Scotch, would you?
You don’t know that, old chap.
Don’t I? Harrumph! The Throne must be preserved!
Otherwise the Queen’ll have to stand up all the time like a god-damned check-out chick.
But there’s a new Communist Party, John. It’s growing in
popularity — have you read their breathtaking republication of Leonid Brezhnev’s thesis
originally delivered at the Graduated Dneprodzerzhinsk metallurgical institute, viz ‘The
Design of Electrostatic Cleaning of Furnace Gas in the F.E. Dzerzhinsk Factory’ (1935)?
They could win 10% of the vote at the next election. Or more. Some polls say 50%.
So what? Gadzooks, Charles, what does ‘democracy’ mean
in this age of inevitable globalisation? I mean, I spent yesterday morning transferring
30% of GDP to a secret vault in the Atacama Desert while investing the remaining 70%
in the Peruvian human blood market. There’s no place for envious Communist
internationalism any more — we need genuine Patriotism! Long live the Nation-State!
Egad, this is damn good snuff …
That’s all very well John, old boy — but let’s see what our
new woman member has to say. The floor’s all yours, Elizabeth …
Seven: The Time Machine (ok, ok, I’m not much with titles) 42
And in middle class homes everywhere:
This new party sounds fab, Tom. Just what we need to beat
the One Nation crowd.
But they’re Communists, Emma. Their leader’s a radical
indigenous Australian terrorist. We should listen to Tony Blair and proceed with
caution. He’s got such a nice smile.
But people are suffering, Tom — they’re turning to the new
party in droves.
She poured them both a Royal Doulton cup of Vittoria
coffee — they had to drink from the same cup these days, times were tough.
But we’ve been tightening our belts and lowering our
expectations for decades now. I’ve even taken a package and you’ve sold your Porsche!
Things have to get better if we stick to fiscal and monetary discipline.
Why should they?
Well … I don’t know … look what it’s done for Chile and
Peru! Whereas Cuba and that decalogic dictator with his ruinous public health system
taking away the self-reliance of the sick, creating a culture of dependency inappropriate to
a Third World country (though the beaches and nightclubs were nice, weren’t they?) …
um … anyway, what’s it actually called, this new party?
They both manipulated straws like the streetwise
starvelings they’d become.
Uh, it says they haven’t thought of a name for it yet.
Indecision was Ruby’s weakness (the others had little

imagination at all and as for the narrator, well, where’s the academic response to
the demo in the above? and what about the postmodern semiotic analysis of
football codes or of the manic trade in saint’s relics that characterised the heady
days of Byzantium (see snap below)?). Just as it had taken her a while to work
out how to make a revolution, the question of a name for their new party was
presently eluding her.
Emporer Constantine I, c. 325 CE (drunk at time of sitting) —

held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. See the author’s classic flop Her Brilliant
Career for earlier erudite allusions to the great man. The iconic image of St George (the saint
and not the bank) has been held over.
“‘Communist Party’ has overtones of the Stalin era,

even though that was a hiccup in historical terms. We want something more like
the Communism we knew.” she said, having read almost as much as Piper but
with more discernment (he was presently perusing Scott’s Ivanhoe under the
impression it was The Collected Works of Kingsley Amis).
42
“Scottish Nationalist.” said Anno, downing her first

dram of the day.
“We’re not all Scottish.” s n i f f e d the
Welsh/African/Cornishman.
“Anti-Savagery League.” Josh suggested. The pole
remained motionless in Anno’s hand. Encouraged, he added, “or Anti-Fascist
Alliance” and received a biff behind the ear.
“We want something bloody positive, not ‘anti’
anything, ye’ve got to be for something.”
The immobile cloud on the horizon was turning rosy.
Dawn came early with dirty fingernails. They’d been up all night.
“Democratic Socialists.”
“Mealy-mouthed and unoriginal.”
“Revolutionary -”
“Sounds like a new brand of plastic wrap.”
“Party of God.”
“Fuck you, I’m an atheist.”
“The Light on the Hill.”
“Fucken electric.”
“Aberrant Genotype.”
“What’s that when it’s at home?”
“Committee of 17.”
“We’ve only got five on the Committee. And did you
fill in the grant application form?” said Anno.
“Shit, we haven’t incorporated yet.” Piper exclaimed,
dropping the book which was confusing him anyway.
“We’ve got 50 000 members and rising! More than the
ACT Writers Centre! That was your job!”
“Sorry. But,” he added cheekily, “you shouldn’t have
spilled all that yeast in the meeting-room. Some of ‘em have reached the
stratosphere. B’boom!”
He was soon rubbing his head again but the genie was
currently eking out a miserable existence of poetry-writing in a freezing
windswept caravan while on the dole and secretly working part-time in a paper-
clip factory where she did all the bendy bits being a woman and an illegal
immigrant.
“Anti-Savagery League.” said Ruby all of a sudden.
Anno hugged her, saying “Isn’t she just bloody marvellous?” At that point the
narrator entered the room revealing herself to be Maj. Gen. Zelda Yumasushi of
the Honshu division of the Salvation Army, but that wasn’t getting her a fucking
role in the book. Scoot!
Josh thumped the table. He was even growing his hair
out a bit, and the beard was just sprouting; over the next few weeks he’d come
to resemble Karl Marx in every feature (Anno already did). Unfortunately, Ben
was doing the same.
“That was my idea!”
“Keep yer hair on, boy, I’ve got an even better
suggestion.”
43
They all looked to Anno for inspiration as the narrator

left in a huff, a strange mode of transportation for such modern and efficient
times.
“Well?”
Marx & Engels had been good writers but the worst
kind of ‘protest’ duo — Piper particularly disliked their cover version of Fiddler
on the Roof. So he was more dismayed than usual when Anno dubbed their party
‘The Marx & Engels Revolutionary Institute and Drum Clinic’.
“Excellent! We can give drum lessons on the side to
defray the costs of the uprising.” said Ruby. The narrator peeped in again,
having tiptoed back. (After all, how else would this tomfoolery get written?)
Piper thought of Timbuctoo and wished he was there.
“Can you do paradiddles?” asked Ruby.
“I can do flams.” said Anno and did some on Piper’s
crown. (The narrator sneaked about stealthily, observing all this and asking for
donations.)
“I’m fab at the samba.” Josh, after having parted with
a few coins so that the government could replace welfare with non-GST-free
charity and thus lower his taxes, demonstrated with a knife and fork on the
kitchen table and the milk jug.
Ben said he could swing a special deal on little rubber
practice pads.
“And the back-beat.” Josh added, and soon the wall
behind him was blu-tacked thick with posters of strong-thighed Fijians bashing
away at hollow logs. Piper preferred snake-charming.
The narrator began hamming it up (though a Muslim)
but it was no use.
Anno began to beat out an Edinburgh Tattoo on
Piper’s bonce. His intelligence soared temporarily.
Ruby got out a couple of more boomerangs and the
five of them (Piper with great reluctance) formed a conga line.
“One-ee-and-ah, two-ee-and-ah … ” chanted Ruby.
Anno did a double roll on the light fittings and began tapping every surface to
see what note it made.
“Great chops, man.” Piper found himself crying out,
to his great astonishment. Anno responded with a powerful drum solo on the
stove.
The ghosts or poltergeists of drummers past swirled
around them — Ginger Baker, Ringo Starr, Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Art Blakey,
and the famous Many More. Piper felt the voodoo rhythms drive away his
nineteenth century inhibitions. He kissed Ruby on the mouth.
“Give over, duckie — I’m not in the mood for
Consequences.”
He sank back into celibacy.
The Institute was a great succcess, wanna-be rock stars

queueing up for kilometres along the shitless pavement and choking on smog.
Piper was deputised to give the actual lessons (Ben and Josh had taken an
advance and gone on a trip up the Nile), which was difficult as despite his African
44
heritage he had no sense of rhythm. He’d sit there with prospective percussion
virtuosos, showing them how to hold the sticks and work the hi-hat and toe the
bass-drum pedal at the same time.
“Now, just go tss-t t’tss-t and see-saw your left foot on
the pedal. Hold the sticks like this … No, no, no! That’s the snare drum, and that’s
the tom-tom!” he’d yell in exasperation. “And you may not use a drum machine!
5
Now try it in … ”
4
2008 was a bad year for the music business and social
Darwinism but a great one for the Left. Their investment in the bongo industry
of San Luis Potosi, Mexico, to the delight of the Institutional Revolutionary Party,
enabled them to equip an army of dedicated insurrectionaries and set up a web
page. They propagandised mightily, drawing supporters and the curious on
every street corner.
In a few months, dreadlocked crowds were banging
pots and pans outside Parliament House and the tree-blown city was in uproar.
ASIO agents mingling inconspicuously in trench-coats and fedoras among the
People feared the worst and decided without much literary imagination to nip
things in the bud.
Piper, by now very rich, clipped off the end of his
imported Havana cigar (imported by Lear jet as a one-off) and sipped at his
white rum by the kidney-shaped swimming pool. The others lolled about doing
much the same, the suntanned Josh and Ben (there was plenty of sun in Australia
but theirs came out of a little brown pot) having been happy to relocate to the
North Shore and buy a platinum Rolls-Royce.
He stared idly across the blue majesty of Sydney
Harbour. Why did they need to have a Revolution? This society was fair and
democratic and everyone, even the ghastly nouveau-riche, had but one vote. He
could stand for parliament and pursue a cautious Fabian course of economic
rationalism with re-training. Hmm … restraint with actors’ equity. (The President
of Actors’ Equity got up in his mind and gave a stirring ovation and laid a egg:
Rhubarb! Rhubarb! Rhubarb! Rhubarb … Piper turned off the Goon Show which
had been repeated on Radio National since 1856. At least it beat that radiophonic
emetic, commercial talk-back.) His shares in Sandline, Military Professional
Resources Inc and other capitalist terrorist multinational mafias were doing
fabulously. Yes, he would become a modern leader and create a post-colonial
stakeholder society based on workfare and endless training for nonexistent jobs,
a Third Way …
It was a shame indeed when he was kidnapped at
Double Bay shopping centre by ASIO while very conspicuously examining a 500
kg jar of ‘Uncle Chicka’s’ sun-dried truffles. Suddenly, he became a martyr.
45
Chapter Eight: Mr Savage’s RevengeChapter Eight:
Mr Savage’s Revenge
Piper, hooded, gagged and bound, heard a superior

voice close to his ear.
“So you thought you could get away with it, lad. You
disgoosting proletarian Taff.” The program made the plutocrat repeat the last
line several times, but he gave himself a slap on the head and his neurons
sputtered out of the loop.
“Mmm — mmm — mmm.” was all Piper could reply.
Naked, his whole body shook with terror and cold.
“We’ve had a good look into your background, Piper.
You’re nothing but a filthy socialist cross-dressing Celt and black as the ace of
spades. And your real name’s Emlyn.”
“Mmm — mmm — mmm.” He could barely breathe
through his nose. His heart did a drum roll.
“I’m stuck in this time too — so I intend to make a
global killing.”
“Mmm — mmm — mmm!”
“Ah, but not you, lad. You’re going to tell me all you
know about the Marx & Engels ‘Revolutionary’ Institute.”
“Mmm — mmm — mmm.”
“What was that? Oh, and Drum Clinic. How cre-air-
tive. I always thought you were a nig-nog.”
Two rough and leather-gloved hands removed the
gag and hood. Piper, blinded and dizzy, gasped for breath.
Mr Francis J. Savage leered down at him, flanked by
two burly guards with Chinese Uzi sub-machineguns made in Hong Kong
without a skerrick of State Intervention and certainly without a licence.
“Yes, I like the modern world, just like the good old
1840s, but — thooroughly global! The stairt — pootty in the ’ands of Ind-doost-ry!
The greedy, rampant Unions crooshed! And your pathetic ‘revolution’ bought off
as it should be.”
“You swine.” Piper strove to retort, but his voice
wouldn’t come. He thought of his old Mam and Dada and longed for the scents
of coal-dust and welshcakes.
“Don’t fight ow global revolution, lad, it’s inevitable,
unlike yours. We have annual turnover larger than the GNP of this coontry! We
can transfer capital invisibly wherever we like, on the principle of packet-
switching. No gooverment can regulate ooz. We can pick off any nairtion that
boocks ow system! Fr’instance, we can withdraw from any state that
irresponsibly spends pooblic mooney on ’omeless children! And we’ve bought
off God an’ all.Tomorrow the world was right. Now, we’d like soom
informairtion.”
“Never!” Piper managed to croak, wondering how he
could have thought as he had by the pool. The whole question of whether
Savage was merely the pawn of capitalistic forces or individually responsible for
his actions seemed irrelevant — the bastard was a psychotic.
Eight: Mr Savage’s Revenge 47
“You probably think this coontry is a ‘democracy’.

And so it is — for those who keep their nose clean and vote for Freedom of
Trade (ie slavery) and the Theory of Comparative Advantage and ow grand
project of turning the entire globe into a gambling casino! (84% of financial
transactions are speculative! 84%! ) Remember, everything is illegal except what
we and Bill Gairts and Friedrich von Hayek say isn’t! That’s liberalism! Nobody
knows you’re ’ere, no one but ooz and Lord Lytton, the aristocratic parasite.”
One of the guards took down some devilish device
from a shelf behind him. Savage made some un-pc jokes about Lee Kuan Yew,
grinned at the man and left the room. The guard was about to attach the
electrodes to Piper’s shrunken testicles when the lights went out. The guard
tripped over the generator and cracked his head on the wall, while the other
guard ran out to switch on the emergency supply. “Bloody privatisation.” he
said.
Holding a candle like Wee Willie Winkie, Savage burst
in and proclaimed,
“Boongling fools! The werkers ’ave strook! It’s a
General Strahk! A Total Economic Shootdown, in fact! We’re rooned! You’ve got
to do summat, Piper!” He began fumbling with Piper’s bonds, and the ex-butler,
with the revived guard’s assistance, was soon free. The other guard handed him
a very expensive Saville Row suit and some silk Pierre Cardin underwear.
“They don’t really match.” riposted Piper, annoyed.
Savage was placing a crown of hundred-dollar notes
on his head. Piper — who’d spent his time voraciously reading the bloody
history of the 20th century — hoped this wasn’t an elaborate bloody ruse to
disorient him further.
“We’ll make you ow bloody King, Your Majesty. Then
you can calm down the People. Make ’em see bloody reason. Make ’em go back
to werk! Even the friggin’ shopkeepers have joined in. No sense of service. Don’t
they want great jobs scratchin’ the dirt from under rich people’s toenails?” He
took out a duster and whisked imaginary lint from the crown while beaming
obsequiously.
Piper brushed the royalist and effeminate thing from
his skull. He fully expected himself to be suddenly dragged off again and made
to sleep in a coffin or face a mock-execution (perhaps on a Cross) but apparently
the simple-minded bourgeois was, for the first time in his life, telling the truth.
As they left the building, Piper (once he’d got used to

the sunlight) noted with satisfaction that guillotines were being knocked up all
over the place and a Winter Palace and Bastille being built so they might be
stormed, creating thousands of jobs. Mad mullahs were harangueing the Islamic
section of the populace while an Intifada was going on in the Western Suburbs. It
was a truly multicultural revolution.
Savage was gibbering at bemused members of the
public,
“Go back to werk! Go back to werk! Aaaark, twee-twoo.”
Piper, fearing that the wrath of the People might be
brought down on his own head, dragged the great Captain of Industry (now the
richest man in the world) away from the surging crowds.
47
“How can they do this to me?” Savage was weeping.

“Haven’t I increased National Wealth by 100%?”
“I suppose they haven’t seen any of it.” sneered Piper,
feeling quite revolutionary again — the Crisis of Overproduction and the
consequent fall of the System in his own lifetime claimed his thoughts. If only he
could get out of this business suit. People, aware only that their real incomes
were falling with gusto, were staring hostilely.
“No, well I have to keep it safe. It’s in a Swiss Bank.
You can’t let the Great Unwashed lay their grubby paws on it. Once the cat gets
hold of the cream jug … ”
Piper noted mentally in his Marxist way the fact that
they’d produced much of the cream. But scum rises higher than cream. He’d
have a few speeches to make after this little lot, perhaps on the barricades with
the Manifesto in his left hand and a pike in the other.
A crowd of blokey Centrelink middle managers ran
past (their bosses had escaped to Majorca), pursued by the unemployed chanting
Managers Out! Managers Out! This attack upon the Public Sector brought a brief
smile to the face of Savage but Piper pointed out that he was a manager too.
The capitalist turned pale, and not because he was
contemplating the prospect of having to pay $30 in personal tax over the next
three years. He toyed with the notion of creating gigantic oil spills and bushfires
to boost Economic Growth, but it was of little use.
“No! It’s lahk the Fall of Rome! The end of the bloody
world!”
Piper dragged the sobbing trillionaire into a taxi (the
guards had melted into the crowd — well, it was a hot day).
“Me grand initiative of a Global Monetary Union
down t’drain an’ all. And me champion austerity measures … How could they do
this to me? Me, born and raised in a coal-cellar — joost lahk you, Piper. Joost lahk
you.” At this attempt at solidarity the program in his head faltered and for a
moment he felt almost human, but greed filled his heart and his fingers twitched
in the absence of a till.
Piper warned him against forcing the, er, narrator into
plagiarising from Charles Dickens.
“Oh, that’s all raht, I know Mr Gradgrind personally.
We’ve had lots of hard times together.” He rubbed together (word repeated,
aagh!) hands encased in mud-spattered fingerless gloves and leered faginishly.
“Enough of such double entendres. The People have
risen. The yeast is red.” Quite a few of the People were rolling about drunk too
— some, in beige shirts, belting out the following ditty and marching leather-
shorted in the opposite direction to the rest:
48
1. DiF
e a h nhoch
e diR
e eihen fest
geschlossen
2. Die Straße frei den braunen Battalionen
3. Zum letzen Mal wird nun Appell geblasen
4. DiF e a h nhoch
e diRe eihen fest
geschlossen
1. S.A. marschiert mit ruhig, festem Schritt

2. Die Straße frei dem Sturmabteilungsmann
3. Zum kampfe steh’n wir alle schon bereit
4. S.A. marschiert mit ruhig, festem Schritt
1. Kam’raden die Rotfront und Reaktion erschossen

2. Es schau’n auf’s Hakenkreuz voll Hoffnung schon Millionen
3. Bald flattern Hitler-fahnen über allen Straßen
4. Kam’raden die Rotfront und Reaktion erschossen
1. Marschier’n im Geist in unsern Reihen mit.

2. Der Tag für Freiheit und für Brot bricht an.
3. Die Knechtschaft dauert nur mehr kurze Zeit.
4. Marschier’n im Geist in unsern Reihen mit.
( Transcribed by Nigel the Net Nazi.)
— but this was Australia, less than One Nation at

Oktoberfest. “I must get back to our headquarters, and you’re coming with me.”
Piper hated musicals.
“I can make you King — or Life President, then. An
Iron Leader. That’s what the People need. Restore Order. Put on coffin-trains
(privately owned and running through marginal electorates). Tighten ow belts
round their necks and forge ahead!”
49
Perhaps inspired by the chorusing counter-

revolutionaries, Savage became rigid, leafed through a shred or two of the
Volkisches Beobachter that fluttered by at that point, and launched into the
following tirade, wagging his finger mightily or flicking his hair back with it:
THE MAIN PLANK IN THE

NATIONAL SOCIALIST PROGRAMME IS
TO ABOLISH THE LIBERALISTIC
CONCEPT OF THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE
MARXIST CONCEPT OF HUMANITY AND
TO SUBSTITUTE THEREFORE THE FOLK
COMMUNITY, ROOTED IN THE SOIL AND
BOUND TOGETHER BY THE BOND OF ITS
COMMON BLOOD. A VERY SIMPLE
STATEMENT; BUT IT INVOLVES A
PRINCIPLE THAT HAS TREMENDOUS
CONSEQUENCES.
THIS IS PROBABLY THE
FIRST TIME AND THIS IS THE FIRST
COUNTRY IN WHICH PEOPLE ARE BEING
TAUGHT TO REALIZE THAT, OF ALL THE
TASKS WHICH WE HAVE TO FACE, THE
NOBLEST AND MOST SACRED FOR
MANKIND IS THAT EACH RACIAL SPECIES
MUST PRESERVE THE PURITY OF THE
BLOOD WHICH GOD — 27
27See the wilfully plagiarised speech by Adolf Hitler, ‘OnNational Socialism and
World Relations’, delivered in the GermanReichstag, January 30th 1937. Cf also
the following Romany gag: A young German tourist listens spellbound as the
old gypsy saws wildly at his fiddle. After he has finished, she goes up to him and
gushes, ‘I loved that! You are truly brilliant!’
‘Thank you.’ he says. ‘But I must confess that I couldn’t have done it without
German help.’
‘Really?’ she responds, intrigued. ‘What, you mean some famous German violin-
master taught you?’
‘No.’ he says dryly. ‘I mean I taught myself to play in Auschwitz!’
50
“I don’t think that this is quite the occasion for that

sort of thing.” interrupted Piper dryly as the rest of the crowd belted the shit out
of the beigeshirts. ‘Third Way’ crap if he ever heard it.
They heard automatic rifle fire. The taxi driver,
patently working, slewed the vehicle around. Red-bedecked crowds pursued
them, shouting slogans and waving pikes (no trout were to be had as they’d
gone on strike too). Eventually cornered, Piper got out and though his heart was
doing a samba he got onto the roof of the car. Dizzily, he said,
“I’m P-peter P-piper.”
There were a few titters.
“I said — I’m Emlyn Piper!” The mortification at
having revealed his real, Welsh name was almost too much to bear, and he
almost fell off.
There were a lot of titters. Never having heard a
revolution titter before, his mortification was replaced by horror.
But these feelings were swept away in an instant.
Everyone recognised him, and he was borne aloft and carried to the Parliament
(unfortunately in Canberra so they were pretty pooped by the time they got
there). Savage was led behind ignominiously as a prisoner.
51
Chapter Nine: The People’s ConferenceChapter
Nine: The People’s Conference
It was good to see Josh and Ben and Ruby and even
Anno again. Piper was paid off by Savage in return for sparing his life and so
now called the tune (naturally,The Red Flag ):
(Words: Jim Connell, Tune: Tannenbaum)
The people’s flag is deepest red,

It shrouded oft our martyred dead.
And ere their limbs lie stiff and cold,
Their hearts’ blood dyed to every fold.
Chorus:
Then raise the scarlet standard high;

Beneath its folds we’ll live and die.
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We’ll keep the red flag flying here.
Look round, the Frenchman loves its blaze;

The sturdy German chants its praise;
In Moscow's vaults its hymns are sung;
Chicago swells the surging throng.
Chorus:
It waved above our infant might

When all ahead seemed dark as night;
It witnessed many a deed and vow,
We must not change its colour now.
Chorus:
It well recalls the triumphs past;

It gives the hope of peace at last:
The banner bright, the symbol plain,
Of human right and human gain.
Chorus:
It suits today the meek and base,

Whose minds are fixed in self and place.
To cringe beneath the rich man’s frown,
And haul that sacred emblem down.
Chorus:
With heads uncovered swear we all

To bare onward till we fall.
Nine: The People’s Conference 53
Come dungeons dark or gallows grim,

This song shall be our parting hymn
Chorus:
A great People’s Conference, vital to the future of the

nation, was held at enormous expense to the remaining rentier class. It would
decide what direction Australian society would now take.
Essential description of Conference room:
Located within Parliament House (itself ringed by a
phalanx, so to speak, of military vehicles in suave khaki rather than beige), the
room was built along the lines of Solomon’s Temple, copied from a 50¢ Vinnies
edition of the Holy Bible, since they couldn’t afford an architect as so much had
been shelled out on the nibblies. Its décor was aesthetically disastrous, being
pseudo-William Morris from ceiling to floor, while the Conference table itself
was uncomfortably octagonal and its only concession to taste was the second-
hand red velvet cloth purloined from the Soviet Embassy in 1964 and bought
from a collector from Honkers by the new government for $500 000 000 000 000
000 000. Over the table dangled a huge Hungarian-made red plastic star,
somewhat askew, bound to the rafters along with strings of garlic and rue and
onions designed to ward off evil spirits (unsuccessfully as we’ll see below). A
Nellie Melba cylinder of ‘The Red Flag’, swiped from the National Film and
Sound Archive, scratched itself silly on the Conference Table, but was rather
drowned out by the Wollongong University Scientific Socialist Gay and Lesbian
Qwire and their stirring rendition of ‘Ça ira’.
The delegates (their opponents allegedly eliminated
by secret bullet) held a viewing of the Party’s revolutionary advertising
campaign on the ABC and SBS (all commercial networks had been appropriated
by the State and sold off to Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer to fund the Conference).
Then Piper switched the magic lantern off and the lights on, and the Conference
began.
“We must not introduce Shari’a Law.” he bellowed at
the Islamic delegate, who was all in favour of the public beheading of Savage.
The Imam (Mahmoud) picked at the prawn dip laced with Khomeini grits that
had cost them 50 bucks a tub.
“Remember your own Charles I! At least we don’t
lock people up forever for stealing a slice of pizza!” he yelled back at the
scandalised Welshman who was descended from Oliver Cromwell, and sang a
snatch or two of Peace Train. Maybe there was room on the charts for him yet.
Some of the crap that made it —! The Beigeshirts, uggh — these days …
“And the Tsar!” added someone else, enjoying the
creative kicking around of ideas and considering setting up her own advertising
biz with public money. “And Llywelyn the Last!”
The former government was presently in lavish exile
in Winston’s booming New Zealand at the cost of the ragged majority who were
too thick to recognise Utopia when they experienced it.
“Stick you-er ’ead up you-er arrrse.” retorted Piper at
all of them, wishing only momentarily that he was an egg-nog manufacturer
53
living in Beverley Hills. He quoted from Machiavelli, an eye-tie he’d been

studying of late:
How many kinds of principalities there are, and

in what manner they are acquired
All states and governments that have had, and have at

present, dominion over men, have been and are either republics or
principalities.
The principalities are either hereditary or they are
new. Hereditary principalities are those where the government has been for a
long time in the family of the prince. New principalities are either entirely
new, as was Milan to Francesco Sforza, or they are like appurtenances
annexed to the hereditary state of the prince who acquires them, as the
kingdom of Naples is to that of Spain.
States thus acquired have been accustomed either to
live under a prince, or to exist as free states; and they are acquired either by
the arms of others, or by the conqueror's own, or by fortune or valour.
ps, some states are simply bought on the open market.
He may as well have cited it in Italian (even better,

actually, they’d have thought it was Dantë).
Erudition and loci classicae aside, everyone in the
People’s Republic of Oz was reluctantly back at work or at the beach, and the
workers and shop stewards trying with varying degrees of success and many
such clichés to run their own industries and almost fully-automated ‘dark
factories’ on a democratic basis. But Australia was almost devoid of investment
capital and the hamstrung economy (thanks in part to agile transfer-pricing on
behalf of the enemy-owned manfacturing sector in the closing days of the ancien
regime ) was close to collapse.
Still, the global Savage was in their grasp, and they
had his Overproduction Certificate and Swiss Bank number. Soon, Ruby told the
Conference as the Jameson whiskey28 overflowed like a Chinese river, the Swiss
economy would be close to collapse and they would be riding high.
(Piper thought of writing a historical novel in which
the main ‘characters’ were various kinds of textile machinery from the north of
England c. 1932, who knows, a bestselller … but he soon dismissed the notion as
fanciful.)
Ruby stood. “We shall now proceed to construct the
socialist order.” she told the Conference, to rousing cheers. There was a Left
Opposition committed to radical computerised participatory democracy and
cryptic crossword compilation but they (like the pro-capitalist ACTU who now
represented 3% of workers) hadn’t been invited and were a bunch of drunks in
any case. (Mind you, some of her best friends were drunks. She wouldn’t have
got into this book otherwise, that and sleeping — and I mean sleeping — with
the author. ZZZZZZZZZZZZ.)
28Believe it or not, the Arabs invented the distillation of alcohol.
54
“Internationalism is safe!” cried Piper blokily, and

there was much singing of the Internationale and various old Soviet hymns from
the 1920s, apart from the Islamic delegate who sat opposite the ex-butler and
scowled at such un-hip pop music — St Cecilia had she not been executed would
have committed suicide on hearing it — while taking out a portable wind-up
record player and proceeding to scratch to death a collectible LP (Sergeant
Pepper’s Old Salts on the Beat ) while insisting that there were a few holes in that
particular cheese.
The Messiah also dropped in, draped in a red flag and
walking across the fingerbowl while playing guitar and mouth-harp. She tapped
her watch (after lifting the sleeve of her long polyester hippie dress) and added,
‘hey man, how uncool to gain the world and lose your soul, bubeleh’, but was
howled down as insufficiently modern and flexible. She disappeared and shacked
up with the genie.
“The Swiss — ”
Miscegenation! Crossbreedin’! Heresy! God will strahk
y’all down! Extry! Read hall about it in the Book of the Prophet Hi-zayah! cried a
southern (Port Lincoln) fundamentalist voice from the most distant corner of the
room, several cubits away. They all looked up at this Christian Identity
phenonenon, stunned. The man — wild of aspect, flies open and armed with a
portable tv and vcr — ran a video of himself shrieking in tongues on early-
morning tv about Je-sus! in the middle of embattled and unparadisial Jerusalem
(he was emphatic that the Bloke had been a horny-handed Son of Toil and
showed some samples of his fretwork and also The One that Got Away).
Jesus weren’t no Jewboy! he frothed. This is ha
hinternational conspiracy! Communism is from Hell! Blacks is the cause hof hall crahm!
Ah gotta site on the Hinternet, boy! Go to http://www.Godkillsfaggots.com,.
For a moment they were all too surprised to react
(especially Piper, who thought the Son of Man had been an Armenian); it was
rather as if Fidel Castro had lit his cigar with the Eternal Flame at Arlington
National Cemetery (after all, he gave up smoking years ago). Then the
carpetbagging dissident — who’d once accidentally circumcised himself while
having sexual relations with a vacuum cleaner he was hawking door-to-door —
fled, pursued by security forces who in many individual cases appeared to have
tied their shoelaces together. After a dramatic high speed fun run to Sydney he
eluded the sadly sloppy and carless revolutionaries — still yelling woo-woo-woo —
and set sail in an ark for Florida, destined unfortunately to be washed up on the
southern coast of embattled Cuba.
“Fuck. We have started something, haven’t we?” said
Piper, cleaning his nails with a Swiss Army knife like some boring war
correspondent. It was the first time, he noted, that such a device had appeared in
the story, and preened a bit.
“Stupid Sassenach bastard. I should ha’ gelded him.”
yelled Anno and waved her pole impotently. “Will you shut that fucken choir
off!”
The other revolutionaries, in a haze of Jammo, gave a
roar of agreement. Piper’s fantasies were almost realised.
Ruby, though flustered by the incident, pointed out
once the singing had petered out that the European Monetary Union (EMU, or
55
perhaps Ostrich or even Albatross would be more appropriate) and the USA-
China Alliance were recommending that Australia be bombed back into
pointless austerity.
“Haven’t we got any friends out there?” Piper asked,
feeling a bit queasy due to the expensive beetroot sauce.
“The new Islamic Republic of Bahrein is making
qualified friendly noises.” she replied with a glance at Mahmoud, who smirked
and blew on his own fingernails.
“Shit. No one else?”
“Fidel. But he’s been forced to bulldoze Havana and
grow sugar cane on the site for the US and Brazilian ethanol markets.” She
snaffled a samosa, imported by private spy plane from Nicaragua at a cost of
$US4 m each. The cut-price deli nextdoor had gone out of business.
“Gawd.” went Piper, trying out the honeyed sausage
rolls which they’d ordered from a planet of caterers on the edge of the lesser
Magellenic Cloud. “Then — we’re doomed. Savage is right — nothing can stand
against global capitalism … ” The star above his head creaked closer.
“Gorbals.” said Anno, chewing and rattling her
claymore. “No paserán! El pueblo … ”
“You couldn’t find that alien again, could you?” Piper
asked Ruby.
“Not bloody likely.”
Camera lights bathed them. Camera lights popped
and they all dived under the table.
“But — the People must not be betrayed.” barked
Piper as they sheepishly crawled back into their seats in a Christchurch eccent.
Josh and Ben (the latter surrounded inappropriately
by ewes clamouring for his autograph and pelting him with wet knickers) were
all for compromise.
“The Party is not a sewing-circle, Comrade.” Ruby
reminded them with impressive gravitas.
[The author was planning on giving the narrator
another set-piece tableau description of the room at this juncture29 but the star-
struck stagehands have downed tools due to the mocking of Actors’ Equity in
an earlier chapter. But you’ve already seen that it was a dead boring room
anyway, Canberra having nothing like the Kremlin in which you could leave
the office light on all night to prove you were working round the clock to save
the Revolution. Nor has ‘oyster’ been mentioned anywhere in this novel —
fuck! ]
“Ask some of the more enlightened business people
to come home.” suggested Ben, with no appreciation of the difficulties of
authoring and ideological purity. “You know, in the time-honoured fashion of
Laborite, well, ‘betrayal’ of the ‘working’ ‘class’. I mean, what’s wrong with
betrayal really — it’s human nature, surely, look at Judas and Christ, Brutus and
Caesar, Kerr and Whitlam, Bill and Monica … Yes, um, what is betrayal, anyway,
29Along with a couple of self-reflexive poems about Byzantium making William

Butler Yeats’ tawdry bourgeois effusions look truly sick. ‘The unpurged images
of day’ indeed. A laxative might have been indicated.
56
especially to an oyster [grrr]? The ALP was always regurgitating thatcherisms

from the ’80s, especially after they went into the Coalition. Heh heh. You know
what politicians are like, oppose work-for-the-dole one minute and support it the
next. Heh heh. The Marx & Engels Revolutionary Institute and Drum Clinic is —
a very good Revolutionary Institute and Drum Clinic … Um — Promise them — ”
The red star creaked once more.
“Bullshyte!” went Anno, drawing her sword and using
her other hand to wield the feared pole. He subsided into his costly outer space
enchiladas but the blow caught him right between the eyes.
“We need a Revolution in Europe, even America.”
stressed Ruby as Ben lay on the floor having mouth-to-mouth applied by Josh to
the music of Leonard Bernstein.
There was much laughter.
A tall and haughty insurrectionary, fresh from battling
Hansonite forces (along with the newly-resurgent Byzantine Empire), paused by
Piper’s seat and passed him an urgent scrambled e-mail print-out. He spread it
before Ruby and Anno. They read with mounting exultation the following
words:
@#*@##%!~!!!@#*@##%!~!!!@#*@##%!!!!@#*@##
%!~!!!@#*@##%!!!!@#*@##%!~!!!@#*@##%!!!!@#*@##%!~!!!@#*@##%!~!
!!@#*@##%!~!!!@#*@##%!~!!!@#*@##%!~!!! …
“Hey Jimmy, give us the unscrambled version!”

bellowed Anno, pole-axing a sieg-heiling interloper with a shaved head and
beige shirt who was passing out pamphlets emblazoned with a graphic of a
young, Nordic, male face and the words ‘Aryan Unity’.
This was eventually done, with everyone taking votes
and passing resolutions and wind along the way. They read:
Marx & Engels Revolutionary Institute and Drum Clinic Inc

PO Box 666
Hell
Arizona 10987654321blast off
USA
http://www.m&e.firebrand.com
Savage’s time machine has gone into production
at a secret revolutionary factory outside Phoenix. Will make us
trillions.:-) Swiss Bank has provided funds.;-) I’m using a portion to
publish my bestselling Book of Communist Jokes (heard the one
about the Commissar and the Honkers Tycoon …?). I plan to enter it
into the Katherine Susannah Pritchard Joke Competition! Prize is $5
000.
Cheers,
Secretary,
57
Production Committee.
“Who’s the bloody Secretary?” Piper demanded to

know, as Josh, flushed but happy, deposited coins in the swearing box. He was
sure he’d remembered to incorporate. (He hadn’t, a matter analysed at boring
length by Professor Nanook N. Inuit in his book False Memory: How Useful it can
Be, published by Cheddar & Stilton, Narvik, 1922.)
“I am.” said Anno, furiously taking minutes while
Ruby scratched away too and the star descended inexorably. “I’m always the
bloody secretary. But hoots, that’s been written by the fuckin’ Production
Committee or wha’ever they call themselves.”
[The inconsistency between ‘fucken’ and ‘fuckin’’
won’t be predictably corrected by a wordsmith of this calibre.]
“Are we sure this is genuine?” Ruby (as President and
Public Officer) asked the military-fatigued revolutionary who had done her best
to look like Fidel c. 1959 except that the spirit gum holding her beard on had
dried out in places. Piper took his chance to peer over Ruby’s shoulder. She had
written,
Hi, we’re Commies … this is little Karl and this is

little Rosa and this is little Che and this is little Vladimir … we want they
should be revolutionaries … ok, we’re a big family, but little Che is my
husband and he’s a Palestinian … on behalf of little Rosa let me ask you,
would anyone like to marry a nice Communist girl, a Bolshevist from Moses
to Truganini and a good cook? Yata yata yata …
So that was what it was all about. But he thought the

gag a little contrived. His Mam had a million of ’em. He began to scribble,
Hi, we’re Taffs … this is little Myfanwy and this is

little Megan and this is little Dylan and this is little Emlyn … we would like
them all to be Welsh Nationalists … ok, we’re a big family, bach, but little
Emlyn is on the Committee of the revolutionary Marx & Engels Institute and
Drum Clinic and going for a grant from the Australia Council … on behalf of
little Emlyn let me ask you, would anyone like to marry a nice Celtic boyo,
yatay a t a, a —
The insurrectionary was peering unsmilingly over his

shoulder and he crumpled the paper and tried to appear fervidly Communist.
(She was secretly proud of landing an article in Readers Digest, ‘I am Fidel’s Brain’,
with an introduction by Alistair Cook and a review in Time magazine by Robert
Hughes.) The star dropped another centimetre.
“Ahem. Yes, comrade President, there’s a secret code-
word.” she explained, piously aloof due to her conversion in the dark mid-
eighties to Liberation Theology and her role in blowing up Canberra Hospital.
Piper thought of Mr Samuel Morse.
“Yippee! We’re in the money …” he trilled to general
disfavour, overwhelmed by a Leninist mental picture (I don’t know who directed
58
mine) of the gold and silver windfalls of the Spanish Empire. 43% of Americans,
he’d heard, owned a few shares like Karl Marx and shunned even a capital gains
tax, never mind a Revolution. Class war, like consumption, was dead as
democracy, and the big shareholders would just have to go on getting inevitably
richer at the expense of the said 43% and those (such as black people who didn’t
identify with Moesha, and various fatuous believers in social progress) who had
no financial savvy or job at all. There was nothing quite like free enterprise,
unless it was all those murder-suicides you hear about.
“But we can’t reply to this as the Internet and the
phone lines are down.” said the revolutionary columnist, cooking up her next
sparkling broadside for the New Yorker — an hagiographic history of the Ford
Motor Co. She helped herself to a piece of raisin toast and a Gold Star of the
Soviet Union they’d bought at Mancare with workers’ and peasants’ blood
imported from the Lima market, proletarian choices Piper deplored.
Flying bombs (financed by the proceeds of blood
futures) began to rocket down on the Harbour, some of them ridden by
collectors of old anti-war videos. Good thing they were in Canberra.
The Conference delegates were almost immediately
informed and the star hung by a thread.
“Saxon arseholes!” Anno now knew their
involvement in the blood trade had been a mistake.
“ ‘ … the blind and weeping bear whom the hunters
beat …’ ”
“Edith Sitwell?”
“We’ll sue!” No one was quoting Edith Sitwell at a
Communist Conference. The German Band — a hammerskin outfit called
Hakenkreuz — was bad enough.
“Swithering bally rotters!” said Ben, a fan of Ronald
Searle, though he’d never swithered in his life.
Someone else (the ‘someone else’ mentioned above,
an obscure Brisbane writer named Svetlana Fyodorovich Dinkididenko with
long white hair), quoted extensively from Swinburne and Piper leaned back in
his chair and sighed rapturously.
“Is it the Yanks?” Ruby asked, opening a brochure on
equatorial Finland. Piper sat up with a start and nearly ruptured himself. The
lowest point of the star grazed his nose.
“Coming in from New Zealand. Pilotless aircraft30 and
cruise missiles. They’ve just wiped out Dulwich Hill and 10 000 USAF jobs.” said a
panting and worried messenger, worried about being hanged. He’d just run all
the way from Sydney and been trampled by the fleeing fundamentalist and his
gormless pursuers.
“That hot-bed of rampant Capitalism.” growled Anno,
referring to New Zealand, a country run now by the dreaded Kiwi Mafia or
Carbonara led (according to the narrator’s detractors) by the hoodlum Al Dente.
There were more quotations, including that from a campy version of the Faerie
Queene by Herbert Spencer that went, essentially, ‘Betty! Betty!’. Marx and
Spencer didn’t get along too well.
30One later flew off into the sunset never to be seen again.
59
“Vwe could go on tour vwiz a Socialist musical

comedy — how about Leer-nyin and Trotsky do South Pacific?” said Svetlana,
thinking of her time in the beer-swilling Ukrainian Ballet and fondling an ice-
pick.
“Er … or bomb them back with chemical weapons.”
Piper averred.
“What?” Ruby said in horror.
“Lice, ked and itchmite. Liver fluke.”
“No!” cried Ben. “Not our lovely sheep … ”
“You can’t make an omelette without breaking, er,
dags.” said Piper due partly to the mention of the word ‘scrambled’ above, and
everyone groaned. “You can’t break a private school system without making
CCEGGS.” he tried again for the benefit of the Canberra reader, but quick-
witted Ruby talked him down.
“Where does Western Europe stand on this?” she
asked the messenger, regarding its eternal leader31, Helmut Kohl, as having the
intelligence and charisma of a boiled egg.
“They’re (pant) said to be secretly against war. You
know (pant),
In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
No? Who is the foe? Who has been the foe all this
century?” He got no answer. “Philistines. Ahem. Ok. Well — it’s like this. The
SPD-CDU-Greens-Nazi leadership (pant) is too busy stealing from the people on
behalf of the multinationals and the people — at least the upper layers of the
proletariat and petit bourgeoisie — too busy stealing from each other to finance
illegal cryptic crossword production. But (pant) 95% of the population (though
31Though Kohl had been thrown out of power some years back, he had never
been able to accept the fact and all Germans had humoured him ever since, to
the extent that they too had come to believe he was still in power, and one
election year re-elected him. A shame he had died by that stage.
60
like the starving bulk of the earth’s population financially incapable of

‘consuming’ the global glut of cars, whitegoods, computers etc) is against the
EMU, especially in the south, so much so that a new ‘eurovote’ has been
introduced which falls in value every time you shift to the left. As a result of all
this chicanery (pant), the Capitalist parties are about as popular as the old (pant)
‘Communist’ Parties were in Eastern Europe and the old Soviet Union — which
sadly are once again in power under Chairman Zhirinovsky.” (There was a
groan.) “And the (pant) Celts are invading Turkey again.” His breath came out
in short pants, a feat that was remarkable since he commonly resided in a gay
ghetto in Novaya Zemlya where it was so cold you climbed into the freezer to
get warm.
“Stuff hackneyed gags like that, you despicable
hireling of the bourgeoisie.” she yelled at the narrator. “And what is actually
happening in Eastern Europe?”
“Business as usual (pant). Civil war, that is. The Tsar’s
skeleton has been exhumed at great public expense and is now lying in Lenin’s
coffin after the Great Man rose from the dead. The Balkans is — are? — in flames
again. (Can you have just one Balkan?) Micro-countries are appearing
everywhere and ‘ethnic cleansing’ is the norm. El pueblo … ” This Communist
joke fell flat. He tried lying with statistics instead but no one had done maths or
neoclassical economics at school.
“Asia?”
“The (pant — ok, I’ll stop now) Great Proletarian
Revolution has started in Seoul and Taipei, but the Chinese are trying to force
the starving North Koreans and Tibetans to crush it in the name of ‘Communist’
Free Enterprise32 — bankrolled of course by their colony Hong Kong and in
particular its underclass — and their great love of Uncle Tom, er, Sam.”
“Latin America?” No friend of swapping justice for
cheap electronic gewgaws, she hummed a little Victor Jara.
The messenger, a fascinating person in his own right
and pissed off at not getting a good part in the book, wiped his fevered brow
and hoped they got his good side. He scored some dip and continued.
“Guevarist (chew) freedom fighters are active all over the sub-continent but so
far the Yankees despite the World Meltdown are maintaining their proxy rule
and, even though California has seceded to become even more right-wing (they
have a Basic Law — condemned by the ‘Red Nun’, Mother Fukka — which
makes Greed mandatory even in Carmelite nunneries), they show no signs of
going home. But Pinochet and Thatcher have been hanged from the same tree.”
“And Africa? The Middle East? The Eastern Middle
…?” (she tired of the low-grade dialogue she was continually being made to
utter) “um — the Circumference? The Equator? The Tropic of Capricorn? The
International Date Line? The Earth’s Core? The North Lamplighter’s Pole?
Santa?”
“ — gone over to the Islamists,” groaned the
messenger, not reprimanded for it much to Piper’s disgust, “which is proving to
32Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,
(Beijing: LPF Press, 1998).
61
be a great embarrassment in Johannesburg and Tel Aviv. We’d better not invite
any of them over here at this stage. And the falafel — aagh … ”
He rubbed his stomach. Mahmoud left the room
hurriedly. The nibblies here were atrocious.“Oceania? Antarctica?” asked a
slurping Piper in seventh heaven, with no memories of the Great Leap Forward
or the Ukrainian Famine (merely of his own formerly straitened circumstances).
He was met with derisory looks and a further descending of the star which bears
no resemblance whatever to Leonie’s in that greatly neglected masterpiece Her
Brilliant Career.
“We need a Great Leap Sideways.” he said to further
unreprimanded groans all round. “Downwards?” he added feebly, wishing he
could sink through the floor.
“Hmm.” Ruby interposed. “Ok, Europe it is. They’ve
got the cash (zipping about the world somewhere), and maybe we can become
G7.0000000000000000000001 (oh, no, that’s Russia). I want to see the German and
French ambassadors immediately. Oh, and the Brits I suppose.”
She could hardly see the others as they’d all been
withdrawn and a shaky Economic Blockade had been set up jointly by the US
and the Tycoons’ Republic of China so that Australians were in severe
withdrawal due to the sudden shortage of Coke, moral relativism, McDonald’s
cardburgers and cheap junk from Clint’s. She stood, and the Conference was
adjourned for a week while they used the restored Internet in an attempt to
organise massive wildcat strikes in conjunction with the Progressive Labor Party
against US armaments corporations.
“All rise.” chaffed Anno, pole aloft, and Ruby shut her
up with a flood of giggles. Piper was a bit shocked at such frivolity but
maintained his stiff upper lip — the central heating had broken down.
Then the star, predictably, fell on their heads, but by
this time they were too tanked to care.
62
Chapter Ten: Defending the RevolutionChapter Ten:
Defending the Revolution
The next week was a long time in politics. France, once

more on the verge of revolution itself (yawn), promised to support the new
socialist republic so long as French nationals could conduct above-ground
nuclear tests at Maralinga and Melbourne (protected, naturally, from the
guillotine) and the Force de Frappe’s own neo-colonial depredations in Africa were
overlooked. Germany would maintain trade links recht, such as they were, along
with an ambivalent stance toward the US-backed war. (It also made a pile out of
re-copyrighting the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’.)
Britain was more problematic, since the New Labour
regime wished simultaneously to support the Americans totally in their quest to
eliminate all social ties between individuals and yet continue the sacred ‘special
relationship’ with their former colony as well as the anarchistic ‘Falkland Islands’.
But they didn’t matter much to Ruby’s strategy.
Meanwhile, against a background of revolutionary
terror and the reactive neo-fascist bombing of thousands of small children in the
recently-deprivatised child-care centres, the Time Machine was selling madly on
the Global Market, and the still-unregulated price of Drum Lessons rocketed.
The famous Five grew immensely wealthy, partly as a
result of flogging the mostly-outraged Armed Forces off to Sandline along with
the Black Sea Fleet to the consternation of the Russian government.
“When they find they’ve been gypped we’ll be in the
poo.” warned Piper with a surprising grasp of the current grapholect. Freed of
the burden of defence, the ever-more-automated economy was nevertheless
recovering as people raked in collective billions and banded together in militias
to fight off the Americans (who were stealing babies to feed the Christian Right),
while Maori partisans in particular harried the unpopular NZ government,
tearing down their Jolly Roger flag wherever it was raised, actions really of
incredible military value. Winston was soon ousted as PM and an Economic
Nationalist party took office and betrayed its constituency. The labour-saving US
raids continued.
“What about the election?” Piper went on, thinking
eruditely about the Electors of the Holy Roman Empire and the Golden Bull in a
China Shop of Charles IV. His nineteenth century inhibitions had gone; he’d
even given up wearing flannel pyjamas, but then he wasn’t Vietnamese. “We’ve
promised one, you know. After that speech you made about Rosa Luxemburg
we can hardly go back on it.”
“I know.” said Ruby testily as massed Country Joe and
the Fish impersonators trendily sang “and it’s one, two, three, what are we
fighting for?” outside. (She personally adored flannel sheets. The personal was
political, all right.) The polls suggested they’d win (under the new system of
revolutionary proportional representation) with a majority of
50.00000000000009%.
“Who we up against?” said Anno in her garbled way,
boozing and farting steadily. Cunningly, she’d suggested an hierarchical system
of electoral colleges in which the local electoral areas elected the municipal
delegates who in turn elected the regional ones who in turn elected the members
Ten: Defending the Revolution 64
of the National Assembly, and who in turn to the Gates of Heaven, but no one
had listened.
Ruby read from a recycled document. “Well, the
Labor Party has split into six — Revolutionary Moderates, Revolutionary Fiscal
Responsibility Party, Alternative Tory Party, Revolutionary Democratic Socialist
Party, Revolutionary Non-Factionals and Revolutionary Working Class Tory
Party.”
“Crikey. And the Liberals?”
“Revolutionary Neo-Liberals a n d Counter-
Revolutionary Freedom League.”
“Any others?”
“Revolutionary Democrats, Anarchists, Mutualists,
Radicals, Greens, Pinks, Red-Greens, Green-Greens, Rainbow Coalition, One
Nation, Leek of Rights, Islamic Jihad, Party of Satan, Animal Party, Electronic
Women’s Party, Unemployed Alliance, Calvinist Work Ethic Party, Individualist
Country Party, Hate Party, Downsizing Techno-Whigs, Kids’ Party, Writers’ and
Artists’ Party, Beach Party, Robot Party, Bosses’ League, Criminals’ Coalition,
Wog Party, Christian Democrats, Christian Fascists, Christian Un-alligned
Totalitarians, Intersexed Party, Festival of Light, Monster Raving Loony Party,
Blackshirts, Pinkshirts (the remnant Beigeshirts all killed each other in a beerhall
brawl), Iron Guard, Ghibbelines, Girondins, Jacobins, Senderoso Luminoso … All
stand to win at least one seat.!I don’t think that a leftist version of the eurovote
would be a good idea”
“Can’t we put it off?” said Piper.
“Danger of civil war.” (She slung him a list of the
Regiments of the British Army from the Household Cavalry to the The Queen’s
Own Buffs.)
“Well, they had nothing more relevant in the
revolutionary op shop. Now, we could only counter this threat — Piper, wake
up — by becoming a Stalinist tyranny like the Yanks and Chinese want. And
then we might fail anyway. And then there’s the Drum Lesson Industry to think
about — shedding jobs ever more rapidly as it grows globally.” Piper, yawning
and having hypnopompic inspirations, resolved to overwhelm the author with
his independent character. He consulted his new Dictionary of Buzzwords and
Circumlocutions (it was his birthday after all):
“More than ever, it is absolutely necessary for the
Party to generate sufficient policy flexibility in our current inevitably globalising
conjuncture in order that we may promote a successful demotic confidence
enhancement which in turn must ipso facto result in a likelihood increment
tangential to the conditions of comprehensive acceptance of our neo-
oppositional and antinomian manifesto by the collectivised yet still undialectical
work units —” He’d often heard Sir Humphrey say such things and what really
scared him was that he understood them.
“Eh? Oh, belt up, duckie!” interjected Ruby. “The
country’ll be more ungovernable than Sicily! What about all my promises?”
“You made ’em!” said Piper, wondering if he could get
his old job back, or at least an equivalent position in this century. The Time
Machine definitely didn’t work. They were soon to get letters of complaint.
64
Ten: Defending the Revolution 65
“We all made them! Workers’ self-management,

redistribution of wealth, 25% across-the-board tariff cut — and it’s more or less
working already — isn’t it?”
“Well, er, yass — in some industries it’s been
happening — from below, so to speak. Take buttling for instance … ” He
launched into a six-page summary of the state of the Buttling Industry (or as he
said, ‘bertling inderstry’) and the decimation of its workforce by computer
programs called ‘electronic butlers’ in spite of the desperate threats of the new
Planning Committee (who planned this tale) to have managers publicly flogged
a lá Taliban with computer leads, but the others were too depressed to listen to
it. “Er — but not much can be done till the election really.” He launched into the
Albanian National Anthem, Rveth Flamurit le per bashkuar, but no one joined in.
“Nor after it.” Anno perorated for him, since his
Welshness didn’t extend to any facility with male voice choir vocals. “Let’s get
the fuck oot of here.”
Piper stopped singing and nodded vigorously. “That
might be a good idea. The emigrés in New Zealand will never forget what we’ve
done. They’ve formed a computerised alliance with the rich Cubans in Florida.”
He hadn’t yet mastered the mimeograph.
“We didn’t do it — it was the People.” Ruby rubbed
her neck thoughtfully and saw herself flying a kite in a thunderstorm.
“Ruby, we are part of the People. We can’t desert our
comrades just because everything seems to be crumbling around us. Remember,
every class struggle is a political struggle. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of
our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole
superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.”
“Oh, yes. I forgot.” She sipped her Campari and gazed
out across their 1000 hectare grounds replete with classical statues and formal
gardens that would have gratified George IV.
The Time Machine’s sales abruptly plummeted and

Savage’s money was running low, when they received even worse news. Savage
had escaped prison with the aid of corrupt guards, US agents, the Klan
population of Jasper, Texas and the fellow in the black hole, and he (and the
nation’s minuscule military-industrial complex) had been taken aboard a stolen
ferry-punt to the pseudo-revolutionary Land of the Long White Cloud.
65
Chapter Eleven: How it all EndedChapter Eleven:
How it all Ended
The election turned out much as the polls had

predicted. The M&ERI&DC faced a hostile Opposition composed of 60
squabbling parties (many called New FUNCINPEC), and itself was divided into
factions which mutually hated each other (and whose vinous members were
generally consumed with self-loathing). Yet the People in poll after poll were
demanding swift action to restore prosperity and employment and build an
equalitarian society. Meanwhile, the war went on.
It was hopeless — and another revolution was in the
wind. A real one.
The opulent lifestyles of the Five were causing scandal,
and they sold the country retreat to a Kwangdong billionaire and moved back to
Josh and Ben’s house. The irony was that they really did want to keep the
promises they’d made, but as things stood they really had no idea how.
“I think we should cut and run.” re-emphasised Anno,
who’d almost lost her taste for battle. She now drank more heavily than ever
and had also become celibate after a run-in with Leonie Barmy.
“Yass!” agreed Piper, red-eyed, noting that the
Planning Committee had planned itself a huge pay rise. “Why should we
maintain the new sharks in their opulence?” A limo pulled up outside and
several pinstriped types peddled Official Secrets from door to shining door.
Wisely, they avoided the Browne-Nose residence.
“Perhaps we could try self-hypnosis?” said Ruby, at a
loss. She taken a great interest of late in self-help tapes ordered from addresses
in North Queensland at $49.95 a set.
At that point, the phone rang. She answered it. As she
put down the rubber receiver her eyes glowed with messianic zeal.
“It’s France.” she breathed. “A revolution has broken
out and is sweeping Europe! They’re all pulling out of the fascist EMU and are
prepared to consider international covenants to regulate global capitalism on the
model of anti-pollution agreements such as the Montréal Protocol. America is to
be isolated! We’re saved!”
“Savage is organising a counter-revolution.”
reminded Piper glumly, unimpressed by people he regarded as mere social
democrats.
“What, in France?”
“No, here! He’s appealing with pots of money both to
the Left Opposition and the local Carbonara.”
“I thought that was a sausage. I — ”
There was a rapping at the door. One of their
bodyguards answered it.
“At this hour!” moaned Anno, unscrewing her
seventh bottle of Dewar’s. “I’m only a social drinker.”
Indeed, they were all getting a bit sloshed — it was
just 7.30 in the morning. Their surprise when armed revolutionaries burst into
the room was total.
Eleven: How it all Ended 67
“Fuck.” the latter mutually clamoured. “A dominant

dungeon.”
Josh and Ben glanced at each other and at the rack in
the corner. This sort of thing had become depressingly familiar to them.
The already tall leader rose to his full height (shame
about the chandelier) and said disdainfully:
“We’re from the new Revolutionary People’s Army.
The Armed Forces have split and there’s been a second revolution and a victory
in Asia. The useless M&ERI&DC — Book of Communist Jokes indeed — is now out
of power.” He helped himself to a chianti from the vulcanised bar.
“I didn’t hear any shooting.” said Piper, puzzled and
sick of this running gag about S&M. Ruby surreptitiously poked the offending
book out of the bookcase.
“It’s just come to Canberra.” There was much
shooting and guillotining outside. They shielded their throats nervously.
“Now”, he continued, “if you guys’ll come quietly I’ll
tell you the one about William Morris and the interior decorator … ”
Ruby thought fast, and not about muscular
Communists.
“Sure — look, we’ve reached a bit of an impasse, so
you’re welcome to the leadership.”
“Eh?” The revolutionary, younger brother of the
insurrectionary above (who herself was destined to sieze power), looked
suspicious.
“Um, so long as you have the support of the People —
”
“Y-yass.” Piper backed her up, “We’re all for
democracy, you know. Revolutionary democracy of course.” He quoted from
The Civil War in France to little avail as the guy had never read it.
“Of (hic) course.” added Anno, dwelling on a vision of
Bonnie Prince Charlie dressed as a woman.
“Well, ok.” said the revolutionary, pushing back his
Red Sox baseball cap (Americanisation had gone a bit far, albeit via the Black
Market) and scratching his head which cursed the fact it would never run in the
Melbourne Cup. “The civil war in France is over now, anyway. We won, you
knuckleheads. So we’re prepared to be generous already. You can go into exile if
you like.”
“No, not New Zealand!”, begged Ben, who’d just got
back from a clandestine trip to the All Black Market and was loaded down with
electronic consumer goods, “there’s a shepherd in Waitangi I owe $NZ760 000 to
…”
“I’m not sheering thet wuth anyone.” grinned the
revolutionary and tipped him a wink. “Ok, stay here then.”
“What a decent sort of cove.” said Piper.

“’ere, I don’t like the look of them guards outside.”
“The bastards. We’re under Hoose Arrest.”
67
The Great Australian Proletarian Revolution was a

great success after that, pursuing a policy of replacing all work with robots and
the like while distributing all the resulting wealth equally through cryptic
crossword addiction. (The whole population, in fact, took to driving solar-
powered Volvos.) Years dragged by and it swept the whole world, even the USA
(where it was implemented by a myriad radical private collectives). (This is
admittedly a bit like my previous novel, but I like happy endings and hope to
have one myself.) Our five friends grew old and toothless and, basically, lost the
plot like I’ve just done …
Hey! That’s a bit pessimistic. Poor buggers at least had

a go at building a better world! That’s more than you can say for the ALP Pty
Ltd!
All right, they kept all their teeth (especially Piper) and
were hale in limb and elsewhere. They spent their days publishing the following
parochial rag on behalf of an extraterrestrial power:
!
Gigglebusteria Gazette
A magazine published under the auspices of the Australia-Gigglebusteria Friendship Association
Editorial by the Revolutionary Monarchist Collective
Welcome to the first issue of the Gigglebustería Gazette. In the interests of

fostering better relations between Australia and the Kingdom of Gigglebustería, we
ask for appropriate contributions from interesting people such as yeti and inventors of
electric ornithopters. However, we can’t guarantee to publish and can’t yet pay since
one of the collective ran off to Bechuanaland with the laser printer. Please send sae
(or laser printer), and if you can put your material on a really hard disk (I sat on t h e
last one), so much the better.
Drytonsils P. Verdigris.
==================
Gigglebustería Resumes Trade Talks with Australia!
The Gigglebusterían Minister for Foreign Affairs, His Grace Sir Diaphanous
Trumpetingtrousèrsete, has agreed to hold talks with his Australian counterpart on
ending the longstanding Gigglebusterían trade boycott of Australian goods. Sir
Diaphanous
Well, I think we’ve seen quite enough of that.

Eventually they were released from Hoose Arrest and
settled on a little farm in the country where they gave up the Gazette and
participated enthusiastically in the new self-harvesting Marijuana Industry which
employed these days about five people (themselves).
68
On the cold wintry nights (their farm was on top of Mt

Kosciuszko) they’d reminisce over a cone or two, especially about the end of
Global Savagery and Mr Francis J. Savage (he was hanged by Maori partisans
while fleeing the Aotearoan Revolution and forced in death to seek exile in the
black hole with his Programmer). Ruby would get out her old Time Machine and
pretend to ring the bell. But it never worked.
Then one night, it worked.
“’ere, who fixed this?” she exclaimed, again relapsing
nostalgically into Cockney.
“I don’t know. But we haven’t travelled into the
future.” Piper replied, idly polishing his boots rather than someone else’s.
“We bloody have.” said Anno, pointing her pole at the
calendar. Snowflakes drifted by the window in a 200 kph gale.
“You’re right. How do you make it go backwards,
Rube?”
“Just pull the lever in the opposite direction.”
“It must be a new event, one programmed into the
virus.” Piper said, having boned up on revolutionary computers for years now
and almost able to operate an early eighties Amstrad.
“But everyone’s got an old Time Machine in the shed
out the back.”
“The whole world will be travelling into the future —
or the past.” said Piper, aghast. He’d finally got used to the current present.
“Global hierarchy will be at an end!” He smiled Welshly.
“Makes a bit of a mockery of the Manifesto.” Ruby
admitted.
“And a few religions I can think of. I can meet my
Druidic ancestors (they forbade the eating of hares, fish and pork you know, also
of traction engines)! Criticism of religion is the presupposition of all criticism.”
“Hmm — it’ll take ’em a while to twig, but.” Ruby
said.
“What’s a few years, fach?” he said in grammatical
gender. “We’ve revolutionised time itself!”
“The revolution will spread to all epochs! Paradise on
earth! Julius Caesar is in for a surprise.”
“Well, he was anyway.” said Piper.
“Forever, in both directions!” they all chorused, Josh
and Ben having just come in from the (Nail) Drying Room.
All right, you’re getting a bit out of hand with the

optimism here. Sheesh! You writers on the dole are an arrogant pile of shits
living off the hard-working Hansonite intellectual élite who put in more hours
than a bunch of coolies.
“But we’re still mortal.” said Anno, crestfallen (she

hastily picked it up), and pouring another bottle of Dewar’s down her throat. She
felt for some reason like gatecrashing a bar mitzveh but Carlton was a bit far off.
69
Another knock at the door (there’d been few in the

intervening years), and they saw they were being visited by a very flashy-
looking angel.
“Good evening, comrades. About that last remark —
Anno, it was you who made it, wasn’t it?”
“Aye. What of it.” she said, her free hand shooting to
the hilt of her claymore.
“You won’t need that where you’re going.” smiled the
angel with a nifty shake of her wings. (A horned figure appeared behind her
singing the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’ lustily but she raised a glimmering hand and the
figure was blown away by a lightning bolt.)
Anno looked past the angel and saw a great staircase
leading off the earth in the general direction of the Southern Cross.
“Och, I dinna believe in all that shyte.”
“Ah, but who do you think wrote that computer
virus?”
“Eh? You mean … ”
The angel nodded.
“Our friend Satan could not really expect to put
Savage in charge of the universe through mere hacking.”
Anno shook her woolly head, not taking much of this
in. “I was hopin’ that if there was an afterlife I’d go doon below — I don’t want
to be sittin’ on a clood playing the fuckin’ harp for the rest of eternity.”
The angel drew back, affronted. “But — you’re Celtic,
aren’t you?”
“Course I’m fuckin’ Celtic — so’s this Cymric jessie
here.” She staggered and indicated a ducking Piper with a cunning arc of her
pole. At least, he consoled himself, she hadn’t called him a ‘Sassenach’ this time.
“And I’m half-Irish.” said Ruby.
Josh and Ben, who had purely English and Serbo-
Croat ancestry, kept silent.
Anno looked sullen.
“But we have lots of fun, charabanc outings to
Nirvana, church fêtes, picnics — and the Boss has forgiven all your sins, so why
not just come upstairs?” (Ok, so I lied in my footnote to chapter one. You’d
never have read it otherwise.)
“But — we’re not even Christians.” said Piper,
bristling with red stars and hammers and sickles, though he looked forward to
seeing his old Mam and Dada again.
“That’s all right, neither is S/he.”
“Oy, habibi! Well, I suppose if we must.”
“’fraid so.” said the angel, possibly one of the oy
polloi. She nodded at something behind them.
The turned around and gasped. Five bodies sat at the
kitchen table, having expired simultaneously while under the lifelong influence
of countless drugs (Hoffmann la Roche ‘Australia’ had expanded to Uranus
where the transfer-pricing was more attractive).
“That’s us! Shyte, you mean we’re already dead?” She
found it difficult to sell that idea to herself.
70
“Something like that. But don’t worry — we ultra-

advanced celestial civilisations have been building a paradise Upstairs for
millennia. You’ve just had rather garbled reports of it till now — like most
inhabited planets.”
“Come on, woman, this is like some third-rate science
fiction plot.”
“Well, look who wrote it.” The angel couldn’t resist a
smirk.
Anno opened a bottle of Black Label and sculled it.
“I’ve never felt more alive! Look at that. Hands steady as a rock. I could do
fucken [you’ve been warned about this] brain surgery.”
“No need for that now.” smiled the angel.
Anno rounded on her. “So — I’m tae believe that we
not only have bloody souls but spirit bodies and spirit clothes and spirit
lamplighter’s poles and spirit claymores — fuck, they don’t even make them
things any more — and that the whole bloody lot can pass through material
objects.”
Experimentally, she ran at the wall and severely
bruised her nose and clitoris.“You’ve been watching too many ghost movies.”
said the angel. “Your new form is simply a higher order of matter, intangible to
other living beings but not one that belongs to a completely separate, ‘spiritual’
universe as the ancient Greeks had it. Hell, haven’t you read St Paul? That goes
for all the moth-eaten things you want to take with you. We have the
technology, so to speak, to ‘spiritualise’ everything. And it won’t put you out of
work. We’re all gas up there.”
“Gas is right. I never thought I’d hear all that crap
from the mouth of a bloody angel. And I’ve never had any intention of ‘going
Greek’, no more than I’d work for the fuckin’ dole. This sort of patriarchal
Idealistic Cartesian dualism drives me spare.”
“Oh, well, personally I’m a dialectical materialist.” She
swore on a stack of Bibles that appeared from nowhere and then vanished (ie the
Bibles), demonstrating Creation ex nihilo for the Hindu reader. “Origen and all
that Pie in the Sky is a mistake too, and the World Revolution will discover a way
of bringing it all down to Earth. But you can discuss all this philosophical stuff
forever Up There. Otherwise you’ll be doomed to wander the earth, bumping
into walls and making a hell of a racket and apparently being sent to Coventry
by the whole population of the planet apart from a few psychics who’ll bore you
to death — well, you know what I mean — with New Age ramblings.”
“I certainly don’t like the sound of that. But —
‘charabanc trips to Nirvana’, I mean, have you no got any pubs?”
“Of course we’ve got pubs! We’ve got anything you
like up there — except fiscal and monetary ‘redisciplining’, ie global injustice and
economic totalitarianism. The Goddess doesn’t go for all that.” She added that
Central Bankers and Finance Jocks could not get into what was once called the
Kingdom of Heaven, something to do with camels and eyes of needles.
“And — chicks?” went Anno. She elbowed the angel
in the ribs. “Ha’ you got chicks?”
The angel cleared her throat and looked slightly
disapproving.
71
“Well, yes, of course, but they might not take too

kindly to that approach.”
“Yippee!” Anno danced for joy. “Yer on.”
The angel, clad in white but black herself, led them

onto the great shining stair. Without effort, they rose as if on an escalator into
the chill starry night. They had no trouble breathing even when they earth
shrank to a point of light behind them, and they felt warm and happy. Anno
downed her spirit spirit and they all had a nip, even the angel — in fact the bottle
never seemed to empty. They threw their arms around each other and were
soon carousing drunkenly. As they moved faster and faster in the direction of
the Southern Cross, they began to sing:
Arise! Ye starvelings from your slumbers;

Arise! Ye prisoners of want.
For Reason in revolt new thunders,
And at last ends the age of cant.
Now away with all your superstitions,
Servile masses arise! Arise!
We'll change forthwith the old conditions,
And spurn the dust to win the prize.
Then comrades come rally,

And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale
Unites the human race
Then comrades come rally,
And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale
Unites the human race
Ye’ll tak the low road and I’ll tak …
“So what’s all this about ‘the Boss’?” said Anno. “Bit
hierarchical, isn’t it?”
“Well, S/he’s really only primus stove inter pares, if you
like, since we chucked out that reactionary old bastard Jehovah and his Witness
Party. But think of the great arguments you can have!”
After some (and possibly years of) heated discussion
and cryptic crossword solution, the singing resumed. A magnificent pair of
pearly gates loomed before them like an immense set of inverted teeth, and
swung open silently. An old man affecting a halo welcomed them in. (Peter II
was there too, but not Francis J. Savage.)
By the time they walked into the Elysian fields and
cloud-tops Above, to be greeted by their ancestors and lost loved ones, furiously
scribbling away at cryptic crosswords, they were all thoroughly plastered, and —
to Anno’s surprise — all agreed that it was time for a Revolution in Heaven.
But that’s another story, out soon.
The End?
72
74

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The Global Savage

Chapter One: God Knows what the Neighbours

It was a dark and stormy night1, the prophetic Edward

It was 1899 and poverty and misery were endemic. Mr

“Yea, and he shall be called

he shall Gamble with other people’s

As Piper shambled home from work along a roughly-

“Oh.” he replied disappointedly to his shadow-cloaked

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

It failed to impress and he never wrote another line

Accidental Digression Showing the Author’s

by the late Merle Travis; also recorded by one Robert

Come all you young fellers so young and so fine

Where it's dark as the dungeon and damp as the dew

It's many a man I have seen in my day

I hope when I'm gone and the ages do roll

The midnight, the morning, the breaking of day

He (humming Summertime as recorded by Janis Joplin)

“ ’ere,” she said in the cockney accent she’d acquired

Liberty leading the people! Piper ahead of her, looking

The Goddess-like fantasy didn’t get him far. Damn

In my youth, Father William7, we used two fingers,

The area was so base8 and common that the rising

7Clearly of the Orange Order.

Surely, he thought, he was developing a serious fever

unhealthily dependent upon foreign multinationals which, in the spirit of

13Forthe sightless on roller blades no less, and observed of course by Michael

sexually-transmitted ailments roamed freely through the kitchenette, which itself

When Fahver papered the parlour

He cringed, culturally, since he was sure he’d heard

While she was busy singing (and he muttering in his

On Matters Which Are Injurious in the Act of Generation

Know, O Vizir (to whom God be good!), that the i l l s

He who follows such a regime is protected against t h e

The tea was nice when it came.

15He’d once done an intensive course in speed-reading.

As stirring revolutionary hymns struck up in his

“Such a — er — a p-progressive woman.” he said,

Once upon a time there was a three-storey lung

(In Australia at about the same time, the great-

Lord Lytton drummed angrily on the dining table

19Beneath each other and below the salt of course.

The ultra-celebrated Leonie Barmy from the author’s famous

His Lordship grumbled and looked black. Patently a

Lytton scoffed his steaming kidneys and raised his

20Woody Allen notwithstanding.

Ruby pedalled harder, ringing out the changes. At the

“What did I tell you! 2008! We’ve by-passed what is

“Well, that’s conjectural.” said Ruby, blowing a

They did draw some attention, however. Kids looked

“This is a bicycle.” Ruby responded testily and with a

They didn’t get as far as Parliament House. A riot of

“And what are you going to make of it?” she added,

As Ruby had planned, they all went for strange and

In the second century of the Christian Aera, the empire o f

Those of an unglobal temper who felt that digression

23The author is believed to have also invented the underwire bra.

24See Mark Thomas, ‘Auntie Rhoberta’s story’, Panorama, Canberra Times, 15

Back in that very century, Lord Lytton was beginning

Back in 2008, if that is the way to put it, Piper, having

Not for little cuss words

1.There are at present contingent beings.

x is a contingent being =df it is possible that x exists and it is possible that x

II. Why think that (2) is true?