Tell me about brotherhood,

my brother.

Send despatches: crisp, precise details.

Spare nothing.

In this part of the world

I hear only gossip,

swirling like murderous mist

from old hags and toothless men

to amuse themselves and

frighten children.

In this part of the world

the talk is of the weather

and the weather in this part

of the world cannot be trusted.

Here, the stars cling to the earth

like a desperate obsession

the monstrous blackness too much for them.

People march in their weak light.

I have a traitor’s heart

and sing:

A minute’s silence for the dead

stills the violence, makes the bed.

Mr Agio feigns death to avoid

a sacrificial life, and in the long

dying, cries out:

my brother, tell me about brotherhood.

Warwick McFadyen

(From The Life and Times of Mr Agio)

By Warwick McFadyen

They lie, the men who tell us in a loud decisive tone
That want is here a stranger, and that misery’s unknown
For where the nearest suburb and the city proper meet
My window sill is level with the faces in the street;   

(And later on)

I wonder would the apathy of wealthy men endure 
Were all their windows level with the faces of the Poor? 

Faces in the Street, Henry Lawson

First the anger, then the hope.

It’s the sentiment of the naïve and the dreamer that all men and women, when confronted with inequality, will react in the same way. That is. with:

Sorrow,

Compassion,

Empathy,

Goodwill and

Help.

It is not the truth. Not all do. History shows this. The present shows this. It goes against logic, and the past, that those responsible for putting a class of society, a section of a nation, indeed an entire nation, in a certain position to better their own status, to enrich themselves, increase their power and confirm and bolster their own beliefs would feel bad about it.

Heaven forbid, to do that would be to censure their own actions and pour guilt upon themselves. Even more, it would degrade their self-righteousness, and close the gap between themselves and the lesser people.

One likes to believe in the brotherhood of man and woman, of the common wealth of virtue, but for every pool of trembling hope, there is a storm surge of greed or a high tide of indifference that swamps the shore. One needs to be a determined optimist. As an eternal state of mind, can there a harder thing to maintain?

It is axiomatic as Newton’s third law that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, that a winner cannot exist without their opposite, the loser. In Lawson’s day these were the faces in the street. A century later, “the men who tell us in a loud decisive tone” are still here. And still their declarations are hollow. They lie, and yet sleep well at night because they rationalise it as an alternative view, a fact seen from another angle, if you will, that it is as legitimate as any other. Indeed, more legitimate because they are propelled by a will to power.

What could an example of this be? Let’s see. Introducing Donald Trump. Actually, there is, of course, no need to introduce Trump. He is the leader of the most powerful and wealthiest nation on Earth.

He is power and money. He is privilege and entitlement. He is the most dangerous type of demagogue because he has no ideology. What passes for political belief is merely venality. What he meant by saying he’ll make America great again is that he will make America great again for business. And Donald Trump is, if nothing else, a businessman. He spends billions on the military and cuts funding to welfare, health, the environment and the arts. The faces in the streets are just numbers to him, unwanted numbers, and these types of numbers, to him, add up to nothing.

He is a piece of work.

Australia does not have a Trump-like equivalent. We are Trump-lite. There are little bits here and there. We suffer the attitudes of Cory Bernardi, Peter Dutton and Pauline Hanson, for example, on racism and refugees. If we didn’t have the ocean, we’d be building a wall. Our government cannot bring itself to embrace love and marriage for all. Our politicians are timid creatures, scared by loud noises. However, if the politics suits, we kick the down and out and vulnerable when they’re down and out and vulnerable and cosset the big end of town with tax benefits. Policy in this country is the perpetual motion of electioneering. And the goal of electioneering is winning.

We love winning. What’s that about winning? There’s always a loser. It was Harmony Day on Tuesday. The federal government’s harmony page says the day celebrates the country’s cultural diversity. “It’s about inclusiveness, respect and a sense of belonging for everyone.”

Except refugees. Except Aborigines. Except Muslims. Except gays who want to marry each other. A point of difference in these frightened times is akin to carrying a rocket launcher. It is a credit to the determined optimists in the population that we have succeeded multi-culturally as well as we have.

Lawson was born 150 years ago this June.  He grew up as Australia plunged into the depression of the 1890s after an orgy of land and property speculation and unbridled corruption sent the country into a fantasy of boom times that ended with the country on the edge of ruin.

Faces in the Street was published in the Bulletin in 1888. Lawson was 21. A plaque at Petersham train station in inner Sydney commemorates that it was there on a platform one rainy night the muse came to Lawson.

As he waited for his train, no doubt he saw the world as a battlefield, society, too. Indeed, the man himself was an early casualty of a hard, benighted life. What would he have made of his being given a state funeral?

What would he make now of the faces in the streets here and in America? He would, most likely, have turned away. He most likely would have gone bush.

Warwick McFadyen is a freelance writer and editor

Empty this into my heart –

The sky, the infinite surface,

Let me feel when I look within

That I am looking out as well.

Empty this into my heart –

The wash and whorl of the sea

Let me feel the tide’s pull and push

To moon light and shadow.

Empty this into my heart –

The light of distant stars

That I might hold close the wisp

Of time that I can say is only mine.

Empty this into my heart –

The whisper of wind on worn stone

That I can listen, and return it in a voice

Fulfilled, never emptying.

Warwick McFadyen

By Warwick McFadyen

Do not be fooled.

After Donald Trump’s address to Congress this week, a sentiment has been circulating that the softer model on show was the real Donald. The man before his country and the world painted himself more moderate in tone and message, less adversarial, than his previous self-portraits. This gentler, caring Donald was really on the side of the angels. He stood for all Americans, and the American ideals of freedom, liberty and justice. He was the even-tempered man; the protector of the dream, the guardian of the future.

Such was his delivery, void of hectoring, that some may allow the possibility that perhaps, just perhaps, Donald is not so bad. That this time, we are seeing the real person. Here is the real deal; that Trump is, indeed, presidential. (Reserve a space on Mount Rushmore.)

Do not be fooled.

Trump, a one-time actor, knows how to play an audience. (His performance as himself in Two Weeks Notice, alongside Hugh Grant, is worth watching. No seriously, it’s not. ) He was playing to an audience this week, and he needed to come out on top. He needed to win. It is one of the pillars of his psyche.

One of the chilling extrapolations of this gnawing need is the Dr Strangelove-like scenario that one of the greatest, and easiest, measures of winning, for a leader and a country is winning a war. Such is the hallucinatory feel to this administration, that it no longer feels improbable that Trump would not turn to his generals and vassals and say, “Get me a war! We’ve got plenty of enemies out there. Get me a war, but make sure it’s winnable, cut dry, no loose ends. Not like that damn endless Israeli-Palestine thing. It has to be something I can win and win boldly.”

One doesn’t increase by 10 per cent or $US50 billion, the military budget of the most powerful nation on Earth (by a ratio of 3 to 1) in peace time and then not do anything with it. Trump knows the most potent form of defence is attack. But as 9/11 demonstrated, it only took a dozen fanatics with boxcutters and the will to die to conduct a deadly attack on American soil.

Not that he isn’t already conducting a war; this one, of course, is against the enemy of the people, no not radical Islamic terrorists, but the press. If only they were team players, everyone would be on the same side trying to win. What could he do but tweet:

“The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”

As is the way in hallucinations, this drew out strange creatures, Republican John McCain reacted thus, telling the NBC’s Chuck Todd: “I hate the press. I hate you especially. But the fact is we need you. We need a free press. We must have it. It’s vital. If you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press. And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time. That’s how dictators get started.

“They get started by suppressing free press, in other words, a consolidation of power — when you look at history, the first thing that dictators do is shut down the press. And I’m not saying that President Trump is trying to be a dictator. I’m just saying we need to learn the lessons of history.”

Some commentators have made the leap via demagoguery from Trump to Adolf Hitler. This is not even an analogy worthy of master and the apprentice. But Trump displays similar markings. His language, his demeanour, his aspirations to greatness brook no criticism. He takes no prisoners. Rather he likes to think he takes no prisoners. He lacks the acumen to see beyond his narcissism. And beyond there, lies nothing.

Ninety years ago, Hitler was slowly making his name again after his release from prison for the failed 1923 putsch. His prohibition from public speaking had been lifted.

Volker Ullrich in his magisterial first volume Hitler: Ascent 18189-1939, cites a report from a police observer on attending a Hitler rally:

“In his speech, Hitler used vulgar comparisons, tailor-made to the intellectual capacities of his listeners and he did not shy away from even the cheapest allusions.

“His words and opinions were simply hurled out with dictatorial certainty as if they were unquestionable principles and facts. All this manifests in his language as well, which is like something merely expulsed.”

Thomas Mann, Nobel laureate and German exile, wrote – again from Volker – for his countrymen and women to fight against a “‘gigantic wave of eccentric barbarism and primitive populist fairground barking”. National Socialism was a ‘politics of the grotesque’. To which, Ullrich writes, Goebbels said: “Our people spit on the head of Thomas Mann.”

It is no far stretch to cross the bridge from then to now.

In 1938, Hitler told a rally:

“Despite the really exemplary discipline, strength and restraint which National Socialists preserved in their revolution, we have seen that a certain portion of the foreign press inundated the new Reich with a virtual flood of lies and calumnies.
The best proof for showing up these lies is success. For if we had acted during these five years like the democratic world citizens of Soviet Russia, that is, like those of the Jewish race, we would not have succeeded in making out of a Germany, which was in the deepest material collapse, a country of material order. For this very reason we claim the right to surround our work with that protection which renders it impossible for criminal elements or for the insane to disturb it.

“Whoever disturbs this mission is the enemy of the people.”

He wasn’t the first: from the French Revolution, to Lenin and Stalin, the phrase has been used as justification and war cry. In 1917, Lenin was on his way to Moscow. Hitler, after being wounded, was sent back to front in WWI.

Here is the world, 100 years on. Of course, these are different times. We’ve done more civilisin’ now, as Mark Twain might have said.

The song, and the oratory, however, of the tyrant remains the same.

Do not be fooled.

Warwick McFadyen is a freelance writer and editor

. 

By Warwick McFadyen

There is a new task for Sisyphus. It is to see things as they truly are. A boulder to Everest would be easy compared to this. One needs to know the true shape of people and events to make sense of their place in the world. But truth is slave to many masters. And now we find ourselves in a world described as post-truth, amid a war of facts and alternative facts. Technology has made the ferocity of the battle much worse than previous eras. The bombardment is unceasing. Sooner than anyone can realise, perhaps already, this is situation normal. There is no going back. Sisyphus is stranded.

To gain this clear-eyed perspective requires trust. What then, in giving our trust to leaders and parties, can we hold close to be the definition of right? I don’t mean in the ideological/political spectrum. I mean in the universal, ethical sense of the word – to do no harm, to act in kindness, to do unto others what you would wish them to do unto you. It is here the road diverges. One leads to the circles of communities where power holds little sway, where the essence of the community is the welfare of the people. Call me a hippy. I’ll put a flower behind my ear.

The other leads into the dark forest. You can get lost in there forever. It is where we, across our modern democracies, are now. Whatever shafts of light get through the trees that we believe are the truth only serve to cast more shadows.

Everything is relative. We can kid ourselves it is not. We can say there are absolutes, lines and bridges that cannot be crossed in how we behave towards each other. We have constructed laws to bind our actions to our expectations. We call this society. And everyone lives in society.

But we are, if nothing else, magnificent at self-delusion. We are all individuals. (The joke is beautifully and simply rendered by the Monty Python team in The Life of Brian. But I digress.) All we are, individuals. We bump against each on the river of life, form unions of common purpose, break away, stay together, are buffeted this way and that, are moved by currents small and large, until we reach the infinite ocean, or should I say ocean of finite – the one and only certainty. Each life has its own meeting place with the sea.

If history has taught us anything it is that we are not very good students of our history. While on one side of the ledger are the giant steps in, for instance, eradicating diseases that had eradicated millions and for increasing the longevity of those lucky to be born in affluent countries (pity those in such countries but who are left behind. Australia says sorry, and truly means it. But getting our hands dirty in the dust of a history and the conditions that we made? Sorry.).  Life has become a lifestyle, an aspirational goal far removed from our ancestors where life was a matter of survival. Who could not want that? The world is a village on a laptop.

And yet. How we treat each other economically, through government and corporate entities, shows time and time again that it is not the poor who build the walls. It is not the poor who invade other countries.  Doing the right thing in this rarefied world is a compromised concept, a manipulation of the marketplace of beliefs, a matter of self-interest.

And yet. There are many charities, and goodhearted people and institutions fighting the good fight to help others. The exception, however, does not prove the rule. But we believe it to be so to stroke the better half of our souls, our enlightened angelic side, and whisper that really in the long run, good will prevail, that if enough people of such intent rise up, the dark night of our being will fade into the horizon. But these things do not die. One phrase will suffice – collateral damage. This constant war footing between political adversaries and between ideologies makes truth not only the first casualty, but the eternal collateral damage. That being so, how then can we trust the motive of those in this realm of power to do the right thing as we who are not define it?

The next time a president or prime minister speaks, ask yourself, Is that the whole truth?

You don’t need to. It never will be.

Warwick McFadyen is a freelance writer and editor

By Warwick McFadyen

Scene: The Oval Office.

Time: After midnight.

US President Biff Trump is pacing the room. Back and forth, Back and forth. He is alone. He is agitated. He constantly swaps his mobile phone from one hand to the other. At times, he stops mid-step and starts to send a text, then halts, his fingers frozen. He resumes pacing. He is talking to himself.

‘No one will miss it. What did Sweden ever do for the world? Tucked up near the North Pole, funny accent, one pop group, fjords and pine forests. Nah. Give the world time, they’ll come round to my way of thinking. I could say it was a slip of the fingers, but that would be fake. Best that there are no more Swedes. I can do without the embarrassment. So I said something that wasn’t quite right, not that I’d ever admit that. I was just giving an alternative fact, not that the Swedes saw that either. They were too pedantic for their own good, and making fun of me. Me! The most powerful leader in history. Now where are they? They’re nowhere on this Earth. Hahahaha. And it only took two bombs. That’s what I like, and it’ll play well with the crowd. Two bombs. That’s time, motion and labour efficiency for you. Didn’t even have to leave the US. No billions of dollars spent on invasion. No messy deaths and injuries, no endless funerals to attend, no flags to salute, no shaking hands or hugging strangers, errggghhh. Nothing. Press, bingo, gone. Now who’s the celebrity? Pay attention to that do-gooders. Look and learn world.’

A song comes into Biff’s head. It’s catchy. He starts singing along:

‘No one likes us
I don’t know why
We may not be perfect
But heaven knows we try
But all around
Even our old friends put us down
Let’s drop the big one
And see what happens

We give them money
But are they grateful
No, they’re spiteful
And they’re hateful
They don’t respect us
So let’s surprise them
We’ll drop the big one
And pulverize them.’

Ah yes. Who’s the boss now? I’ll drop the big one… Who’s going to throw one back? I’ve got thousands, thousands of them. What’s the point of having something and not using it? It’s dumb, just plain dumb. And I’m not dumb. I’m a smart guy. I’m the President of the most powerful country in the history of the world! Haha. You can’t get to be standing where I am by being dumb! (He bends down and whispers into his hand, ‘Hehehe unless you just actually outsmarted them hehehe.’) Smart? Outsmart? It’s the same deal, mostly the same letters anyway, he shrugs.

Still, there will be the press conference this morning. If anyone asks did I have anything to do with the disappearance of Sweden, I’ll just reply, No. The disappearance of Sweden is fake news. It’s fake news everybody. I’ll tell them I had a look at a world map just before coming in and Sweden was still there. So I think my alternative fact trumps yours. I mean where would we be if maps lied? You wouldn’t know where to build a wall for instance. I’ve been consulting my world map for my wall with Mexico, and it’s going to be so great that it is going to be seen, so I’m told, from space. Can you believe that folks? From outer space.

Biff’s phone rings.

‘Hello, Vlad. Yes of course this is a good time. Always good to hear from you. Have I heard Sweden no longer exists? No I didn’t. It’s very later over here. Everyone is asleep. Except me of course; heavy is the burden of those who wear the crown eh Vlad always having to keep an eye open. What did you say? Did I know which way the wind was blowing? Isn’t that a Bob Dylan line? Who’s Bob Dylan, oh never mind, a third-rate hillbilly commie folksinger we seem to have too many of over here. You put all yours in the gulag haha. What’s this about the wind? What, the wind is blowing very strongly west to east and some very large mushroom clouds are blowing in your direction from where Sweden used to be? That’s terrible Vlad. Are you sure they’re not fake clouds? Yes, sorry, of course I believe you’re telling the truth. Yes, this isn’t a cheap reality show. Of course of course Vlad. Any help you need. Just ask. Vlad, I can’t hear you. Is that coughing? You should get to a doctor. Vlad?

The call ends.

Biff can’t control the compulsion. He must tweet, something, anything:

@therealbiff  Our fine-tuned machine will defeat the enemy of the people!

@therealbiff All news is fake! HAPPY PRESIDENTS DAY – MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

‘There, I feel better now.’ Biff starts to sing: ‘No one like us, I don’t know why….’

Warwick McFadyen is a freelance writer and editor

By Warwick McFadyen

A park bench, mid-morning. Friends Guildenstern and Rosencrantz discuss an energy crisis over a lump of coal. The climate soon becomes somewhat heated.

Rosencrantz: What are you holding in your lap?

Guildenstern: This, my friend, is a genuine lump of Australian-made coal.

Rosencrantz: And why are you holding a genuine lump of Australian-made coal? It looks dirty and heavy.

Guildenstern: Yes well my friend that is where you are wrong. This lump of coal is as clean as a freshly scrubbed baby. And light? Why it’s as light as a feather. It just looks dirty and heavy to you because you are ignorant of its many qualities.

Rosencrantz: (sighing) Do tell.

Guildenstern: First and foremost Rosencrantz, it keeps us warm. It may not look like it does, but trust me, without this little lump and its millions of brothers and sisters we would be freezing as if we lived in a cave like our ancient ancestors.  And it gives us power, such power.

Rosencrantz: How is it going to do that while we sit on this bench? That’s clearly absurd even by your loose definition of absurdity.

Guildenstern: That is where you are misguided.

Rosencrantz: Misguided! It’s a lump of rock. What are we supposed to do with it, rub it against our skins until we ignite? Until we spontaneously combust? That will keep us warm alright as we melt into a puddle. Then it won’t matter.

Guildenstern: Please Rosencrantz enough with your sarcasm. My lump, and yours too since we are in this thing called life together, is plainly a metaphor.

Rosencrantz: A metaphor?

Guildenstern: Yes of course. Did you really think a lump of compressed plant matter composed mainly of carbon sitting in my lap can do anything at all? I hold it for a purpose.

Rosencrantz: Yes?

Guildenstern: To show you, and the world and its passing parade, that my way of thinking is better than yours, that with this magnificent piece of anthracite I cradle is one of the building blocks of civilisation and civil society. And what’s more it shows that I am not a coalaphobic, as you appear to be. For shame.

Rosencrantz: A coalaphobic? Now I know you have fallen off the edge of reason.

Guildenstern: You can hardly deny it Rosencrantz. You make your judgments on its colour and its origins. For shame. Don’t be scared. Don’t be scared. It won’t hurt you!

Rosencrantz: Good grief. It’s a lump of coal! It’s insentient. It has no life.

Guildenstern: To you perhaps, but others see it differently. To us, it has taken on a life of its own, and it gives life what is more. Which takes me back to my metaphor that I was trying to explain to you before you rudely interrupted me.

Rosencrantz: Go on then if you must.

Guildenstern: I must because it is evident that you have no idea how wrong you are and how right I am. It really makes me wonder on what level your intelligence works. Tell me, what do you see when you see my lump of coal?

Rosencrantz: A lump of coal.

Guildenstern: No you don’t. Try again. Close your eyes.

Rosencrantz: How can I see with my eyes closed?

Guildenstern: It’s easy, myself and likeminded coal people do it all the time. Try again.

Rosencrantz: Very well.

Guildenstern:  Are they shut tight?

Rosencrantz: Yes.

Guildenstern: Light is not getting in?

Rosencrantz: No.

Guildenstern: So, what do you see?

Rosencrantz: I see a foolish man with a lump of coal.

Guildenstern: Let me explain. Again, the coal is a metaphor. To true believers, it is not a lump, it is a monarch. King Coal, lord of the realm of our senses and beliefs! We live by its ineluctable laws of economics. Don’t you see Rosencrantz, King Coal flows through our being, how we view the world, how we act, how we reconcile good and evil. It is the river of life. It does not pollute as so many others have you believe. We are not stupid. Would we deliberately sabotage life to maintain our sense of position, power and privilege? It’s offensive. And that is how it keeps us warm, by this knowledge glowing within.

Rosencrantz: Could it not be the sun rising overhead, too?

Guildenstern: Well, possibly if you must there might be a small degree of that. But could you imagine, an ideology based on the sun? What primitive madness would that be? And we are not primitives. Would people have elected primitives to govern their lives? Come now, a little sense.

Rosencrantz: No, you are right. You have your lump of coal to prove it.

Guildenstern: My lump of King Coal, my friend. Address it properly if you don’t mind.

Warwick McFadyen is a freelance writer and editor

By Warwick McFadyen

I am standing on a station platform in Melbourne. It’s peak hour. A train pulls in. It’s so full I decide to let it pass and wait for another. In a few minutes another pulls in, but it’s the same story. Full. The third train is half empty, I board it and make my way home, accompanying the other travellers. I’ve read that each train service at full capacity can carry 800 people. So, in two-and-a-half trains 2000 people are making a journey home.

I am standing on a station platform. The full-capacity trains stop and take off, but I do not see commuters; I see the faces of the unknown, the asylum seekers of Manus and Nauru. This is a trick of the conscience upon the conscious. I only recognise a handful of faces, maybe fewer names. They are, in reality, going nowhere. But their faces tell a story of deprivation. It is one of inhumane treatment built on political expediency and despicable trading of life for opportunism. It is an inglorious chapter in our nation’s history where puffed-up nationalism turns refugees into criminals.

It can turn one refugee who thought of Australia as a haven to flee where he was offloaded. Iranian Loghman Sawari, 21, sought a good life, but he ended up on Manus, where he has been for three years; on the brink of bleak despair, he managed to get to Fiji, only to be deported back to Manus. Kafka has nothing on us.

The face on the trains do not comprise an army of invaders. It is merely two and a half trains. And yet we have no room for these refugees in Australia, nowhere in this vast land, in this continent of 7.5 million square kilometres. Sorry, we’re full up. Go somewhere else. There are more than 65 million displaced people in the world, so it just as well we’re so far from anywhere.

And the government policy, no matter who the government is, is this: If you arrive by boat, wretched and torn from your home, we give you only this: Nothing. We put you somewhere else, out of sight.

And now we’re trying to put you somewhere else that’s even farther away from us.

Understand, this is how my government thinks:

You know (you have been told enough times) that you will never set foot on Australian soil. It will be better for your state of mind that you understand why this is so. (After understanding comes acceptance, repeat this enough times in the tropical sun behind wire and you will find the anger will dissipate.)

If we were to say, please come, we have plenty of space, we have hope to give you, we can give you asylum, then what message does that send to the world? In our mind, it sends the wrong one. We did not establish Operation Sovereign Borders, redefine your humanness as illegal maritime arrivals, and strut the world stage saying, as former immigration minister and now Treasurer Scott Morrison said, that the world was now catching up to us! for nothing.

If we were to say welcome, it also says that we are soft in the heart and soft in the head. The avarice of people smugglers will rise and more of you will come. Our borders will bleed. Soon enough, waves upon waves of refugees will be washing through our cities, sullying our way of life, tainting our stream of daily normality with their wretchedness. It took 200 years for our bigotry to refine itself into the thread that runs through our actions. This you should know, is how some people think. Others, the do-gooders, think we can accommodate you. Remember this, they are not the government.

It takes a steely determination to acknowledge and yet still refuse asylum for the 75 per cent of you on those islands who have been deemed refugees through official channels. We even risked a falling-out with America over trying to offload 1250 of you. And you were almost gone (even further) from our sight except for the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. Trump only sees the deal, and the pity for you is that he says it is a dumb deal. You can understand his point. What would he see as his advantage from going through with the deal when he has just banned refugees entering the United States? Grumpy isn’t the word for it. “Extreme vetting” is your lot.

Speaking to business executives, Trump said countries were taking ‘’advantage of us … really terribly taking advantage of us. I have a lot of respect for Australia, I love Australia as a country. But we had a problem where for whatever reason President Obama said that they were going to take probably well over 1000 illegal immigrants who were in prisons and they were going to bring them and take them into this country, and I just said ‘why?’ Why are we doing this? What’s the purpose?”

He thought some of you perhaps could become the next Boston bombers.

Perhaps this is what you’re planning when you are not planning to self-harm or kill yourself. You cannot plan to come here anytime ever again in your life, even if decades later you have by some miracle survived hell, restarted your life in another country. The stain upon you in our eyes is forever, and in the law.

The Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull believes the deal with America may still happen. Manus and Nauru prisons, sorry we call them detention centres (as in detention equals you’re just being held for a little while after school and centres, really it’s like a neighbourhood community hall) will be shut and all this, and you, will be a distant memory.

You may believe in a miracle and that Turnbull will override politics and say, You know what, this is wrong. I should be doing the right thing and the right thing is to give you asylum.

This is a message to the world, too. It speaks of a purity of the heart. And you know, should you ever meet any of us, we will find us very warm and open-hearted. We pride ourselves on such qualities.

Warwick McFadyen is a freelance writer and editor