You know.......

A Story by The Grappler

Just a little homily of a true occasion I spent on the roadside... and musings for the future....

Once a jolly homeless part-time casual itinerant worker
Camped by a billabong
Under the shade
Of a WorkChoices tree....
And he sang as he bitched
And waited for his pension rights....

......You'll come a-waltzing WorkChoices with me!

"You know ... (*settles down by the fireside again)....

In the year 1999.. after a lifetime of toil and innovation and hard work and dedication to my employers and my chosen ones, to my then dear departed family that I no longer had after growing up without one..... and all that....

I camped on a roadside with my faithful steed, a 1992 Falcon Station Wagon, beside me, as I stirred the embers of a fire in deep Winter in the Northern NSW Highlands, having expended my last petrol to get there.... and deciding... tragically as it turned out..,. to simply set down where I ran out of gas and make a new life at age fifty....

And I thought.. after three days on the roadside with a stew made of sausages bought down the road and waiting for pension day (disabled you see)... that in all truth the simple sunset and fireside were truly something wonderful... and I could simply get by with nothing.... and had few needs really.... just the gloaming and the cold, frozen nights of frost when I bedded down in the back of my wagon....

Yes - I thought as I watched the evening stars and went to bed early due to the cold..... this is what the original swagmen would have seen and enjoyed in a simple manner.

And I thought... you know... looking at my humble worn-out Falcon station wagon... I could do a painting of this..and call it 'The Modern Day Swagman and His Noble Steed'.....

And you know... I get a lot of criticism from kids who've never done one hard yard in their life here on this forum....they call me some sort of crazy person and some sort of entrenched bigot and someone who somehow hates gays and women and politicians and such... but ... you know.... I kinda get the feeling that after a while I have more than anyone the right to despise ... not hate you see.. despise as in putting way lower than myself.. those who think that everything that can be known is learned out of books and ideologies that exclude people such as myself... how exactly these same people could possibly tolerate sitting by that roadside ... as they will one day the way things are going... and how they will see that simple gloaming....

Or if they will see it at all.... you know... I kinda doubt that many of them will make it that far when things go down for real....

Blokes like me? Well ... we were just the start of it.. ripped off of our jobs, our rights, our families and homes, our right to a decent retirement for all our work.. you know what I mean..... but you can see it all happening right now for all the rest.. we were just the forerunners of the plague that would ruin us all....

Now the gu'ment wants to take away pensions to make their ends meets... well ... all I can say to that is that they caused this.. let them fix it... but in the meantime... there's one hell of a lot of blokes and sheilas who'll be looking at that gloaming... and working out for themselves how they are going to get past it, and even have a retirement apart from the roadside.....

G'night ... I gotta turn in.. getting cold again... but before I go.. you know... I'll be camping out again most likely soon.. when I march on Canberra to try to wrest back for yez all some semblance of what once was Australia and what was once a a fair go for EVERYONE in it....."

ADDS:- All this is true story...I went from owning two homes and having a Jaguar and a Daimler in the garage to nothing in five years... this is not a joke.

Some of you see me as some sort of well-heeled spokesperson for some sort of mythical right wing conservative idiotacracy.. you could not be more wrong.

What you think you've done... I did years ago... and one hell of a lot better. Now it's time to save what's left of what was once a great country.

For the gainsayers... EAT ME!