Dear reader we return to our saga, a train approaches and for our heroes, a last chance, on a platform with no name, to a destination unknown, and no ticket in their hand. Will this be the end? Or the beginning of the end? Or the end of the beginning? Or the preface to the beginning and a footnote directed towards the end? Like the Coalition’s Climate Policy it’s open ended and plausibly meaningless, which ensures its status as a document of our time. Read on…..
Indeed the light was growing from a pallid incandescence to a deeper throbbing glow. Within a moment Sophies Sobrani wasn’t the only object illuminating the gloom.
‘Yes!! It’s a fuckin light allright Sophie affirmed, it a train. A fucken train and this is what I’ve been waiting for. The phone call must have registered without anyone answering, and here, (she pointed towards the light) evidence of just how advanced Australian know-how was in the 50’s. All by itself, valve technology, and seamlessly running as it was designed. A train to take us out of the past and into the Future! But Im afraid for you boys, you’re gonna have to wait behind’.
With that statement we could hear the click of the safety catch, and the gleaming gun metal of the MP 40 as she pointed squarely at us.
‘Ah Sophie, if it’s a train might there be people on it?
Christian as a top debater at St Custards College for Boys. Unaware the he would be promoted from Attorney General to the status of Blind Trust. The highest tier for any Australian politician.Even higher than Cinq Ports!
Ces, ready for such an ultimatum was quick off the mark. Though not as sharp as a fully accredited Fair Work Commissioner, he had done a bit of debating in distant schooldays and with the same precise logic that propelled Christian Porter from Federal Attorney General into the heights of a blind trust, he threw his all in to assuage the gun-happy Sophie. If this was a card game, the pack had been dealt and the roll of the dice was immaterial. But as a last chance, everything rode on the next move and rather than play the victim which would mean certain death, he tried to appeal to what mattered most to Sophie, her image.
’Ah Sophie, if it’s a train might there be people on it? People who might think it was un-sporting of you to just shoot us here in the spot. Now I know that you work for people high up like Angus and Xi, but if you graduate from your position of Fair Work Commissioner and want to run the United Nations as Mathias does, or go onto bigger things, you might need to think about your public image. Even in Australia, people don’t associate, he paused, ‘yet, knocking off opposition just cos they disagree with you. I mean it’s very non-woke, but you’ve gotta think of your image long-term. Is killing us worth it’?
Sophie was up all night designing these placards. A proud moment in her public life.
We could see Sophie mulling this over, a chance to be rid of the three wise men, and the perhaps if word got out, the consequences. If there were passengers some of them might go soft- cock and dob her in or worse, claim our deaths for themselves and thus get promotion over the top of Sophie. That was the thing that really worried Sophie about getting enough credit for doing things HER own way! That’s why it still rankled her that in years past when Julia tried to carbon tax, Sophie didn’t get credit for her Ditch the Witch placard. She’s been up all night doing it, and felt that it as he most important piece of public service she’d done to date.
Rather than give a direct reply (she was cunning we could tell) she changed the subject, ‘See that train up there? Quent replied; ‘Might it be a tram or another light rail conveyance’?
‘Shut up! Of course its a bloody train’! Sophie replied, ‘but not one you’d be familiar with. Australian rail, this one is unique, it always comes on time, and we don’t have trouble with the rail unions and you wanna know why?
Why?
Because it’s all entirely automated.
‘Ditch the Witch’ was a 3.am inspired flash of genius!
And controlled by its driver, a fully automated 1950’s cybernetics industry robot, one we affectionately call…..’Bjelke’!.
Sophie rightfully claims credit for both poster designs, (now on display at the National Portrait Gallery) as her own.
Yes he’s had a few overhauls but in the end, for this environment nothing beats valves and oiled components for durability and reliability. 1950’s Australian tech, never surpassed. And when they take out the satellites, this valve technology will still perform flawlessly, and keep performing for the next thousand years
‘Charlotte’, who promoted leadership roles for women in Public transports heyday.
A thousand years that sounded eerily familiar. In her tight leather jacket and knee high jack-boots, the belt and the rake of the officers cap she either looked like a dwarf rendition of ‘Night Porter’, or just a size challenged member of Victoria Police. For those readers not old enough before Christian Porter and his bags of cash, there was a starlet called Charlotte who performed a very sexy S&M routine as a night porter on a train in the olden days where people liked to go to rally’s, salute and generally dress up in uniform and march eastwards. A. Bit like the state of Victoria, but with more theatre. That’s cos they weren’t, (having fun in public places) banned as in Victoria.
The dim, dark dungeon like cavern became suffused with a glow. The glow that only an incandescent bulb could give, like the fog lamps on an old Bentley or the sulphurous glow that French cars used to have before the euro squashed the colour of national characteristics under the dun- coloured miasma of standardisation. It was warm, and redolent of hope, whatever it was. A train, a conveyance, a monorail, an articulated trolley-bus, its warmth and shimmering progress was redolent of hope, and with all the despair of Sophies monologues we had reason to hope. For without hope, (akin to the Coalitions Australian Way climate policy”) we mere mere chattels.
‘What is this light from yonder’? Sophie ghasped. (Quent saw his opportunity in celebration of AUKUS) ‘Oh say….. Can you see? By the dawns early light”?
Charlotte talks to Mike Paluzzo (Border Force) about maintaining punctuality and character checks on enemy aliens and untrustworthy citizens who are caught travelling without a valid Myki
‘Is Dawn Fraser with us’? Quent quipped, ‘I had no idea there was a swimming carnival on’?
Are Ces and Quent off for a swim? Hard to find a public pool in the outback but is that all on Sophie’s mind? Find out in the next absorbing episode, ‘Sophie’s train might have blood on the tracks’, or ‘Choo Choo and it’ll make life easier to swallow’.