Preparing the ‘Drums of War” the most powerful Queenslander since Bjelke’s wife Flo.
We return to our saga, still, (if you can remember how this story began) no closer to finding the heinous villain who so cruelly defiled our Tea-lady Mrs Culthorpe on secondment to our nations parliament as an intern. With no resolution in sight, we must wait as Vladimir surely does for a victory of sorts. Resistance seems futile. Even with Australia’s bravest and most noble soldier ever, ‘Benny-Boy’ Roberts Smith our heroes, and their new side-kick Terry seem no match for the over-arching power and obduracy of Australia’s most powerful individual who goes by the name of ‘Dutto’. More powerful than Twiggy and Gina put together, Dutto knows everything. And with his finger on the trigger, and a chorus grafted from the ‘Drums of War,’ our heroes have discovered the hideous truth, That ‘Dutto’, all along was a Queenslander, Yes!
In spite of their hideous deformities this small band of Queenslanders RULE the entire nation!
But there was worse to follow, that Dutto was born at Radium Springs and has a mutational claw. Dutto has demonstrated to them his claw-power and like Barnaby, Pauline, George, Clive, Bob and Matt he has demonstrated the awful truth that all Queenslanders are DIFFERENT! Their leaders to a man and woman all suffer a hideous deformity caused by being irradiated as kiddies at Maralinga and they’ve regrouped in the only state where such hideous and vile deformities of personality and physical presence, would go unnoticed. Queensland.
The pall of the nuclear age has returned to wreak havoc. Only our heroes know the truth. But dead men tell no tales. Will this be their death provoking final moment, or just another day of election 2022.
Unstoppable, and in spite of their hideous aberrant mutations they melted into Queensland society where their deformities would go unnoticed!
‘Ha ha ha’, Dutto laughed in a sinister, and triumphalist manner, ‘Once this election is over I’ll have all of you off to the Solomons”! He paused relishing the prospect of his first military campaign, using us as ‘human shields’. ‘Whichever way you look at it, you Benny-Boy will lead. If you get wiped out by the Chinese I’ll just say you were renegades trying to annexe the Solomons to Queensland just as we did new Guinea back in the 1890’s. And if you fail, as you surely will. No one will be the wiser. You’ll be snuffed out faster than Sam Dastyarii did when he went one step too far at electoral fund-raising’. Dutto, then, inextricably, spoke an entire sentence in mandarin. We think it was mandarin, but before we could ask him he sniggered and snarled, and his claw hand snapped viciously in the air.
To impose their very own skewed logic to the political process
‘SILENCE! He bellowed, and as we sat in terror, wondering what was next as his claw- hand started clicking, and from his chrome-dome head, smooth and waxen like the full-moon twitched. Then to our utter amazement from his forehead sprouted two feelers. The feelers, like antennae spiralled out from the skull-like orb. We could almost detect sparks of static electricity, as he focussed with all his might on something beyond the dusty dark forlorn streetscape,
‘What is it I whispered to Ces’ ?
‘Dunno, he’s trying to hear something. Or feel something’? chimed Benny. ‘Yup, it’s like a yabby looking for sea slug, or a cockroach looking for a corner cupboard or’, chipped in Terry.
To impose their irradiated IRON- WILL and determination to SURVIVE! AT ANY COST!
‘It’s like a prosthetic leg being banged together with another prosthetic leg’. We didn’t have the heart to tell Benny that his simile was a little far-fetched, but just smiled encouragingly.
All the while Dutto, half-man, half-insect, half-crustacea. (Well now you’re asking how can you have three halves? Well Dutto being a Queenslander can approximate anything if he really believes in it) .
Dutto twirled around, he beckoned with his normal hand, finger to his lips, a “ Shhhhhhhh”! Move and you’re breakfast’!
We gulped, we’d been down here so long we weren’t sure if it was breakfast or dinner time, and that reminded us that we hadn’t eaten in so many days…..and though there was salve in Terry’s Camels, they weren’t really filling in a satisfactory way. ‘That’s why smoking is a poor source of nutrition’, Ces surmised.
Deformities of mind, body and soul that were inescapable!
Then, from the corner of the street, we saw something. Dutto saw it first. A movement of sorts. In the middle distance, concealed from our view by an assortment of packing cases long abandoned. We could see Dutto’s feelers, antennae, twitching furiously and then we noticed his eyes, always pin-pricks, darkened sultana’s attached to the bun- like visage of his face aglow. And to our horror, we could see that they’d turned a dull cold deep-red. Being part crustacea, he was now more fully crustacea, and crab-like the eyes began to glow and then the most extraordinary thing happened. They emerged, from stalks just as a mud crab, or a mollusc would. It captivated us, one moment there stood Dutto more human than crustacea, and now he’d changed before our very eyes to become hideously the ‘full crustacea’! The eyes, protruding, the antennae twitching, and the crab claw clacking, he moved sideways to get a better look. As he did so, the noise, a noise eerily similar to the sound a rodent makes as it scurries inside a partition wall had us spell-bound. ‘What could it be’? I whispered to Ces. ‘Dunno’, came the standard reply. ‘Do you think its’?……. The whispering trailed off as the nearest crate burst open in a blinding flash, and then before our eyes had time to adjust to the blinding light we heard something whistling above us, and cowering crouching and compressing ourselves to the side of the wall we saw an object hurtling down upon the twitching, convulsive ghastly man-thing that was Dutto and with a resounding plop it hit him fair square on the head. Dutto recoiled with the impact and we could see his antenna, which were only seconds ago twitching and sparking with intense activity had crumpled like tinsel on a Christmas tree. The object, a crumpled jack-boot. As we recoiled with the horror as a greenish goo insectivorous and alien oozed from Dutto’s temple we heard the triumphant cry. “Thought you’d got the best of me Potato-head? Well you aint, Im a survivor and no matter how hard you try, you’ll never get the better of me’! The voice was high pitched and repulsive in its own cadaverous way and we all realised that in that instance ‘SHE’ was still alive. And whilst she prevailed there was still a chance of escape. But we also knew that it was another gamble, another impossibility, another forlorn hope, cos try as we might we knew that the irrepressible Sophie was back!
Finding safety, security and acceptance in a shared and hideous past erased from the public record. (or any press non-aligned to LORD MURDOCH of RUPERT)
What will happen in the next episode? Will it be a reckoning? Will Dutto, like Scomo recover from his frank character assessment for those within his own party, to be absent on every count and yet still emerge victorious? Only the tea- leaves know, and sadly like the Ms Culthorpe’s stint as tea-lady in parliament we may never know the culprit. For the only thing we did know, could know and might ever know amidst the known unknowns was the fact that we were still alive. But only just. Find out in the next episode;
‘Dead or Alive? With an election on, we’re only half-dead’,
United in the ETERNAL and UNYIELDING truth of ‘KING COAL’!
or, “Barnaby’s Choyce”!