Dear reader we return to our saga.
Lest we forget. The stunning victory gained in Flanders.
No preamble here as this is ANZAC day and solemnity and truth is the order of the day.
Dutto’s ‘Brave New World’!
(If you are eligible for an ANZAC Day Order as distinct from an Australia Day or Queens Birthday Order, we suggest you apply to our pcbycp ‘Order Authentication Service’ where your order will be vetted, calibrated and indexed against other order holders. Steam- cleaned and verified as ” authentic’ within two weeks or your order returned. A $200.00 dollar surcharge applies to all Orders lodged post-election 2022.)
Queenslanders generally hide mutations through the artifice of public office.
For a while it took us minutes to take in the spectacle of Dutto as he really was. A half crustacea, from the props department of ‘District Nine’. But what made us tremble more uncontrollably was the voice. It was Dutto allright. It had that instinctive Queensland twang to it. And yet it also sounded different. Eerily different. As if he’d gone the ‘full crustacea’. There was a rasping to his voice and it went to the very core of our souls. A penetrating, insinuating and coercive voice, that seemed impossible to resist. It went like this;
‘Well well well Benny-boy, we meet again’
People of ‘Occupied Countries’ often do not understand the bounty of ‘Freedom Freedom Freedom‘ ! !
Dutto said this in a manner so flat it was flatter than the irradiated wastes of Maralinga. . He emphasised his address to Australia’s greatest ever and most decorated soldier wth a snigger. Whether Benny liked it or not, he knew that Dutto had him taped. Whatever Benny-boy had done, thought, enacted and even planned Dutto knew. Dutto made it his business to know everything. And what Dutto didn’t know; ‘wasn’t worth nuffink’. (T. Abbott c. 2015).
Benny stood up, he dropped his weapons to the ground. He walked a step forward to the ghastly apparition, and with one mighty impulse, he tore off his fatigues and threw his tattered shirt to one side. With his chest emblazoned with the sacred V.C he knew that like garlic to the vampire he at the very least was, “PROTECTED”!.
‘Ha ha ha,, you think that’ll work’? Dutto sniggered.
People of Occupied Countries often fail to understand the benefit bestowed upon them by ‘THE RULE OF LAW’!
‘But…… you, you, you promised me protection if I stayed with Kerry and upheld the Anzac tradition”
“Anzac tradition’? Dutto scoffed.
Benny’s lantern jaw dropped. And from Lips hardened through drinking from prosthetic limbs he ghasped; ’HOW DARE YOU’! ‘Do you…… do you…… besmirch the honour, the unassailable sepulchre of ANZACKERY’?
‘Ha ha ha ha” Dutto laughed demonically, “Anzackery’? He paused, his cranium aglow with power. ‘I fucken made Anzackery’!
For a moment Benny looked utterly crest-fallen. Just as crest-fallen as he felt when he buried the tapes in his back-yard. His world. The world of mateship, heroics and honour had collapsed like an election promise.
‘But but’…… For Benny this was a bigger shock than punching his girlfriend, snotting his wife and threatening to top his mates if they squealed. ‘But….but,,…. but’,
As in Afghanistan they need to understand the legend of ANZAC in upholding CIVILISATION and ‘Australian Values”!….. to lift them from the curse of POVERTY!
‘Save your breath’! Scoffed Dutto.
Benny looked shaken, shrunken and dispossessed… ‘but… but… Dutto…. why are you here’?
Here, the voice boomed in a crustacean kind of way, Dutto moved sideways, (as a crustacea or mollusc does) for emphasis. ‘Why am I here? You fucken wanna know what a bloke like me is doing down here??? I’ll fucken tell ya. I know EVERYTHING so it’s only fair that you might know a bit about myself’!!!
He paused, his claw clicked and clacked menacingly…
And the the truth implausible, un- hearable, incomprehensible came as a thunderclap.
‘I was BORN HERE’!!!
Benny fell to the ground. He collapsed and writhed on the dusty surface. His whole world, a world of bravery, medals and knocking off wops in far-flung places for Australia evaporated. It was piteous. It was sad, it was epithetic, it was to watch, inwardly degrading.
People of Occupied Countries need to be EDUCATED, so that the message of ANZAC is understood and obeyed as an unasaillable FACT!
Ces offered him a Smartie to cheer him up.
‘Yes Benny-Boy’ Dutto replied implacably .. ‘you and yer mates might as well know. When they shut this place down I was born. Born beneath the atom bomb as you might say! My deformities kept me away from the outside world. My parents, two lab-technicians on secondment from the CSIRO’s Myxomatosis lab, who had experiments too important to leave, perished here. They perished alone when I was a young man. The only way I could survive with my deformity, and ineligibility for the NDIS, was to seek cover. So I sought cover in the Real World. That’s it Benny BOY, … YOUR WORLD!!
Dutto emphasised ‘YOUR WORLD’ with a crushing sense of irony!
He continued, clearly he’d had a long time to think of this soliloquy. He looked God- like in his black Victoria Police Special Response and Public Order Surveillance gear.
“And where could I go where such a hideous deformity would go unnoticed? Only one place in Australia? Queensland’!
‘Clive, Bjelke, Barnaby, George, Matt, Bob and Pauline are all different! Not just because they’re Queenslanders, but like me, they’ve prevailed in spite of their DEFORMITIES’!!
That’s it Benny-Boy! We Queenslanders are DIFFERENT!
We dare to be Different because we are different!! Clive, Bjelke, Barnaby, George, Matt, Bob and Pauline are all different! Not just because they’re Queenslanders, but like me, they’ve prevailed in spite of their DEFORMITIES!! And as this Benny-boy is ANZAC DAY, you can participate in something very special I’ve longed for. No matter how much Sophie tried to cruel it for me, I will always survive! That’s what we Queenslanders do. No two-bit Victorian Fair Work Commissioner can change the unalterable fact it’ll always be a Queenslander who runs this country because unlike you and your pissy mates we believe in RIGHT’!!
He had a point. In his star-trooper, storm-trooper uniform he looked pretty cool in a Bruce Willis kinda way. And scary too. Just his crab-claw was enough to scare the be-Jesus outta us.
‘And you know boys, I’ve got news for youse, after this election I’ll be Supreme Commander of this country’!
‘But won’t the P.M be a bit of a problem’, Ces tentatively and respectfully asked.
To understand that in failure, abject and total failure comes the benediction of “Clutching Defeat from the jaws of someone else’s VICTORY’!
“There will be no more P.M. I have a coup planned, and in a flash parliamentarians will be given the boot and anyone who doesn’t obey will be shipped off to the Solomons. There’s a lot of unexploded ordnance left over by the Japs, and I’ve gotta feeling the Chinese ‘ll want it cleared before they turn it into the world’s biggest off-shore REAL ESTATE OPPORTUNITY!
‘But, before I sweep all of you on your way I want you to celebrate ANZAC DAY. And I want you to think of the sacrifice made by all those diggers who died so we could have ‘Clean Coal’, Bet 24/7 and Midday television’!
‘What do you have in mind? You power-crazed War-mongering Bjelke-ite’? Ces blurted. Benny was too distraught to say anything he just shivered in a state of deep shock, as though his entire persona had turned to an LGBTI nuanced serve of rainbow-coloured custard. …
Dutto was undaunted. His ambition unchecked. “I want youse to sing along with me. A little tune my parents taught me before they KARKED IT! it was on the Hit-Parade back in 65, and it symbolises all that I believe in.. have you ever heard of a song called ‘Two little boys’?…
This was it. A song more hideous than anything Cliff Richard ever sang and worse even than ‘Chirpy chirpy cheep cheep’. We had nowhere to hide. We couldn’t escape. And for dramatic effect, Dutto picked up Benny’s Kalashnikov with his crab claw and just sliced it in two. The pieces falling to the dusty ground more suddenly than the turret of a T72 ‘cooking off’ when hit by a Stinger.
Only the NOBLEST shall be custodians of ANZACKERY!
We were stuffed! And as we began to sing, ‘Two little-boys’. We knew Dutto, his humour more sinister than the sign-writer who welded ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ above the holiday park portal we were not gonna be around when the music stopped playing. So as we sang, we slowed the tempo just long enough to give us a chance. An impossible chance, but one that symbolised like Gallipoli and Singapore a victory of sorts won from a crushing defeat. That was in our minds upholding the ANZAC SPIRIT! And the HOLY GRAIL of ANZACKERY!
But were we up to it? Did we have the mettle? Did we possess the right stuff?
Terry passed us a another Camel and lit it up. Defiant to the last at least he knew the verses, as none of us could remember the verses to ‘Advance Australia’ lest ‘Two-little boys’, and we droned on..
Will this be their last chorus? Is there room for an encore? Find out in the next melodically challenged episode, ‘Rolfs Riff is Ruff’ or “ Tie me kangaroo down un-sportingly, and don’t let the bugger loose Bruce’ …