Her Body, Our Choice

Cafe Locked Out, updated pieces.

Mid 2022.

The Deplorables Tour. Darwin.

Her Body, Our Choice.

If I have to take it, I’ll take it, but they are not touching my daughter. Before the mandates, she had been working in retail. Now she hadn’t worked since December. When I met her, it was mid-May.

For 115 days in 2022, Kret, Wendy, and I circumnavigated Australia, stopping in most towns to see if all of Australia was happily compliant with the mandates, or whether there was dissent. In every town we found the dissenters.

Kret and Wendy slept in Wendy’s Winnebago, called Sandy after her father. I slept most nights in this swag. It was an extraordinary adventure within an extraordinary time.

Her Body, Our Choice.

She told me that Darwin was expensive and the dole was nowhere near enough. With few jobs on offer for the unvaccinated, she only had a few options. Move interstate, despite Darwin being her home—she’d been born here. Or she could start her own business, without money, for her savings were almost gone. Or, she could surrender and take the jab.

It was a Ted Talk with Bill Gates that saw her become suspicious. He was talking about population control via vaccines. It sent her wandering off and tumbling down our crowded rabbit holes, until she reached here, where she was walking through the streets of her home, explaining to me how she was working her way up to complying.

“‘It’s rape,’ she said. ‘That’s what it is. They want me to agree to be raped. Even my mother keeps urging me to give in.’”

And as she spoke, I wondered what had happened to all those feminists who had passionately pushed for decades, “My Body, My Choice.” It used to be a slogan decorating the sides of buses. Even the government had come on board and woven it into our vernacular. Initially, many of us liked it being there, because from a sovereignty perspective, it made sacred sense. But now they were using it to justify late-term abortions, where babies, who’d survived their unwanted births, were being left to die in bowls on stainless steel shelves, feeling perhaps, on some spiritual level, as welcome as junk mail.

But for my new friend, it was no defense. Just a gutted nursery rhyme from a forgotten war, sung only by those people, especially women, who for some silly reason, some selfish concept, did not want to be vaccinated.

These women, who were now being outcast, not just from employment but from their friends and families. Their only companion, their pride and integrity, this dogged determination to hold onto that God-given freedom, the one where they got to choose what went into their bodies. A freedom that was now economically besieged, as our society, now ruled by fear, coerced and insulted them, until they broke and agreed to be, as she stated, raped.

Were we all rapists now? For all of our good intentions, all the accolades we gave ourselves and our democracy, had we devolved into a choir of condescending crows cawing for compliance? Waiting on the decaying sidelines of morality for this young mum to sacrifice her principles, in order to keep a roof over her daughter’s head?

Us crows that now knew that the products didn’t work as they were supposed to. That knew, instead, that there was a chance that they could hurt her or worse. Then, to finish the victory, we slapped her in her now-vaccinated face, by having Sco Mo state, “No, no one was ever forced. It was always your choice.”

Then, astoundingly, because of political desperation in the midterm elections in the USA, they were challenging Roe vs. Wade, and in cities around the world, women were marching defiantly, while holding up signs that read, “My Body, My Choice.”

If she had been a nurse, or a doctor, society wouldn’t have lifted a finger to help her if she wanted to decline. So why would Darwin give a toss about the moral challenge faced by a young mum who used to work in retail?

That night she accompanied me to a gathering of the Darwin resistance. We were in a cheap hall, and the hall was full.

For a period, I was in an industrial kitchen interviewing people. One of them was a man who, as a child, had escaped Hungary with his parents. He spoke of a moment when, in the dark, near the border, they all hid in silence, moments away from death, which was a border guard holding his rifle.

The memory was so clear that he began to cry and told me that he had never told that story to anyone. In the end, the guard had turned out to be a silhouetted tree stump.

“And now the same forces we escaped are coming here,” he said. “I know it. I can feel it. And if it succeeds, then where do we run to? Where?”

Back in the hall, they asked me to do a small speech. So there I was on stage, with hundreds of strangers watching me, waiting, as though I had picked up, on my travels, some answers. When instead, I was just collecting questions. The main ones being:

“Where had my country gone?”

“And how had fear of a bad flu seen people turn on their fellow Australians with a clinical savagery that had no room for kindness or empathy, or in many cases, love?”

So instead, I shared the plight of this young mum and asked them if anyone had any work they could offer her. After the speech, in the time where everyone came together and shared war stories, two business owners approached me and said they could offer her a job. And I felt in both cases that they were making room for her, and I found this beautiful. And she said she would call them both in the morning.

Did she? I don’t know, for we had to leave before dawn. We were headed for Katherine and then across to Mount Isa. Long, straight, often empty and silent highways, where hope was a set of headlights far, far, far in the distance.

Michael

For a collection of Essays soon to be published by John Stapleton