The Cheapest Freedom

Cafe Locked Out

He was from Sudan.
Six foot something, he was built like a warrior—but there was no call for warriors here.

We were parked near a small oval. Some young men were kicking a football to each other as suburbanites patrolled the edge, spoiling their pedigree dogs with an hour of exercise.
All the dogs were on leads, in obedience to the sign. Many had their poo bags tied like bows to their collars. A few wore electronic training devices hanging from the same collars—ready to give them a mild shock if they stepped out of line.

The Sudanese man had just finished reading the words stuck to our bus, including the main banner: Free Speech Defence.

He told us how he’d grown up in a refugee camp in Sudan. He had gone there himself, searching for an education—because outside of the camp, that wasn’t possible.

Years later, his asylum seeker application had been accepted by one of the bastions of freedom, decency, and fairness: Australia.
Now he lived in the Western Suburbs of Melbourne and had a good job working for the government.
No militia here to drag him off to their army or just shoot him. No waiting on the Red Cross to deliver food trucks.

Instead, he was renting an apartment. He was building a life.

“We got sent a memo,” he said. “Everyone received it. It stated that if we post anything about Israel and Gaza online—or even dare bring it up in conversation at work—we will be summarily sacked.”

This was all he wanted to talk about. But the only ones he could talk to about it were us.

I asked him if he wanted to do an audio interview, offering to conceal his name and alter his voice so it would be impossible to trace.
Free speech is important, we said. He agreed. Then, after pondering for a while, he declined—choosing instead to exercise a rarely spoken about, but currently our most prevalent liberty:

The Freedom to Endure.

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On the east side of the Wheatbelt in Western Australia, we’d been searching for the Australia few ever hear from.
Taking the smaller roads, we came across a one-street town, bordering a lake being slowly besieged by the local desert.

From the signage, it was clear the town survived on tourism—and this was off-season.

In the local Mitre Ten, I was exchanging a gas bottle when the owner, who was not in a good mood, started asking questions about our bus.

“We’re independent journalists,” I told him. “We like interviewing people about what they think of the current state of Australia.”
“We’re becoming communist,” he snapped.

These frontier towns come attached with a myth. You believe, initially, that people making a life out here must be self-reliant, tough—people who had decided they wanted to be far from government control.

I asked him if he’d do an interview. As he finished ringing up my bill, I watched him study our bus again.
Above the windows: Free Speech Defence, in bold red font.

After our transaction was completed, he declined.
For now, I guess, out of all the tools of liberty he’d been gifted at birth, he’d chosen—just for now—The Freedom to Endure.

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Our sky is long.
Sometimes, in the country, on these small roads, you can drive for what seems like hours before another car or truck passes you.
I see it as a land where only the dreamers can prosper—and even their hopes are not guaranteed.
Evidence? The brick ruins of houses that this old country is patiently dragging back into itself. Into its cockatoo silence.

But there is another silence here now—and it's been spreading in every town and city we’ve visited.
It’s no longer contained by COVID. It’s become the choice.
The default setting.

Voluntarily disarming the majority of us by offering—in silence—a trade.

To sweeten the deal, those marketing the silence have spent the last five years tormenting the outspoken.
Reiner Fuellmich has become the new Assange.
Other whistleblowers—like Barry Young from New Zealand, who released data proving a certain medical procedure was dangerous—have been violently arrested. Young now faces seven years in jail.
And a grandmother, who believed she had the right to protest, was pushed to the ground by Victorian police officers and then pepper-sprayed—twice—before being left to suffer. All of it recorded. A mobile phone. An iconic picture.

A picture posted so we don’t forget what the authorities did.
But does that same image just sell the deal wrapped in this new silence?

Freedom of speech is a dangerous freedom.
Around the world, there are unmarked graves full of those who exercised it—under political regimes where truth is still seen as a threat.

Even when the truth eventually emerges—and exonerates those who were once labeled conspiracy theorists—people still agree to the deal.

In hospital, a few nurses asked what I did. When I told them, three—on separate occasions—declared, in their own words:

“There’s no free speech anymore.”

They didn’t shout it. They didn’t even say it through gritted teeth.
They just said it quietly, with the tempered sadness of someone well into the journey of recovering from grief.

And then, if anyone else came within earshot, they returned to the safe silence offered by what is, perhaps, the cheapest liberty of all:

The Freedom to Endure.