The Orphans Haunting Goodbye Road

Cafe Locked Out, Stories from the Road.

It’s 5 am, and while Kelli sleeps, and mummers in her dreams, I’m writing this in Florence, who is camped in a forgotten car park in a beach town called Copacabana

David and Max, Image: MGG

.During the day, David pointed out the Prime Minister’s house.
“It’s one of those on that hill,” he said. “Four point six million dollars’ worth.”

He was here, with his entourage, the other day. The media filmed him in the pub, going, “This is my new local.” Just with a lisp.

David has been living in the car park.

Goodbye Road, Lyrics MGG, music, AI.

Next to him, in his son’s station wagon, lives Max, his son’s German Shepherd.

Once, Dave flew the world as a charming and handsome air steward for Qantas. And that smile of his—the one he can still use to disarm anyone—is alive, as he rolls off his stories like the town’s oracle.

When the lockdown hit, Dave took off. Unvaccinated by choice, he lived on the empty regional highways and back roads, camping here and there, always expecting to be pulled over, but that never happened.

I found him in the Canberra protests when, well-dressed, he separated himself from the great herd of protesters and, looking to all the world like a stylish tourist, approached a line of masked police officers, with their blue gloves and pepper spray canisters, and asked the most senior cop he could find if this was where he joined the tour.

“Tour?” the copper asked. “What tour?”

“The Satanic Tunnel Tour. I’ve just done the one in the Vatican, and they recommended it.”

Yes, he did actually ask that, which still makes me smile as I type this.

Across the road, the waves are pounding the beach like an artillery barrage from a discontent war, and they kept rhythmically firing as last night, Dave and two other men sat in the car park, where we shared our stories from this war.

And as the rain fell as gentle as the tears of angels, Dave opened up about the daughter he lost when she was seventeen months old. He believes it was the MMR vaccine and tells us how her death certificate read SIDS. That was all he said, and the anger still corrupts him.

One of these is Albo’s House

“But I’m trying to be happy, you know. What else can you do? But then this government … they owe me four years. People keep telling me to move on, but I can’t get past it, you know. I’m owed retribution. I want it.”

One of the guys, who is vaccinated, clearly can’t comprehend the foundation of Dave’s discontent, so out of kindness, he offers David the same advice—move on—stating that Dave should focus his energy on preparing for the economic collapse. “It’s coming,” he says, using his hands to paint a mushroom cloud. “It’s coming.”

But I get it. And so does Peter, the third man, as calmly, I try to explain.

“It isn’t the fact that we were ostracized. It’s the fact that for the majority of these past few years, especially early on, we lived under the distinct possibility that they would come for us.

The pandemic of the unvaccinated, sang the choir of puppets who fronted MSM, as the health minister of Queensland stated that we were oxygen thieves. And never forget that all over the world, and all across Australia, despite the worst plague since the Black Death, they raced to build their resilience camps—rows of huts that looked like they’d been built by IKEA, all surrounded by walls topped with multiple rolls of razor wire.

We heard the hate, and we saw too—through the windows to their souls—them closing our doors in their hearts. It was this that let us know that if the authorities did come looking, you, our loved ones, wouldn’t hide us. In fact, chances are, you would be the ones pointing us out.

Move on, they say now, like they want us to believe the lie that the darkness we saw is no longer there.

Move on, they throw back over their shoulders, as from under their apathetic masks—required to protect their souls in this new norm—where you can be diagnosed on a Monday with the Big C that will take you back to the gods in a week.

Move on.

How?

We saw you not only cave to the fear, but we felt you quietly agree to sacrifice us.

That’s why you stayed silent as we lost our jobs. That’s why you agreed to ban us from Christmas and christenings and weddings and, of course, funerals. We watched you believe their lies about us and comment, in hate speech comments that Facebook wouldn’t censor, where you wished the police had used real bullets.

This is why we are so close. For in that time, we strangers, we black sheep, we were all that we had. That was why, when we hugged, we hugged—and still hug—like people who had found someone lost in the wilds.

“Fucking right,” says Dave. “If they did come, and it looked like they would, I had a contingency plan. Lots of us did.”

“I was shit scared,” said Peter. And I can see and feel the fear haunting his eyes, as those waves—that we can’t see—pound and re-pound the beach; promises from a war that has not forgotten us. The ones who, as those around us lost their minds, drove to meet this tyranny head-on. In our protests and on the steps of their Parliaments, our unmasked faces breached their waves, until their army of fear retreated into the shadows haunting their conquered souls.

“What are you talking about?” said Kelli, her eyes as wise and wary as an owl. “They could still come for us,” she said, as alone, she leaned against Florence—her home—as her resilient elegance, those protective wings, sheltered all her unspoken and active wounds.

But once again, the sun rises. As I write this, I’m watching its hope rescue my keyboard from the darkness.

Soon, we’ll be packing up and heading north. We are en route to another 8:32 Gathering—which is like a modern-day corroboree—a joyful meeting of orphans, who found each other by having the courage to challenge their suffocating night, by holding up our souls, like streetlights illuminating Goodbye Road.

Michael Gray Griffith

04/03/25

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