The nineteen-sixties were bleeding.
The decade was a violent, erratic transmission of signals that my hyper-focused mind could neither filter nor process. To a boy sitting on a hard wooden floor in rural Australia, the world outside was a sequence of sudden, catastrophic fractures projected through his parents.
First came the distant echo of the Kennedy assassination—a president shattered in broad daylight, a global gasp that rippled through the adults around me. Then, the marching feet of civil rights and the sudden silencing of Martin Luther King Jr. The world was tearing at its own seams, and the tears were broadcasting straight into our living rooms.
But it was Vietnam that truly split the sky.
The war wasn't an abstract concept; it was a daily intrusion of raw, unedited horror. I remember the flicker of the black-and-white television screen capturing a moment that permanently seared itself into my brain—the South Vietnamese general holding a pistol to the head of a Viet Cong captain on a Saigon street.
The blast was silent on our box, but the violence was absolute. The sudden, casual execution of a human life, captured in a frame and sent across the oceans to sit with me in the dark.
The next day the television was gone.
My father watched these signals not as news, but as prophecy. To him, the world wasn't just changing; it was ending. The chaos of the sixties was the literal handwriting of a terrifying, impending apocalypse. And his response to the bleeding world was simple, urgent, and final.
He decided we had to retreat from the earth entirely.
While the whole world held its breath for the moon landing, my father vanished. He left the house without telling me where he was going, leaving me entirely in the dark.
I was eight years old, crowded into the deputy principal’s lounge room alongside several of the surrounding kids, staring at a screen that didn't belong to us. We watched grainy, black-and-white shadows drift across the Sea of Tranquility. Man was arriving in the heavens at the exact moment my family was fracturing from the world.
It was about a week later that my father finally returned.
He brought no stories of space or progress, but he carried news of a different kind of destiny. He had found it. A property on the Mid North Coast NSW—cheap land, dry scrubland, a hard piece of country where he intended to start over. He also brought home a miniature Fox Terrier puppy named Trixie. We bonded instantly, two small creatures clinging to each other for warmth before the sky fell in.
When he told us about the property, his very first command was absolute:
Do not tell anyone where we are going.
That psychological weight of enforced silence was already deeply familiar to me, though it usually came from my mother. Our next-door neighbor had a daughter the same age as me, and we used to play in the backyard. One afternoon, Mum let it slip to someone that the girl was adopted. Then she remembered I was in the room. She snapped her eyes to mine and commanded me never to tell her.
I didn’t even know what the word adopted meant. I just knew, from the sharp, terrifying look on my mother's face, that I held a piece of explosive knowledge. My mind understood that this secret would somehow hurt her if it escaped my lips.
Lacking the social nuance to navigate it, I did the only thing my brain knew how to do to ensure safety: I stopped talking to her altogether. Our time in the backyard became awful and awkward. To keep the secret, I simply shut her out. I blocked her out completely.
Whether it was my mother's domestic paranoia, my father's apocalyptic flight, or my secret flights in the still darkness pretending to be asleep, the message from all sides was identical: The truth is dangerous. Keep your mouth shut.
Now, we were stripping our lives down to the bone for the final exodus.
The engine of our departure was a herd of purebred Friesian cows, given to my father by the Seventh-day Adventist dairy farm established around the College and factory where he worked. These cattle were our ticket to a new economy, a desperate gamble on survival in the scrub. We were converting our existence into livestock, preparing to drive them into a landscape that was entirely hostile to their survival.
Our departure became another classified file I had to carry in silence. I didn’t know why he wanted the move kept so quiet.
Looking back, I think it was one of two things: either he didn't want people to know he was fleeing the world because of his belief in Christ's imminent return, or he couldn't bear to let anyone know that his dairy venture was already collapsing before it began, because that hard, dry country wasn't suited for cattle. It was a choice between apocalyptic flight or shielding a private failure.
It was a massive, radical move, and he wanted no outside interference. But the point wasn't his reasoning; the point was that secrecy had become a defining, suffocating feature of my early upbringing. I was a child forced to live in the shadows of adult conspiracies.
The final departure was fractured.
My mother was still the Matron at the towns Old Peoples Home, locked into a contract she had to finish. She and my sisters stayed behind to fulfil that obligation.
When the vehicle was finally loaded for the drive north, Trixie sat right between us on the bench seat—a small, breathing shield against the empty road.
We arrived at the property with no power, no running water, just a thousand-gallon tank waiting for rain and a silence so wide it swallowed sound.
The “house” was an old fibro-clad shack. A single internal wall divided the five-by-eight-metre rectangle into two rooms.
The tank water was for drinking only.
Rationed. Precious.
For everything else, there was a shallow dam two hundred metres deep into the scrub. We would walk into the bush, dip our buckets into the dark water, and carry them back by hand. We heated it outside in a forty-four-gallon drum propped over an open fire. Life was reduced to basic physics: weight, wood, and water.
For the first six months, the property was an all-male incubator.
My mother and sisters were still down south, locked into contracts and finishing the life we had left behind. In that isolated fibro rectangle, it was just us men: my father, my brother, me, and my only companion, Trixie.
We didn’t go to a physical church during those months. Instead, we spent the Sabbath deep in the scrub. Every Saturday, Dad would lead us out into the dry bush, away from the shack. He would find a space among the trees, open his Bible, and deliver his own private sermons directly to the wilderness.
The sky was our ceiling, but the air was thick with a different kind of confinement. My brother was never interested. He sat in the dirt, restless and defiant, throwing out awkward, unanswerable questions that pierced straight through my father’s rigid certainty. He challenged the text. He challenged the authority.
His questions infuriated my father. In those quiet woods, their relationship existed on a razor's edge bordering on pure contempt. I stood between them—the silent witness to an ideological war—watching the veins tighten in my father's neck while the wind moved through the eucalyptus leaves.
It was there, sitting on a log under the heat of a makeshift pulpit, that the cosmic and the domestic became a single, terrifying architecture.
Fear was the first theology I ever learned.
Not love. Not wonder. Not reverence.
Fear.
It lived in the sermons that warned of a returning King who would split the heavens, a literal Second Coming where every eye would see Him and there would be no place left to hide. It lived in the songs we sang with shaking voices. It lived in the whispered adult conversations about the Investigative Judgment—the terrifying reality that my deepest, secret thoughts were being scrutinized in the courts of heaven. The end of the world was never presented as hope—it was absolute surveillance.
Every sermon planted the same thorn: He could come at any moment.
I carried eternity on shoulders too small for it. I carried the belief that one wrong thought could condemn me. I carried the terror of being left behind.
What adults called faith, my body experienced as hypervigilance. What they called obedience, I experienced as self‑erasure. Fear‑based religion doesn’t just shape beliefs—it rewires biology. It becomes the nervous system’s operating system.
Ontological Refuge
There is a place inside me that existed long before I had words for it— a quiet, star‑lit chamber where being itself feels lighter, where the universe folds inward and becomes a shelter.
I did not choose this cosmos. It formed around me the way a shell forms around a creature that has never known safety. An ontological necessity: if the world cannot hold me, I will hold myself in infinite space.
Out there, existence is a performance— a demand to speak fluently in languages I was never taught, to wear faces that do not fit, to move through systems that mistake silence for emptiness and sensitivity for weakness.
But in here, in the vast interior where stars hum softly, I am not required to explain myself. I do not need confidence or charm or the practiced ease of those who were born into safety.
In this inner cosmos, I am allowed to simply be— unmasked, unjudged, a consciousness floating in the only space that has ever felt like home.
And maybe this is my ontology: not the world’s definition of being, but the one I carved from necessity and survival, a universe within where existence is finally gentle.
