What does it take to deserve a place at the table?

How a little imaginary town can remind us what the real world is missing.

Why sometimes the most human things happen in a place that doesn't exist.

There is a rather curious little corner of the internet where a top-hatted duck wearing a monocle can hold public office, a grey wallaby can walk around on gold-plated titanium knees, and a rat wearing a fedora considers himself an investigative journalist of considerable standing.

There are also five cats with a questionable attitude towards authority, an emu plumber, a camel, assorted townsfolk and enough extraordinary machinery to keep a small industrial nation occupied.

Welcome to Dusty Gulch.

Mahia: Where the Sheep Graze and the Rockets Fly

How a little bit of Kiwi ingenuity could help build the next frontier of artificial intelligence.

New Zealand has just been to the polls. Politicians have spent months telling voters what they intend to do with the country, what needs fixing, what needs changing and, naturally, why they are the people to do it.

But while the political circus has been packing up its tents, something rather more extraordinary has been happening on a quiet stretch of New Zealand's North Island east coast.

There are sheep grazing.

And rockets launching.

Not quite the usual combination, is it?

Beneath the still waters of Lake Argyle lies the ghost of a homestead -  Argyle Downs -  once the beating heart of the Durack cattle empire.

This is the story of how the Duracks rose from famine to fortune, and how the land they conquered finally claimed them back.

In the heart of Australia’s wild Kimberley, where the sun scorches the red earth and rivers carve ancient paths through rugged landscapes, one family’s name looms large: Durack. They weren’t born to riches, nor did they inherit vast estates, but through sheer grit, ambition, and an audacious cattle drive across thousands of kilometres, the Duracks carved out an empire. Yet, for all their triumphs, they knew their castles were built on fragile ground, vulnerable to nature's whims and the shifting tides of fortune. This is the epic tale of the Duracks, the cattle kings who ruled the outback - until their grass castles, like so many before, were swept away.

Operation Rolling Pin - The Liberation and The Battle that followed!

Special Dispatch from Dusty Gulch
By Roderick Whiskers McNibble, Chief Investigative Correspondent

The Cybertruck disappeared into the dust.

Back in Dusty Gulch, nobody spoke.

The WDP gave a faint, uneven thrum. Dusty McFookit was concerned.  The future of his beloved town - our beloved town - was at stake. Would Feline Force Five succeed in their daring mission?  Maureen watched the road. Trevor’s titanium knees clicked softly as he shifted his weight.

The sonic rolling pin was in Honklander hands, but for how much longer? .

And a question that the entire town was thinking but not asking out loud was " Who trained the Feline Force Five? " 

When I was a lad in Western Australia, the 5th of November used to be an eagerly awaited event. 

That was Guy Fawkes Night, commemorating the apprehension in 1605 of conspirators who plotted to blow up the British Parliament and were hanged and quartered.

Just the sort of thing a young Flysa could get excited about. 

The Catholic conspirators led by Fawkes, placed thirty-six barrels of gunpowder in an undercroft beneath the House of Lords in order to assassinate the Protestant King James 1 during the opening of Parliament, and place his young daughter Elizabeth on the throne as a puppet Queen.

The Planned Surrender of Australia: A Warning from 1989

E.D. Butler (1916–2006) was an influential Australian nationalist and founder of the Australian League of Rights. He was known for his opposition to international financial power and his advocacy of national sovereignty.

He was also a committed antisemite. His writings and the organisation he led promoted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and denied or minimised the Holocaust. I reject those views outright. They are abhorrent, and they must not be excused or forgotten.

But rejecting a man's prejudices does not require us to dismiss every question he raised. In 1989, Butler delivered a speech titled The Planned Surrender of Australia, examining what he saw as the cumulative loss of national sovereignty through international treaties, economic integration and the transfer of decision-making away from Australian voters.

More than three decades later, some of those questions remain uncomfortably relevant, not only to Australia but to many Western nations.