Crack Up or Crack Apart

When the world gets grim, you’ve only got two choices: crack up or crack apart.

After days of heavy headlines and the suffocating weight of politics and history, sometimes the wisest thing we can do is pause, pour a cuppa, and remember to laugh. Yet I suspect many have gone past that point.

Australia has always been a country of people who crack up, crack a tinny, crack a joke, and move on. But even we are weary of watching our nation and our world crack apart.

Today I want to talk about the birth and death of humour - how the left lost what little they had, and how humour itself has shifted. Because when laughter dies and mockery takes over, humanity has lost its soul. And sadly, too many governments are legislating joy out of our lives. 

Dusty Gulch Dispatch: The Croc Cavalry & the Great Duckening

By Roderick (Whiskers) McNibble, Special Correspondent (still in hiding)

There are times in a rat’s life when you wonder if scratching a pencil in a wombat burrow matters at all. Whether your words rise to the surface - or sink into dust with the town above. But this time, against all odds, someone heard me.  With a purloined Starlink dish strapped precariously to the CWA hall roof before its members were fully duckified -  my message got through.

And someone answered.

The Warning of Gareth Jones: Who Owns Our Land, Our Water, Our Future?

When we speak of Ukraine and Russia in the 1930s, we are speaking of lands under Stalin’s Soviet regime -  not the independent nations they are today.

It was this regime that forced millions of farmers to surrender their land in 1929. This was not a natural disaster, but a man-made catastrophe -  engineered to crush resistance and bend people to the state.

Three cases, scattered across three eras, warn us that unless law remembers its duty to serve justice, not just authority, Australia and other countries, will keep reliving the same tragedy.

The stories of Max Stuart (1959), Ned Kelly (1878–1880), and Dezi Freeman (2025) span more than a century, yet they converge on a single truth: whenever law and justice are prised apart, destruction follows.

The accused suffer, communities fracture, and the authority of the state corrodes.

Was each man’s fate determined less by fact than by the way power was wielded: through provocation, bias, and suppression?

As a teacher seasoned by years of studying history and upholding the integrity of language, I beseech all who read this to confront a grave truth:

For at least eight decades, a pernicious propaganda has infiltrated our media, schools, and entertainment, crafted to deceive and destabilize society. I am of the older generation, hardly a boomer. They are youngsters, and I am of the previous generation. 

Until we acknowledge this, we remain blind to the true adversaries of our civilization.

History, when studied with diligence, offers clarity. So let us look to history to open our eyes.