The Best of 2022. “Give Us Our Jobs Back Ya Dog”: Australians Have Had Enough. A Sense of Place Magazine, 17 December, 2022.

By John Stapleton The disruption to Australian life continues to grow worse; with supply chains broken, supermarket shelves emptying, and suburban parks quiet as a confused and anxious people shelter in place. A dark evil spreads across the land. Everyone is vulnerable. The rich get richer; and the rest remain bewildered, with thousands of teachers, […]

Dark Seas. Extract: Hideout in the Apocalypse. A Sense of Place Magazine, 15 December, 2022.

By John Stapleton. Photography David Sandford. The spooks were easy to spot. Most Australians couldn’t afford a new iPhone, and certainly not in that part of town. Old Alex felt decidedly unsafe, packed up the apartment, both glad to be out of there and angry at being made homeless, relentlessly pursued; as if he had […]

Australia’s Battered Inland Rivers: The Greed of the Oligarchs Destroys Australia’s Outback

By John Stapleton. Photography by Dean Sewell. Australia’s fabled Outback is now being regularly described as an inland sea as the country experiences its third year of widespread heavy rains, by far one of the wettest periods in living memory. The story below, featuring the magnificent photography of multi-award winning Australian photographer Dean Sewell, was […]

Australia’s Only Celebrity Jihadist Creates Diplomatic Chaos: The Life of Neil Prakash. A Sense of Place Magazine, 29 November, 2022.

By John Stapleton. Once labelled Australia’s most dangerous man, Neil Prakash was stripped of his Australian citizenship in 2018, amid considerable political theatre from the government. Lawyers and academics argued at the time that it was against the law to strip someone of their Australian citizenship if it left them stateless, and the current government […]

Media Manipulation, Censorship, Surveillance: Australia. The Best of 2022. A Sense of Place Magazine, 13 November, 2022.

By John Stapleton One of the most vile of all the vile deeds perpetrated by the Coalition under the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison era of benighted Australian governance was to make journalists Persons of Interest – POIs – under the ASIO Act. The current Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, raised not one word of concern asthis legislation, introduced by […]

Victoria’s Freedom Party: Australians Fight For Liberty, A Sense of Place Magazine, 8 November, 2023.

By John Stapleton Australia experienced one of the most extreme and counterproductive Covid responses of anywhere around the globe, and as a direct result of the totalitarian lunacy which overtook the country, its politics have changed profoundly. The Premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews became infamous around the world for his completely over-the-top response to the […]

Craig Kelly: The Most Reviled Politician in Australia. Pilloried, Ridiculed, Marginalised, Vindicated. A Sense of Place Magazine, 5 November, 2023.

Widely condemned as a conspiracy theorist, no one has been more marginalised by his own side of politics, nor ridiculed in the public square, than United Australia Party’s Craig Kelly. Originally joining the nation’s ramshackle conservatives, the Liberal Party in 2010, he resigned in 2021, disgusted by his own mistreatment and by their mismanagement of […]

Pfizer’s Reputation Destroyed by European Union Parliament Admissions: Why Isn’t Australia Holding a Similar Inquiry? A Sense of Place Magazine, 2 November, 2023.

By John Stapleton. Extract from the Upcoming Book Australia Breaks Apart. Below is a transcript of a press conference held by members of the European Parliament expressing their absolute outrage over the performance of vaccine manufacturer Pfizer, including, despite being funded by the taxpayer, the company’s complete lack of transparency. For anyone who has followed […]

Shearers: The Photography of Russell Shakespeare, A Sense of Place Magazine, 20 October, 2022.

Award winning photographer Russell Shakespeare explains the obsession: I’ve photographed shearers a lot over the years for a number of different publications. They’re an important and easily understood symbol for one of Australia’s most important industries; and there is a good deal of romance associated with them, historically and to the present day. It’s romantic […]

From Out of Chaos: The Art of Ronan Dinneen, A Sense of Place Magazine, 17 October, 2023.

I had full on psychosis. But I kept drawing all the time. I was living in Saigon in Vietnam, ended up homeless. I was pulling the cameras out of the wall in my hotel; and they kicked me out. I was so anxious. I couldn’t work. I thought it was a set up. Everyone was […]

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews Unmasked: The Man The Monster, A Sense of Place Magazine, 23 September, 2022.

There is no doubt that Geoff Shaw regards the Premier of Australia’s second most populist state as a monster. But before we get into the excerpts, let’s skip straight to the end of the horror story. Alex Berenson, former New York Times reporter and author of Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, […]

The Stars of Australia’s Blossoming Independent Media: Morgan Jonas and The MCJ Report, A Sense of Place Magazine, 14 September, 2022.

By John Stapleton A profound lunacy has overtaken Australia; and the entirely bought mainstream media, hostage to their government funding, has ignored what is happening right in front of all our eyes. But as the saying goes, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and as a direct result of the legacy media’s […]

The Long Read: Covert Concessions and Sweetheart Deals. Extract from Unfolding Catastrophe: Australia, A Sense of Place Magazine, 12 September, 2022.

By John Stapleton The brutal and very ugly face of the Covid response in Australia, former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, is now mired in scandal, flayed daily in the public square. The discovery that he appointed himself to five different portfolios in secret under the cover of the Covid panic made him the laughing stock […]

The Evidence is Out There: There Is No Excuse for Ignorance. The Grand Jury Of The Court of Public Opinion. A Sense of Place Magazine, 10 September, 2022.

“After months of deaths and vaccine injuries, no one can plead ignorance.” Now even one of the great censors and distorters of our time, the Google owned YouTube, is running at least some of the episodes of this forensic picking apart of the Covid narrative by some of the world’s most formidable experts. The Grand […]

Prison Island: Extract from the Upcoming book Australia Breaks Apart, A Sense of Place Magazine, 6 September, 2023.

By John Stapleton. The Long Read. Chapter One. PRISON ISLAND This massive edifice of evil was too complex, and, really, too elegant, to assign to just human awfulness and human inventiveness. It suggested a spiritual dimension of evil. This evil was like a giant cultural spaceship which landed on Earth, with a technology to unfold […]

How It All Ends: Extract from Australia Breaks Apart. A Sense of Place Magazine, 31 August, 2022.

By John Stapleton. The Long Read. This is Chapter Two, How It All Ends, of the upcoming book Australia Breaks Apart, the sequel to Unfolding Catastrophe Australia. The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears […]

Winter’s Back in Australia: The Photography of Dean Sewell, A Sense of Place Magazine, 25 August, 2022.

Snow is blanketing the Blue Mountains west of Sydney as a cold snap sends temperatures plummeting across Australia’s south-east. The icy conditions brought thunderstorms, rain and snow in higher parts of the NSW tablelands and north-east on Tuesday, and treacherous road conditions have forced several major roads to close. The nation’s increasingly bizarre politics is […]

Scott Morrison: The Very Ugly Face of Australia’s Covid Madness, A Sense of Place Magazine, 23 August, 2022.

John Stapleton. Extract from Unfolding Catastrophe: Australia. In recent days Scott Morrison, as he has done since Covid lurched onto the Australian scene, has been spinning the pandemic story hard in an attempt to rescue his political career. In early 2020 he placed himself front and centre of the unfolding drama, hoping, on the face […]

Power Hungry Elites Have Upended Australia, A Sense of Place Magazine, 18 August, 2022.

By Paul Collits: Politicom John Stapleton, editor of the fine online journal A Sense of Place Magazine, has now published two books on Australia’s experience of COVID totalitarianism.  The first, Unfolding Catastrophe, chronicled Australia’s descent into policy madness over two miserable years.  His latest, Convoy to Canberra, focuses on the extraordinary popular uprising in February 2022 in which […]

Reignite Democracy Monica Smit’s Charges Dismissed: Australia’s Courts Clogged, A Sense of Place Magazine, 29 July, 2022.

Australia’s court system is now clogged with people protesting thousands of punitive fines or jail sentences. Of all the online personalities and citizen journalists to emerge during the Covid era, one of the most prominent was Monica Smit of Reignite Democracy. From pepper spraying grandmothers to arresting pregnant women in their own homes to bashing […]

Convoy to Canberra: The Day Australia Changed Forever. A Sense of Place Publishing, 30 June, 2022. Text Only.

CONTENTS ONE A TIME FOR ALL TIME TWO FROM ALL THE LANDS WE COME THREE THE FULCRUM POINTS OF HISTORY FOUR THE PRIME MINISTER WHO DESTROYED AUSTRALIA FIVE WE WILL WASH AWAY TYRANNY SIX JOY AND CALAMITY, BRUTALITY AND KINDNESS SEVEN THE MEEK SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH EIGHT THE GREAT MARCH NINE THE SAD AND […]

With our dismal history of bombings in Iraq, Australia cannot take the high moral ground on Ukraine, Pearls and Irritations, 28 June, 2022.

By John Stapleton From Malcolm Turnbull’s first day as Prime Minister in 2015, the bombings on Iraq increased. We all became responsible for killing great numbers of Muslims. For years putrid skeletons were being dug out of the rubble. Lovers, sons and daughters, soldiers old and young, men and women, children. Most of all, believers […]

Australia’s Unfolding Nightmare: How It All Ends Part III, A Sense of Place Magazine, 27 March, 2022.

Oak Flats is a working class suburb south of Wollongong on Australia’s east coast. Its demographic of tradies, electricians, plumbers, tilers, truck drivers, school teachers and nurses do not like or trust the nation’s politicians and to a man and woman pay more or less no attention to the media. It is this demographic which […]

Unfolding Catastrophe: Australia. Extract. Part One. The First Draft of History. A Sense of Place Magazine, 24 February, 2022.

Photography by Dean Sewell THE THINGS HE REMEMBERED MOST STARKLY from the early months of the Covid Era were empty trains churning through the night, a sense of threat as everything was altered, military helicopters hovering over a deserted Sydney Harbour, empty streets, silent suburbs, and dread, mostly dread. Perhaps one of the single most […]

Video From The Day Australia Changed Forever, A Sense of Place Magazine, 15 February, 2022.

The 12th of February 2022 is the day Australia transformed.Without counting the several hours missing from the police report of people coming on the 11th, over 1.2 millions cars entered ACT in the week preceding this epic day. Epic as the name of the camping ground, the Canberra showground, where more than two hundred thousand […]

The Sad and Brutal Final Hours of Camp Freedom and the Convoy to Canberra, A Sense of Place Magazine, 15 February, 2022.

What had been a remarkably successful policing operation, handling the one million protestors who showed up in Canberra to protest two years of government overreach during the Covid era, turned sour in the final hours. Until that point there had been no reports of violence, rapes, vandalism or all the other behaviours one might fairly […]

Anxiety Grips Canberra’s Freedom Camp, A Sense of Place Magazine, 13 February, 2022.

By John Stapleton Twenty four hours after a jubilant atmosphere gripped Canberra, with a massive protest involving crowds estimated between 500,000 and a million in one of the largest protest gatherings in Australian history, a deep anxiety has afflicted the camps of protestors. Tensions have been rising throughout the day; with many protestors either leaving […]

The Day Australia Changed Forever. Protestors Ring Australia’s National Capital. A Sense of Place Magazine,12 February, 2022.

They’ve come with their dogs. They’ve come with their kids. They’ve come with their hearts. There are an estimated 200,000 protestors on one Canberra campsite alone. Today is the Ground Zero of days; when the nation stood up and said no to the authoritarian derangement which has overtaken the country. In one telling incident, last […]

Images from the Convoy to Canberra: A Day That Changed History. A Sense of Place Magazine, 12 February, 2022.

By John Stapleton. Australia has just witnessed the largest demonstration in its history. Many people had streams of tears flowing down their faces. The emotion flowing through the entire crowd was overwhelming. Kath, 53, a delivery truck driver who lost her job due to the vaccine mandates, drove nearly 4000 kilometres from Darwin to be […]

Imprisoned Dr Bruce Paix Released on Bail: Given A Hero’s Welcome at Canberra’s Camp Freedom, A Sense of Place Magazine, 11 February, 2022.

By John Stapleton. War veteran and trauma specialist Dr Bruce Paix was arrested near Canberra airport while on his way to attend the Convoy to Canberra gathering. Cheering crowds celebrated Dr Paix’s release today, 11 February, 2022, as he was driven around the campsite on the back of a Convoy to Canberra truck. Dr Bruce […]

The Spirit Rises: Inside Australia’s Protests, A Sense of Place Magazine, 10 February, 2022.

By John Stapleton. While mainstream journalists around the country continue to ignore the biggest story of their lifetimes, Australia’s independent media is on fire. Thousands of people from all around Australia are converging on Canberra as part of the Canberra Convoy protests. The protests are both chaotic and glorious, and the burgeoning campsite on the […]

The Meek Will Inherit The Earth: Inside Australia’s Camp Freedom, A Sense of Place Magazine, 11 February, 2022.

By John Stapleton.  With numbers now in their tens of thousands at the rallying point for Convoy to Canberra, the atmosphere at the heart of Australia’s Camp Freedom is both chaotic and glorious, jubilant, exultant. And all participants say one thing: “This is history in the making.” Crowds line the streets of the campsite cheering […]

The Largest Aussie Protest Gathering In History: As Seen from the Sky, A Sense of Place Magazine, 11 February, 2022.

Drone footage by Bailey and his Dad. Travelling from all states around Australia, including one lone driver from Perth who travelled 52 hours, the Convoy to Canberra is inundating the ACT like no event ever before seen in Australia’s history. At the time this image was taken, it’s been estimated that 350 vehicles per hour […]

How It All Ends: Australia Transforms. Part One. A Sense of Place Magazine, 10 February, 2022.

John Stapleton. For years the biggest story in the country has been the slow motion collapse of the Australia of old. Now, with the country only slowly stumbling out of lockdown and insane levels of social restrictions introduced without parliamentary approval in what was tantamount to martial law introduced, under the cover of Covid-19, it […]

Vaccine Mandates Fails: Day Ten of the Canberra Convoy. A Sense of Place Magazine, 10 February, 2022.

By John Stapleton. Another in a queue of court cases against vaccine mandates has failed; leading critics to emphasise the urgent need for an Australian Bill of Rights. Here renowned Australian photographer John Napper, who is presently documenting the Canberra Convoy and the astounding events in Australia’s national capital, reports on the demonstrations outside the […]

Canberra Explodes: Australia’s National Capital Transformed, A Sense of Place Magazine, 8 February, 2022.

Sources various. Compiled by John Stapleton. Days of protest are marching towards a resolution. So here are the scattered notes from multiple sources; as the river of this history changes all our lives. And transforms the nature of the polity. They tried to crush the people, and instead transformed them. A story which has made […]

Notes from the Frontline: Australia’s Capital Under Siege, A Sense of Place Magazine, 7 February, 2022.

Compiled by John Stapleton. Fortune favours the brave.  The scale of the catastrophe that is enveloping Australia, that is the most staggering thing about this period of history. The psychopathic lack of empathy by the perpetrators. The dismal state of the nation.  The Prime Minister Scott Morrison is now twirling in the wind, forced to publicly […]

The Right to Protest Has Been Restored: And Protestors have travelled from all over Australia to surround the National Parliament, A Sense of Place Magazine, 6 February, 2022.

Compiled by John Stapleton. With Joel Gilmour. The mainstream media has utterly disgraced itself over the past two years; allowing itself to be manipulated or bludgeoned by government into being propaganda cyphers and willing puppets for the authoritarian derangement which has seized the country. What the authorities failed to appreciate was that in this era […]

The Australian Convoy: Day Three, A Sense of Place Magazine, 3 February, 2022.

In his own grudging, peculiarly ungracious way, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has admitted that some Australians are unhappy with his management of the Covid “pandemic”. Bull dust. They’re absolutely bloody livid. Morrison must face the electorate before 23 May this year. Two years of mayhem under his “leadership”; and the country is in chaos […]

Australia’s Convoy: Day Two, A Sense of Place Magazine, 2 February, 2022.

With TOTT News & True Arrow. Many hundreds of thousands of Australians have been protesting for months over the authoritarian derangement which has seized the country. Almost all those protests have been ignored or misrepresented by the mainstream media. Not this time around. Australians are a phlegmatic people, slow to take to the streets. It […]

Pure: Timothy Mo’s Neglected Masterpiece, A Sense of Place Magazine, 1 February, 2022.

Timothy Mo is a superbly gifted writer but a difficult man who has long fought with his publishers. As the son of wealthy Hong Kong Chinese, he attended Oxford and was once a favourite of the English literary set, but fell out of favour. In later life he has produced a masterwork, Pure. Timothy Mo had […]

Millions March: Australia: The Best of 2021

With Real Rushkan, TOTT News, Reignite Democracy Australia, Hold the Line, the Aussie Cosack and Others. Compiled by John Stapleton. With a number of books now emerging about the Covid era, including most recently Robert F Kennedy’s The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health and Alex Berenson’s Pandemia: […]

“Biggest cyber breach in history” as techs scramble to be heard above Omicron din, Michael West Media, 13 January, 2022.

“Biggest cyber breach in history” as techs scramble to be heard above Omicron din BUSINESS, FEATURED|By John Stapleton|January 13, 2022 Log4j hacking threat. Image by Cling Patterson, @cbpsc1, Unsplash Change Text Here Australian governments and businesses have been warned they face their greatest hacking threat yet, Apache Log4j. John Stapleton reports on Australian Cyber Security Centre warnings of possible […]

Christmas Day: The Nightmare of Australian Family Law. The Best of 2021.

The Family Court of Australia is finally being abolished, dissolved Into the Federal Court. There Are Very Good Reasons. The misuse of expert witnesses is a problem throughout Australia’s judicial system, but no more so than in family law. Here, in a piece originally published in the 1990s, we look at a past which should […]

Civil Unrest Across Australia: Violence Envelops The Nation. The Best of 2021.

Sources: TOTT News and Others. Compiled by John Stapleton. Black clad police firing into unarmed crowds.  Somehow we’re all fine with it. Two police standing over an unarmed 70-year-old grandmother pepper spraying her in the face.   Somehow we’re all fine with it. Genuine protest, an unfamiliar sight in Australia after the orchestrated public displays around […]

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