Advance Australia Where?

The Rumour Haunting us Town after Town: Cafe Locked Out: On the Run.

The town is old. These stone bricks were carved by hand and manhandled into place by men whose sweat and hopes the bricks didn’t retain, like they now support the cameras that watch us. Unless the vibrant ghosts of these people are recalled by the corellas and their rivals the sulfur crested cockatoos who are crack-larrikin their way from gum to gum.

She has so many lines carving her face, it was like time decided to use her to record our country’s fall. In her late seventies, she is wearing her yellow polo top uniform and is concentrating as another woman, dressed the same and in her sixties, instructs her how to use the screen, as today’s bread waits for us in racks behind them. I pay with cash and the older one has already calculated the change as her teacher taps in the amount.
They are not allowed to finish the transaction themselves; they have to wait for the computer to figure out the change.
Behind me two tradies are yawning as they wait for coffee, and the older lady smiles as she hands me my change, her eyes as bright as polished opals run through the town’s river, that is as old as the stone her forgotten fathers cut from this land.
She didn’t want to come back to work, but the cost of living is greater than her pension.
She has grown children, grandchildren, a failed marriage and now rents a room in a local share house populated with other women. And now she works here, for a new migrant who recently bought the business with money, the rumour goes, that was a payment from our government.
It’s the same rumour that has been haunting us, town after town. Grants and interest free loans, used as carrots, and with each gift accepted, with every business purchased by taxpayer’s money, so the rumour goes, another staunch Labor voter, who will encourage their entire family to vote the same, is secured.

This inland town is in the South Australia wheat belt, and across the road, a kitchen hand in her mid fifties, and a follower of CLO, fills us in on how new migrants have been buying several businesses. The motels, the post office, this cafe too, and the servo. She is in her fifties and lost two previous jobs, that she’d held for years, because she refused to take the covid jab. Now she cleans toilets in a school, a government office in the evenings, and this job.

She lost her family too, due to non compliance, and works now, every hour she can get, to hold on to her mortgage.Her face is handsome, but she was once beautiful. Perhaps the only make-up time has removed was her belief in how her life would unfold, in this country town, a belief she took for granted. A belief that the stones now housing this cafe also never bother to retain.

I have no issues with migrants, wherever they come from. And why shouldn’t they capitalize on any opportunity that comes their way.
Though I do wonder how the homeless, who are lined up along the river in their cheap tents, or sleeping in their cars in the fringe parks decorating this town, would feel if they knew that in India and Pakistan, visa companies were advertising; migrate to Australia and receive a one off grant.

Some of these homeless are indigenous, the only people the stones that are our land recall; the rest are all white.
But perhaps these rumours are false. Perhaps they are born from the spite of one failing culture observing another far more industrious culture succeeding.

To find out I am working with the esteemed journalist John Stapleton, Sydney Morning Hearlf and The Australian, as together we seek to prove that these rumours are unfounded, or a profound challenge to the lyrics of our national anthem as it bangs on about Advancing us all, as one, fairly.

Michael Gray Griffith
24/01/26

Michael And Kelli Cafe Locked Out on the Run

Im Kelli