wootness

[boodie]

Happy birthday to haggis_bagpipes one very strange young man, funny but.

I was rummaging through my old story files and I came across this, written in 1995, full of good intentions, needs work, and is long. 8-)



The Island

The door opened and the man looked up, his eyes betraying only the slightest flicker of interest as his latest crop of students filed in, strangely enough, after many years of neglect History was once again a popular subject, and this class perhaps the most popular of all, covering as it did what historians were wont to call somewhat inaccurately "The second Dark Ages."

There were always of course, some students who denied the existence of this period in Australia's history, claiming it to be a conspiracy, not unlike the sick rantings of the white supremacists who argued that the Holocaust did not take place, or that the English did not almost push the entire Aboriginal population towards extinction, or even worse that the Genocide of the Tasmanian Aborigines had moral rightness.

Always a few, who denied the evidence in black and white, the newspapers, the TV coverage, the letters, who treated it as one big hoax, designed to make them feel bad.

Giving his students a few minutes to settle down, he stood up and faced them, leaning down he flicked a switch, and there was a surprise murmur as the terminals on the students desks went out, he gestured for silence.

`I am your Teacher for this term, for one reason or another you have all chosen to learn more about what has come to be known as "The Second Dark Ages" or as I put it, the "Heever Hysteria'. His voice was rich and slightly sonorous, but the amount of passion he invested that short sentence with caught a few students unawares, they sat up straight as he continued.

`I am an old fashioned man, and I use old fashioned methods, there will be no computer aided displays here, in order to learn effectively about this time, then you must see it as the people of the late 20th early 21st century saw it, that means instead of touch pads, you will be watching video footage on a machine called a VCR, instead of News tablets, you will be reading actual copies of printed newspapers, instead of VR news you will be listening to the Radio.'

`Everything you see, read and hear took place, there has been no altering or tampering with the tapes, footage, or paper, some of you, no doubt will have trouble coming to terms with what you see or hear, but you must learn how to view these items with a dispassionate detachment, emotions wont help anyone, not now, and will only cloud your judgement for your assignment. Any questions?'.

A forest of hands met his request, he pointed at a young woman sitting in the second row, she blushed slightly, then cleared her throat, `Your description, Heever Hysteria, what does that mean? He gave her an almost feral smile, `The answer to that will become apparent in the very near future'.

Then he clapped his hands `Enough of this, no more questions, now is the time to sit and listen and learn, today we start with an extract from the diaries of the man credited with discovering the viral peculiarities of the HIV(A) virus, the Immuno/biologist Dr. Cady Smith. Smith never claimed to be a writer, so his style of writing is somewhat pretentious and stilted, he was also somewhat shy and refers to himself in the 3rd person.

`Dr. Smith did his research under the threat of great danger, as you will see, never sure when or if he would be caught, but his own personal courage led him to keep on going in the face of this danger, sure that in the end the truth would be known, do him the courtesy of listening in silence.'

He cleared his throat, and picked up a book from the table, several students gasped as they realised that it was a real book, one made of paper fibre, old, rare and precious, he then started to read and soon all minds were concentrating on the story unfolding in front of them.

"The Bible tells us that "No man is an island," but I have found this to be false, the hysteria that surrounded the emergence of the so called Gay Disease, HIV proved that to me in no uncertain terms. It needed only the slightest reason and people were clamouring to become islands, be alone. In spite of a thin veneer of sophistication, Australia and Australians were only one step removed from their convict heritage.

They arrived here the unwanted dregs of Mother England, forced to live apart from the rest of "civilised" society, and what better place to put them, than an island as far removed from family and friends as possible, a place to imprint on them the shame and utter hopelessness of their lives.

The name of this island was Van Diemens Land, it became synonymous with heartbreak and despair for the poor unfortunates transported there, usually for the utter heinous crime of stealing bread, some 140 years later the scenario repeated itself, proving once again that humanity had once again failed to learn from the lessons of the past.

This time it was not the criminals, but the `deviates' and the `unclean' that had to be sent away, in the intervening 140 years the island had undergone some remarkable changes, the people of Tasmania (as the Island was now known) as if aware of their unique heritage always felt slightly superior to their Mainland counterparts, and pitied them for not living in what was patently the best place in Australia.

The Mainlanders sensed this pitying attitude and never missed a chance to poke fun at or throw scorn on all things Tasmanian. This attitude was undoubtedly one of the main reasons that Tasmania was put forward as the place in which to dump the unwanted, the HIV and HIV(A) sufferers.

I can remember how it all started, the origin of this hysterical push had its' beginning in the discovery of the HIV virus, the Gay Disease, nothing was done, nor the problem taken seriously until straight people started dying as well, then came the hysteria, some wanted all the Gay people shot or rounded up and put on an island to die, compassion and saner heads at that time ruled the country and money was spent to find a cure, despite the howls of protest from sections of the ultra conservative community the self styled moral majority, who objected to money being spent on a disease that was a punishment from God for indulging in abhorrent sexual practices.

In the years that followed the same protests were made again and again, in spite of the disease spreading through the heterosexual community, they wanted funding slashed for AIDS projects directed at Gay people, compassion reserved for the 'innocent' victims, regardless that it killed ALL alike.

Almost overnight and from out of nowhere it seemed, an extreme radical group emerged, calling themselves the Australian Family Values Organisation, a group whose tenets appeared to have more in common with the Klu Klux Klan and Hitler than any true family oriented group, claiming to have nationwide support and the backing of the Catholic church, the media dubbed them the Christian Right and the name stuck.

Their hateful media releases and poster campaigns drew widespread condemnation from the Government, HIV and Gay support groups, but their platform held appeal to those whose bigotry and fear made them incapable of sorting through the lies and half truths, the immediate withdrawal of Government funding for any project, group or counselling service that catered for Homosexual men and women including all HIV counselling centres, the criminalisation of homosexual acts, male and female, the compulsory testing of all known gays for HIV and other `dangerous' diseases, and the forcible incarceration of those deemed to be a public danger.

There would have been no way that this group would have been taken seriously nor any creedence given to their ideas, but for one major and awful event, the sudden and inexplicable emergence of a new strain of HIV. It appeared that finally the disease had done what experts had been predicting for years, mutated into a more dangerous and contagious strain, with such commonplace methods of infection as intimate oral contact, especially kissing, the scientists named it HIV(A)

This mutation provided the perfect opening for the CR, from their lofty heights as guardians of the public morals they demanded that the Government do something about the threat to `normal, decent GOD fearing Australians' in desperation and in hindsight unwisely, the Government, in an effort to abate the media and political frenzy that threatened to sink them called an election, however the CR had prepared themselves and stood candidates in every seat, they based their campaign on one thing and one thing only, the danger to society that HIV and HIV(A) sufferers were.

In a result that was almost predictable, given the hysteria surrounding the emergence of the HIV(A) strain, the CR won a 58 to 5 majority, enabling them to bring into law their doctrine of hate, soon the jails were full of people perceived to be a danger, neighbour reported neighbour and an atmosphere of fear existed throughout the country.

After some months of this the Government announced that it was about to release its' new policy about the future directions they would be taking to control the spread of the HIV(A) strain, it was the sting in the tail, a final solution that was almost unbelievable, there in paragraphs 1a to 24d written in plain English, the solution that the elected majority, wrapped in their cloaks of moral indignation and secure in the knowledge that they were doing the `Right and Proper Thing' deemed to be acceptable and desirable.

In a nutshell, the gift of statehood stripped from Tasmania, turning the clock back to its convict past, this allowed the Government to expatriate all uninfected people to the mainland, and when this was done, all those who were carrying the HIV and HIV(A) virus would relocate, forcibly if necessary, to Tasmania and this is where they would stay.

The Government used this bill to carry out stage two of their political agenda, after some amazing rhetoric against those the CR considered also to be a threat to the moral wellbeing of society, the bill was rewritten to include in the definition of `Undesirable' all homosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals, paedophiles and child molesters, in one swift move the CR sought to purge itself of those who they percieved to be destroying the moral fibre of the country.

Of course there was immediate outcry from the citizens of Tasmania, even those who supported the CR, NIMBY was well to the fore, the bill stripping Tasmania of its statehood passed with no dissenters, an appeal to the UN by the Tasmanians and many community groups went unheeded, the UN had always been somewhat of a toothless tiger and it found itself ill equipped to deal with this emergency and spent months locked in endless debate while the evacuation commenced, under the watchful eye of the Australian Army.

In a sight reminiscent of the Germans herding the Jews into the cattle carts, the `undesirables' packed into planes and disgorged at the other end, also under the watchful eye of the Australian Army, some people refused to go and sympathisers organised shelter and protection, at great risk to themselves, as anyone caught aiding or hiding a Heever as the popular press named them were to suffer the same punishment as the Heever, banishment to the island, and there to die.

In its' infinite compassion the CR Government decided that there would be no visiting rights, aside from visual satellite links, the Heevers would have to be self sufficient as no shipping or freight, apart from the sad human cargo, would make it past the 50 km exclusion zone around the island. Enforced by the presence of state of the art Collins class submarines and Patrol boats, an air exclusion zone set up and patrolled by the Air Force meant Tasmania was for all practical purposes isolated.

Children watched as Mothers' fathers, sisters were taken away, families divided, whole suburbs depleted, the CR its' election promises delivered, gave the Australian public what they wanted, a safe Christian environment, free from perverts and undesirables, a truly safe place to raise children, the beginning of a new utopia.

Hardly.

The decline was insidious, barely noticeable, it started with a subtle shift, as if there was no longer any common thread that bound the peoples, other than by virtue of living in the same land, this manifested itself in the slow disintergration of Australian society. There was something lacking in Australia for along with its Heevers, it had lost its heart and its hard won innocence, the long haul from the days of the convicts was all for nothing.

While Australia was slowly falling apart, the inhabitants of the concentration camp called Tasmania were slowly pulling the shattered threads of their lives back together, the mourning period was long and in a lot of cases, fatal, the suicide rate amongst the Heevers and others was catastrophic.

In the early years of the colony hundreds of people a day were finding new and spectacular ways to excise their grief, of the 400,000 `undesirables' forcibly moved to the island, some 20,000 people died by their own hand, and another 5,000 murdered. The CR seized on these statistics as proof positive that Australia was better off without these people, ignoring their own disastrously high suicide and crime rate.

Eventually the Tasmanians realised that no one was coming to their aid, all efforts at establishing contact with the UN faltered, a planned worldwide boycott of Australian goods failed when the US refused to join in, stating that it was an internal Australian matter, and not of international concern, not surprising since President Rush Dole's major backer was the ever increasingly powerful American Moral Majority.

All over the world HIV and HIV(A) positive people were living in fear that their governments would be the next to follow the Australian initiative.

Life on the island was by no means hard, people learned to cope with all manner of shortages, in a show of compassion that was barely one step above cruelty, the Government allowed only people under 18 to have a once a month video link with those members of their family that still wished to remain in contact.

As the months went by those numbers dwindled as the stigma of having a Heever relative increased, it became easy for some people to forget they ever had husbands, wives or children.

The children were the saddest victims of this bold new experiment in social engineering, some people wanted dispensation for children to remain with their parents until they were 18 and then to be `repatriated' to the island, but in a wave of hysteria reminiscent to the Eve Van Grafhorst saga back in the late 1980's, horror stories of people infected by biting children surfaced and the Government quashed that move.

So children became separated from their parents and placed in the care of minders, a lot of parents opted to accompany their children, but surprising numbers didn't, whether from the fear of catching a disease, or the stigma attached I do not know, but there were 250 `orphaned' children on the island, in various stages of HIV and HIV(A), many a child died crying for the parents that had deserted them.

Opposition to this inhumane regime was fierce and a thriving underground resistance sprang up, the group ferried, literally, hundreds of tonnes of medication and supplies to the island, it also brought in sympathetic Doctors and Specialists, it was one of these Specialists who undertook the research that was to explode the bombshell that would rock the Australian government and it's people to the core.

HIV(A) was not fatal, it was a transitory infection lasting for upwards of 5 years, mimicking the symptoms of advanced HIV+ illnesses, he, Dr. Cady Smith, renamed the virus HITV(A) and set about documenting, at first secretly and then with increasing openness the complete life cycle of this mutation.

What had alerted him to the possibility that perhaps this new mutation was not universally fatal was the cases of what seemed to be spontaneous remission from the debilitating symptons of advanced AIDS, the sores, the pneumonia, the failure of certain AIDS related cancers to appear, and the undeniable fact, that after the arbitary 5 year life expectancy that the Government sponsored research into this disease had specified, people were RECOVERING.

At first he thought that it may have just been a few cases of misdiagnosis, that perhaps his patients had something else, and unfortunately had been sent to Tasmania by mistake, but when he could no longer deny the mounting evidence before his eyes, he undertook what was a highly dangerous survey and found that of the 25,000 people sent to the Island as carriers of the HIV(A) virus, only 2,000 had died in the past 6 years and of those 1,800 had committed suicide and the remaining were either murder victims or had disappeared, presumed dead.

Armed with this evidence and his own scepticism of the Government sponsored research he managed to convince some colleagues on the mainland to run their own tests on tissue samples and cultures, his findings proved to be correct, HIV(A) was not fatal, it may have been highly infectious, but it was not fatal.

It was about then that the first attempt on the life of Dr Smith occurred, warned by a sympathiser in the Government, Dr Smith managed to escape the contrived accident in his laboratory, his notes salvaged, he went underground in the colony and continued working with the members of the colony that had HIV(A). Documenting beyond all reasonable doubt that HIV(A) was not the fatal disease that the Government portrayed.

When it was absolutely sure that they had all the available evidence and the evidence above reproach, a group of disaffected scientists went to the Opposition party, and soon a judicious leaking of the documented proof, largely gathered by Dr Smith, began to appear in the media.

The Media, as if ashamed of the part it had played in the creating of the HIV(A) hysteria, leapt upon this material and in an amazing reversal of roles lambasted the CR Government for it's part in the forced removal of the HIV(A) victims.

The Government, well aware of the power of the Media, fought a determined action to prevent the various media outlets from reporting the disturbing news, in a desperate last attempt to silence the media it declared a state of national emergency, under which it could forcibly wrest control of the press, tv and radio out of the mostly independant hands of the media barons.

This, however was going too far for the public, even conditioned as they were to swallow any amount of media hysteria as long as it pandered to their own perceptions and biases, it was a different matter when the Government tried to take away the Australian publics' right to a free press, the CR found out just how militant the Australian public could be.

By day and night the soldiers of the Australian Army stood almost eye to eye with the soldiers of the Australian public, who were hell bent on protecting the traditional inviolability of the Australian press, the major newspapers and tv stations guarded 24 hrs a day by men and women desperately trying to redeem themselves, realising how they had been duped by the mock neo-moralistic posturings of the Government and by their own prejudices.

On the Island this news caused feelings of ambivalence in those who had diagnosed with HIV(A), almost as if they did not trust the new found compassion of those whose hate and fear had forced them to this place, the HIV sufferers and the Queer community also looked upon these developments with some scepticism, in the 8 years since they had been forcibly removed to this place they had fostered an amazing sense of community, old hates and prejudices had been put aside in a determined effort to succeed.

For some justice was swift and lethal, of the 200 convicted paedophiles transported to the island, not one had survived to commemorate the first anniversary of the forcible exodus, slowly but surely the islanders came together and finally by the end, saw themselves as the ultimate winners of this experiment, while looking with thinly disguised contempt towards the rest of mainland Australia, one of the worst insults you could bestow on an Islander was to tell them they were acting like a Mainlander.

So they looked upon the sudden rush of compassion and brotherly concern from the Mainlanders with barely disguised cynicism, pleased as they were to find that HIV(A) was not the fatal disease the scientists would have them believe it was, the majority now considered Tasmania to be their home and they would resist ANY attempts to intergrate them with the rest of Australia.'

A shrill bell broke the intense concentration of the students, stretching in their seats they realised that they had been listening solidly for over an hour, transfixed by the story unfolding in front of them, their Teacher looked at them, searching for the signs of disbelief that he was sure he would see.

He sighed, it seemed he wasn't going to be dissapointed, he could see on the faces, among the looks of intense horror and shame for the events of the past, the closed expressions of those who refused to believe it had happened like that, those whose sensibilities had been offended.

He raised his hand to get their attention, `That of course is only a short precis of what happened, there have been many dry text books written on the subject, but none of them, I feel convey the emotion of the time, more than the diary of Dr Smith and the other books you will be reading, your assignment for tonight is to continue reading Dr Smiths' diary and then write a 2 page essay on your first impressions, do not write what you think would please me, write me of your first honest impressions, when I was a young student there was a phrase "warts and all" I want your warts and all impressions, unvarnished honesty, this assignment does not count towards your marks, this is for me only. You may upload them anytime between 10pm and 9.30 am into my Mailbox, no late uploads will be accepted.'

He stood, and gestured for his class to rise, 'I shall see you all again tommorrow afternoon, good reading Class'. His students filed out, subdued, already thinking about their assignment, well that was what he hoped, he stared after them, his eyes far away, a small cough brought his attention back to earth, it was the young female student who had asked the first question at the start of class.

`Sir, in all that you have said, you didnt mention your name, and it's not on any of the teacher listings, how will we know who to send our assignments to?'

He smiled, `Think upon it as a challenge, most of you are reasonably bright, a few will manage to address the assignments to me personally, most will use the generic posting available from the University facility, I have faith in you child'. He said no more and the girl realised that was all she was going to get.

The University had fought against him in this, but in the end he had won, he could conduct his classes anonymously, and use the generic posting facility, but once a student had discerned his identity he had to come clean to the rest of the class. He sighed and straightened up, an old man, well preserved his colleagues said, well preserved indeed, he was 125 years old, and on days like today he felt like it.

Glancing around the classroom one last time before leaving, his eye came to rest on the diaries that he had been reading from, so many memories, so many friends dead, he walked over and with callous disregard for the fragility of the priceless paper book, thrust it into his brief case.

Dr Smith switched the light of as he left.

© Teddy 1995

Comments

[haggis-bagpipes.livejournal.com]

*bows low* Why thank you Boodie.

[funnelwebkitten.livejournal.com]

I hope you had a good day, I does!

[haggis-bagpipes.livejournal.com]

I am :)
And I do not have a funny butt!

[funnelwebkitten.livejournal.com]

ohh I dunno, I hear stories!