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The Craft is an e-novella about Witchcraft in a future setting. It's a prequel to my dystopian novella: The Cloud: set in the last half of the 21st century - after The Great Famine.
Since writing this I have added a preface, concerning witchcraft, that you can read here...
At the end of February 2016 Wendy and I took a package deal to visit Bali. These days almost everyone knows that Bali is a smallish island off the east tip of Java in the Southern Indonesian archipelago, just south of the equator. Longitudinally it's just to the west of Perth, not a huge distance from Darwin. The whole Island chain is highly actively volcanic with regular eruptions that quite frequently disrupt air traffic. Bali is well watered, volcanic, fertile and very warm year round, with seasons defined by the amount of rain.
'I was recently restored to life after being dead for several hours'
The truth of this statement depends on the changing and surprisingly imprecise meaning of the word: 'dead'.
Until the middle of last century a medical person may well have declared me dead. I was definitely dead by the rules of the day. I lacked most of the essential 'vital signs' of a living person and the technology that sustained me in their absence was not yet perfected.
I was no longer breathing; I had no heartbeat; I was limp and unconscious; and I failed to respond to stimuli, like being cut open (as in a post mortem examination) and having my heart sliced into. Until the middle of the 20th century the next course would have been to call an undertaker; say some comforting words then dispose of my corpse: perhaps at sea if I was travelling (that might be nice); or it in a box in the ground; or by feeding my low-ash coffin into a furnace then collect the dust to deposit or scatter somewhere.
But today we set little store by a pulse or breathing as arbiters of life. No more listening for a heartbeat or holding a feather to the nose. Now we need to know about the state of the brain and central nervous system. According to the BMA: '{death} is generally taken to mean the irreversible loss of capacity for consciousness combined with the irreversible loss of capacity to breathe'. In other words, returning from death depends on the potential of our brain and central nervous system to recover from whatever trauma or disease assails us.
Gough Whitlam has died at the age of 98.
I had an early encounter with him electioneering in western Sydney when he was newly in opposition, soon after he had usurped Cocky (Arthur) Calwell as leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party and was still hated by elements of his own party.
I liked Cocky too. He'd addressed us at University once, revealing that he hid his considerable intellectual light under a barrel. He was an able man but in the Labor Party of the day to seem too smart or well spoken (like that bastard Menzies) was believed to be a handicap, hence his 'rough diamond' persona.
Gough was a new breed: smooth, well presented and intellectually arrogant. He had quite a fight on his hands to gain and retain leadership. And he used his eventual victory over the Party's 'faceless men' to persuade the Country that he was altogether a new broom.
It was time for a change not just for the Labor Party but for Australia.