The Screaming Skulls in My Glory Box

Propaganda, dead sheep, skulls, and breaking magic spells.

“The Heiress” Helen Norton 2021 (Prosperity Series)

What happens when you wake up—after already waking up—and all the simmering dots suddenly join into thick black lines?
Terrible, hard-core reality replaces fuzzy doubt.
The terrifying thought arrives: that your possessions aren’t just part of a coercive system—you yourself are being manipulated through them, often without your consent or awareness.
Everything shifts, as if the once solid ground—the crust of the earth beneath your feet—loses its anchor in the bedrock and slowly starts to slide over hot, dangerous molten lava, reminding you how small you really are.
They trade your fear like oil, a valuable commodity.
As if it were a slave in a market of black-suited traders.

Four years ago, at sixty years old, I left the city—and my beautiful, light-filled contemporary home in the Perth Hills—to live in a tiny, dark, old cottage in the country.
A humble wood-and-tin shack with no insulation, on a fourteen-acre farm with thirteen left over sheep and a dry well.

It wasn’t my first time living in the country. I have a history of retreating from the evidence of my own success and status at certain points in my life. It looks like sabotage to any outsider, but I know differently.

There is no rational explanation. It’s a distant call from somewhere not visible in a real estate downsize or upgrade catalogues. Nope. It’s some other thing. Annoying and yet inescapable when it calls.

A plea from some dark place, only perceptible by placing your ear on the floor of forests. A whisper that comes from the bones—a longing to retrieve the sense of smell—my animal instinct.

I don’t call it up.
It comes calling.

There is a ritual—secret, not by choice but by sleep—that must be honoured on the day it wakes.
I pull out an old tin biscuit box. The lid cracks open. Coarse brown hessian covers bones, trinkets, and treasure.

I carefully peel back the loose-woven shrouds wrapped around each sun-bleached skull: kangaroo, crow, fox, dingo, rabbit.

I caress each one and am transported—back nearly fifty years—to when and where I found them.

At sixteen years old, I left my job in busy, psychopath Melbourne and moved to the Nullarbor desert—because even then, as a city child, I couldn’t defy my inner animal’s needs.

I hadn’t found the skulls yet, but they had already found me.
While I dodged treacle traffic, rapists and old coffee drinking Lebanese men’s stares, thousands of miles away, they lay in the desert, whispering and dragging me to them.
I didn’t know where they were—I just dreamed them, over and over.
I sat on the tram and saw their shadows behind the hedges
I sat on the roof of the houses, and heard them in the distance, above the sirens.
The bones. Laying, waiting in 50-degree sun in saltbush desert a thousand miles away.
Animal bones.

Me? I was a city girl—hooking up wool in a knitting factory in Ripponlea, owned by Mosha, the Jewish, Jaguar-driving boss.
I knew that polishing his desk after hours with Mr Sheen wouldn’t end well.
And it didn’t.

Then—a train. A suitcase.
And suddenly, I hauled into the nowhere land.

I would spend the next ten years living and working in three of the most remote deserts in Australia, out of tents and crapped-out caravans.
Shooting, trapping, and skinning animals.
Shitting in scratched-out holes in the sand.
Drinking water from dead horse dams.

This unusual time gave me perspective, I guess—perspective few others might have.
Living in a desert—as one of its animals—is not like driving through one, or camping for a week.
I can assure you.

And yet here I am, almost fifty years later.
The same animal.

Only now, I’ve worn many dog collars myself.

Something has changed.
Something has snapped.

Maybe these days, my chameleon capacity for shifting back and forth in and out of that skin has slowed—like my hormones. Now, it’s different. The seamlessness is rusty. It creaks as one skin falls off.

I keep seeing myself trying to stand in two worlds at the same time—
and struggling to do so.

There is something about my animal-ness that refuses to play.
My pretender spots flicker a few times, then die.
My skin is leather now—
not burned and sore, but rigid and dry.
Not raw.

Is it instinct? Or oversight?
Experience will make you bitter, or clearer. Take your pick.

Bitterness only comes when you see what things are,
but still believe in them.
You still let them rule your mind.
Therefore, you believe in them.

After all, what option do we have—you say, spitting at the screen.
We can’t stop it!
We are powerless now.

And now, here at my farm in the southwest of Western Australia,
where I deliberately withdrew from the limelight four interesting years ago,
I see that bitterness is as useless as ignorance.

There are many levels of ignorance.

There’s chosen ignorance—pretending there is nothing to see when it’s obvious.
(Not really ignorance at all, but more like a kind of mental trauma defence.
A way to save your sanity from the incoming horror of truly seeing it.)

And then there’s simple, plain old ignorance—where lack of exposure
prevents one from seeing something at all.

The latter is the one most ardently pursued by propaganda
on every level of the societal machine:
schools, media, governments—just everything.

It is the gold standard the rulers of the world most desire:
You won’t miss what you don’t even know you missed.
Obliviousness.

There are no broken windows or handy lamp posts
from which they might be strung up.
No pitchforks or knives.
Just blank stares and gaping mouths,
waiting to be fed by the next ‘handout.’

What Pulled the Trigger?

The wild animal in me had been pacing the gilded cage
of my lovely house on the Perth Escarpment for some time.

But it was so nice. So comfortable.

I had created an award-winning infinity-edge swimming pool
overlooking the sparkling city lights.
I was in magazines.

I could do so many good things
and keep enjoying it—kind of.

Then I noticed the gigantic mobile phone tower,
looming over the beautiful national park
where I walked every morning with my dogs.

All I could see was a big “5G Coming Soon” flag,
flapping around its head.

One morning, I stood there—
and saw it for the first time, properly.

After going past it almost every day for thirteen years,
I saw the razor wire.
The vicious sword-blade edges of the steel fence posts surrounding it.

I could kind of overlook that.
But then came the masks.

Worse, far more terrifying, were the citizen mask police—
volunteers offering their services for free
on every corner you turned,
even on bush tracks near death towers.

I survived that.

Then came the turning point.

One fine day, in the now completely isolated new frontier
of the great South continent,
Premier Mark McGowan and Health Minister Roger Cook
(now the new Daddy Premier)
made an announcement.

From this weekend, they had a new idea.

They would send helpful nurses, accompanied by police escorts,
to knock on the front doors of random homes across Perth—
to enquire about your status and invite you to have a “free jab.”

It was, they said,
a kind of health and wellbeing check-up.

Service beyond service.
Direct to your door.

The best service you could ask for—
apart from getting your jab at Bunnings
with a reward of a free barbecued sausage, of course.

When one timid journalist—later banned from pressers—
asked which suburbs they would call on,
they refused to say.

It was meant to be… a surprise.

I won’t outline the obvious implications of this.
It breaches so many “rules,” it bizarrely doesn’t—
because it’s unheard of.

Shock and awe are blinding, after all.

But it happened.

I think that was the truncheon across my monkey cage.
The strike that flipped the animal instinct switch.

It was so loud it woke the skulls.

I could no longer hide my head in the hole.
I admitted to myself:
I was not an ostrich.

So I packed up.

After thirteen lovely years on the edge of the city,
in the Perth Hills, in my nice, comfortable, successful life—
I left.

No one seemed to hear it,
except a few of us.

The exodus had begun.

Some of us can hear the skulls in the catacombs of history—
over hundreds, even thousands of years—
warning of these times.

Others hear nothing
but the assurances of the daily pressers.

The Skulls in the Biscuit Box
Right or wrong, I could not argue with the skulls that now rattled louder than ever in the biscuit box.
I feared they would shatter.

Moving—again—was exhausting.
All my too-many possessions, my studio equipment.
It obliterated my order of things:
my routines, my sense of security,
all the stable conditions that matter to creative people—
in between their crazy adventures,
from which they draw inspiration born of instability.

But remember this:
there is no art created in any society, in any period of history,
while bombs are actively falling on one’s creative instinct.

Art may well be created about war and carnage—
but only at a distance from where the bombs drop.

As for war artists?
They paint nothing but the fearsome faces of men,
captured in the foxholes.

For artists to do what narrative artists do—
to tell stories, metaphorically—
that kind of work is rarely welcome
when the “story” is still raw,
when the propaganda is still ripe and effective.

This is dangerous business.

You cannot tell these truths—truthfully or metaphorically—
while they are still being manufactured.
You cannot retranslate them while they are under construction.
We must only do this in secret code.

I said it is dangerous business.
It is.

It is indeed a tragedy—
that history will repeat its horrors
because, as planned, many today cannot even recognise
the ancient patterns being replayed
in our so-called civilised countries.

In dark days, the first to be pushed into the ditch
are the artists, the academics, the genuine people,
the writers who dare to speak—
as the web of censorship is spun.

The black spider does not like to be interrupted
while she works her trap into shape.

Shame, isn’t it—
that we stripped the history of Communism from the school curriculum?

Students of history—
(what little of it hasn’t been rewritten by the victors)—
know enough about revolutions and war
to understand this:
truth has no place in the bed of deception.

So, with a strange mix of relief
and absolute dread
at leaving my heaven in what once seemed like a time of peace,
I walked away from that comfortable world.

But the animal in me saw it differently.

It moved away from the cage—
away from the chaos, the disorder,
and the sickly-sweet stench of death
that has hung in the air since the great deception of 2019.

While all this was deliberate,
it has made it difficult—
not ironically,
but obviously—
to remain in the limelight.

Sheep Die – While Bombs Fly

Now, there is a silence that eventually surrounds you
when you step far enough away from the insanity—
the hypnosis the world is in—
as it marches toward its own self-destruction
at an accelerating pace.

You still see it. Every day. On the computer.

In the background, a sheep dies suddenly.
You worry. You ask: What happened?

Then you see the great swathe of snake tracks,
winding up and down their walking path.

There is always grief.
Be it a chicken or a tree.

What more could I have done?

And now?
Israel is bombing Iran.
World War three is coming!

Then you remember:
I need to bury this poor sheep. It’s going to be 40 degrees today.

That’s what happens.
That’s how you get your mind back.

It’s not always death.
Sometimes it’s a dozen chickens waddling with their wings out—
so excited to see you bringing them scraps from the kitchen.
So grateful.

Seeing everything is only possible
when you move far enough away to see everything.

Bitterness only grows in the absence of full perspective.

But full perspective?
It strokes your fur in the correct direction
after a life of being rubbed the wrong way.

It’s a relief.
It feels better. Instantly.

It’s such a relief to know goodness.
But only if you really know badness. Ugliness.

Heaven and Hell exist as mythological dichotomies
because they hold the principle by which humans heal:
We must hold both in order to discern either.

To hold perspective well
gives you options inside your mind—
a way to balance,
a way to remember
that you are not alone
or insane.

There is a broader world in which to measure all things.
Not to ignore them—
but to understand them.

Otherwise, you live only in Eden,
and cannot know how beautiful it is.

Or, as many do,
you live only in Hell,
with no option to change it—
even with a single act of free will,
such as kindness
in a landscape of hellishness.

What do we do?

A part of me wants to get in there and fight.
The other keeps asking:
Why bother?

Lately, many things are becoming clearer.
For example: the next level down from owning possessions as status—
the tiny home movement.

Many owners don’t even own land.
They’ve stepped out of the system entirely.

But if you do own land and try to do something on it—
like place your own tiny home—
the system pulls you back in.

The taxes begin.
The monitoring begins.
The choking begins.

This morning, I was thinking about insurance.

What a strange game it is.

Once you remove the fear of owning a big house or lots of stuff,
clarity increases.

House insurance?
It’s blackmail.

Medical insurance? Same.

They make you sign waivers to avoid paying out.
They offer you a “No claim bonus.”

What the fuck is that?

They’re saying:
We only insure you for big stuff, but pay us anyway—
even if you never claim for 30 years.

And then, you start to scan across the whole system—
and you see it.

Blackmail and fear = extortion.

You never truly “own” anything.
You just pay taxes for the privilege of ownership.

It’s a rort.

Just like usury:
interest on loans.
They don’t even own the money they lend.
They own the impression of it—
and charge you for the magic trick of that power.

These are strange things.
But when you start to see through them,
they crumble—fast.

I walk around my house
and look at all my things in every room.

What is all this stuff?

I have four fans—because I have four rooms.
Five chairs—because I have five desks.

But I sit at one table, on one chair, 99% of the time.

I use about four plates and cups.
Three pots.
One set of cutlery.
One set of sheets.

Three sets of clothes per season.

I have a full tool shed—
but I use tools from the kitchen drawer 99% of the time.

Even in my studio—220 square metres—
I ask myself:
What do I actually use in here?

A few boxes of paint.
Some canvases.

About 70% of the contents?
Unused.

It starts to feel very odd.

So what do we do about this?

We look up and say,
“It’s a cloudy day”—
as the chemtrail planes disappear into the distance.

Someone calls the Bureau of Meteorology and asks,
“Hey, what are you doing?”

The reply:
“Nothing. Nothing is going on.”

“Can I speak to your superior?”

“That is not possible. Goodbye.”

The Perceptiphere and the Desperado

Everything we do to “shelter in place,”
to protect ourselves from the horrible dark cloud
gathering in the perceptiphere,
looks like more game-playing.

The game of the recalcitrant.

Look! A mad border-dweller,
skulking in the desert.

A desperado.
Living with his old dog in a tin shack.
Dreaming of the good old days.

What was once in the corner of our perception
now stands fully in view.

And all you can hear is the Eagles’
Hotel California
playing on a loop:

“You can check out anytime you like,
but you can never leave...”

While we play inside the game (the hotel),
we play a role in the charade.

The terrifying truth of the options beyond—
we see it at first as a mirage.

All shimmer and vibration.

One second: large, wet, and close.
The next: static. Then gone.

Is it actually there?

You only see it
when all the distractions fall away.
When the illusion dissolves.

It’s far too disturbing—
unless you’ve stared into its face with no face,
in your dreams.

Unless you’ve known it in life.
Unless you’ve stood in the desert,
alone,
and stared out at that horizon
while caressing fossilised snakes
melted into gibber stones.

Then, you know what this trickery is
that fools so many.

All the kings.
All the castles.
All the armies.
All the gold and treasure—

Melt into hot red sand
between your mind and the other side.

The noise from the squawking boxes,
the cogs churning into the guts of the Earth,
the splitting psyche—

All fall away into static.

A lizard with a tail like a whip
scurries past,
pausing only to look into your eyes.

What is in our eyes—
what is right before us—
that we are so blind to?