Checking in with Steve in Babbage Island, Australia

When we first communicated, Steve, I thought you were in the USA, but you’re in Australia, on Babbage Island, next to tiny Carnavon, with less than 5,000 people. The nearest city is Perth, ten hours away by car. You must have deep roots in this region?

-I’m not even allowed in the USA. My police record would stop me getting a visa and I am loathed by the Zionists. They’ve put me on a list and declared me Amalek, according to my anti-fans at the Jewish Defense League. Carnarvon is a strange place, really. It’s got a lot of tropical fruit, and was the first place to grow bananas in this state. It was a whaling station. It’s a bit of a fishing destination, though not so popular since they closed the One Mile Jetty.

Not to sound weird, man, but does anyone migrate there? To put it differently, are there Lebanese, Samoan or Vietnamese restaurants or gangs in your region?

-There’s a couple of Thai or maybe Vietnamese owned cafes. There’s a kebab joint which may be Turkish or Lebanese. There’s a Chicken Treat, and the pub for a feed. On a small pension, I don’t get out to eat these days. There’s a restaurant beside the One Mile Jetty Museum. I’d expected to work there as a caretaker, but that didn’t work out, so I ended up stranded here, at the caravan park. My car also crapped itself. It took me six months to fix, as I had to be my own mechanic. I needed Chat GPT and Ebay for instruction and parts to fix my Mercedes. At least I started to get the hang of fixing my own car.

I don’t see anything you’d call a gang, but drunken mobs of blackfellas always seem gang-like to most whites. Drinking as such has a low profile because cops are ubiquitous anywhere people gather.

We get many Samoans through here, and Aborigines, including Noongars trickling North. They were the southern tribe who stuck around Perth after white colonisation. Northern tribes avoided the developed South. They were warned of our arrival by ET.

Hold on, what’s ET?

-Extra terrestrials. The blackfella has a long and well-remembered history of contact. I’ve heard it directly from the oldest tribes. Wandjina Man, a famous cave painting in the Northern Territory, is one record. It’s a depiction of the “Grey aliens,” one of the “star people.” The Aborigines were warned of our arrival by ship, and what would follow. It’s the core reason Noongars are scorned among northern tribes. Ignoring the stories, Noongars decided to live among us, which led to alcohol and drugs, and the stolen generation, etc.

I’ve spent many years in the Pilbara and Kimberley. These are my favourite places because of the people, black and white. They’re more genuine and honest, in my view, and closest to the Crocodile Dundee of the Outback.

I’m deeply committed to aboriginal wisdom and knowledge. It’s the main reason I am here. Though I may return south for a bit, this is where I plan to see out the bad times. I’ve got a permanent invite to join the Aborigines in the Kimberley. I’ve seen some of their spooky stuff and take it very seriously. I also have an affinity for some First Nations from the USA. Cree, for one.

What spooky stuff?

-One of my first spooky experiences with a blackfella was in Karratha. After my French wife left, I used to drive to Bunbury to visit my parents. I had a Ford GTHO, a beast. I’d do the trip averaging 100mph. You’d get 100 speeding tickets these days, of course. One time, I saw an Aborigine I knew, so pulled over to offer him a lift. He laughed and said, “No way, you drive too fast, brother.” I left him and continued down south. When I got to Bunbury about 11 hours later, I saw the same guy walking down the street! He waved and looked kind of sheepish. There’s no way he could have gotten there before me. When I mentioned this to him later, he just grinned and spoke about “spirit walking.” He was the tribe’s “spirit man.” My only conclusion is I saw his astral body in Bunbury.

Maybe you saw his astral body in Karratha? You mentioned a French wife. How many wives have you had?

-I’ve been married three times. A French girl when I was young. I was a Mormon then. We met when I was doing door knocking with missionaries from the USA. We got engaged during my last year in high school. She was 15, I was 17. Claire was a gorgeous, busty blonde, but our sex life was problematic. Only later did I know she’d been fucked by her father, but he and I got along great. A little guy, he’s an ex Foreign Legionnaire. We smoked pot together.

We ended up living in Karratha. I had a business servicing office machines. Bought a house even. I was making good money but lost it all, and fucked up drinking after Claire left.

I hit the road. After backpacking across the Nullarbor, I was headed north towards the hippy commune in Northern New South Wales. Never got there. Instead, I bumped into another busty blonde, a Danish girl, at Cable Beach in Broome. We hooked up, then left for Southeast Asia in 1987 when her visa ran out. Ended up in Denmark, where we married.

I worked factory jobs and as an office machine tech. They were a good six years. I learned Danish so I could argue with her parents. I came to love my Danish parents-in-law deeply. We returned to Australia, had three kids and were living near Pemberton. There, I started a fireworks company. Fireworks is a bad boys’ club. It’s run by the biggest heroin dealers in the state, I found out. I ran afoul of them. I also dabbled with manufacturing meth. Used it, too. That led to some bad decisions. Legal problems caused me to lose my company, our farm and even my marriage of 20 years to a fantastic Danish girl, but it was me who fucked up. I was a selfish and foolish father. I don’t blame them for having nothing to do with me, but it hurts.

It took me ten years to recover. I ended up meeting a Pakistani girl, 29 years younger, on Facebook. We fell in love. I went there, met her family, reverted to Islam and married her. I loved my father-in-law too. In Siem Reap, I got Missi a visa for a prospective spouse, since it’s easier than for a wife. We moved to Australia. When Missi’s father died, she went home for his funeral, but couldn’t drag herself away from her family again. You’ve got to experience Pakistani families to understand. It looks like she took advantage of me, but I don’t think it was intentional.

On my one visit to Australia, I was limited to Queensland. What struck me immediately were the high prices of beer and cigarettes, due to punitive taxes. It’s as if your government didn’t want folks to spend hours at a bar, drinking, smoking and chattering. Pubs were way too bougie, with, nearly always, fine dining options.

-There’s a strict control on alcohol sales. You’re even recorded when buying over a certain amount. I’m a Muslim revert, so it doesn’t affect me really. Here at the caravan park, cops come through at least once a day.

What, exactly, is a Muslim revert?

-To marry Missi, I had to convert, but I genuinely converted after a visit to Badshahi Mosque. Her family were showing me around. I was deeply affected by the exquisite building. The engineering and magnificent quality of the workmanship from Mughal times was staggering. I recognised, above all, the extreme love and devotion it bespoke. I knew the men who had created this incredible perfection had done so out of devotion to the creator, and nothing else. Nothing else I’ve seen comes close to that magnificence.

The perfectly straight lines, the beauty and the level of the paved courtyard, despite many years of use. Elephants, horses and all had traversed it, yet after hundreds of years, it remained perfectly level, to the minutest degree. It had never been relevelled in 600 years! It was as perfect as anything could be done today.

That building inspired me to see what Islam could produce. I spent much of my time there with tears streaming down my face in awe. I have a strong feel for engineering, ever since I grew up devoted to Legos. That and the book Muhammad by Martin Lings are what led me to convert. We say revert because we believe all are born as Muslims, that Islam is the natural state of all, as created by Allah. Having spent four years in a Mormon seminary, I was well versed in the Old Testament. That served me well with Islam, where I found very much the exact same things being taught. I reverted to Islam in 2011 and have never looked back. Once in, I had to examine the sectarian issue, so recognised it was the Shia examples which inspired me. Thus I’m a Shia Muslim, quite specifically. It’s the purest form of Islam.

You were born Presbyterian, then converted to Mormonism and, now, Islam. You were also a Buddhist, no?

-Yes, for about a decade after spending a year backpacking in Thailand. I was very impressed with the brown robed monks and thought this was the one for me.

Now, let’s get to your police record. What’s up with that?

-I’ve only spent 1 ½ year in prison, total. There’s also an Interpol warrant on me in Switzerland, just for absconding on a fine. I never did anything else to earn that attention. With repeated court cases following this unpaid fine, it’s grown pretty substantial. It’s a shitty bureaucratic shithole. Actually, the initial arrest ended with me holding a fat off-duty cop by the throat, hanging over a stairwell, but they kind of let that slide because he was an arsehole.

When I was about 22, I was locked up for a couple of months for drunk driving. Having no bigotry towards blackfellas, I felt good about seeing some among the inmates. Walking awkwardly towards my cell block, I saw one blackfella with gumboots, so made a clumsy remark intended as a joke. He just put his head down and kept walking.

Minutes later, a couple of enormous blackfellas came out from the kitchen and stopped me. The guy I spoke to was behind them. This mountain of a man said, “You called my brother a pig?” Actually, the lousy joke was about sheep. As I tried to explain, he cut me off with a THUD. I literally saw stars like in the cartoons. I was stunned but realised words would not help, so I just shut up, saying, “Yes, sir,” and sorry, as I walked on.

Once I got to the dormitory, the other white guys stared at me in silence. This was a segregated prison. Indeed ,most still are. One guy then said, “Fuck! You’re dead! You’ve already pissed off the boongs.”

Blackfellas were 4/5th of the prison population. From there on, all the talk was about how dead I was. How the boongs looked after their own and nobody crossed them inside. An uncomfortable first night was had by me, thinking about what the next day would bring.

In the morning, we headed to where tea and breakfast were served. Each group had its communal place. Feeling mostly upset that blackfellas thought I was a rude racist, I had decided to deal with it head on. With my tea, I walked to the black side of the yard. All eyes were on me, obviously. Muttering among the white guys was that I was going to my doom.

I could see the bloke I’d spoken to, and those big ones on either side. They were in a card game. I knew not to address them directly, so asked another if I could talk to his brother. It was kind of comical, I guess. He turned to a big guy, “This whitey wants to talk to ya.” I said I’d been stupid and shouldn’t have talked to someone I didn’t know. I explained I had no problem with blackfellas, that I’d been living near Roebourne for years, that I was new to prison life and feeling really off balance and lost, so when I saw a familiar black face, I tried to make contact in my nervousness. My attempt at a joke was a bust. I was sorry and shamed it happened. They heard me out, then said, “OK, fair enough. Now to go back to the white side.”

While there, my father had delivered about 200 cassettes. I had a Walkman, too, so used it to listen to Bob Dylan, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Cat Stevens and others. One day, a couple of blackfellas came into our dorm, to ask about the new John Fogerty song they’d heard me playing. They said one of their guys was trying to learn it on guitar.

Blackfellas have some incredible musicians. Each prison I was in had some who played guitar beautifully. Not to mention astounding chess skills. Eyeing my large collection of cassettes, they were obviously impressed.

I said they could borrow whatever from me if they wanted for their brother. He looked at me like I was mad, “You’d loan this to me?”

“Yes, sure. You’d return it, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course I would. Do you think I’m a thief?”

I confess it went through my mind. Many of them were in for theft, actually. He picked another cassette and asked, “What about this one?” He didn’t even look at it, I noticed. I answered sure, and the same to a third. He asked for a fourth, but I said return the others first and you can borrow more. I honestly didn’t know if I’d ever see any of them again.

They left with three of my tapes. For the rest of the day, John Fogerty was blaring full volume from their cell block.

Whiteys in my barracks assured me I’d never see my tapes again. Actually, they came back. A few others did, too. At one point, I must have had 40 cassettes loaned to Aborigines. By the end of my time in there, I never lost a single cassette to them.

On the other hand, I lost half a dozen and my Walkman to a white guy who was a long termer. In for murder, he was a pretty scary. One day, he said to me, “You’re pretty smart, eh?” I didn’t deny it. Frankly, there was quite a gulf in intellect between me and most of the white guys, at least. I was just out of university. Despite having studied chemistry and physics, I’d actually been an English and English Literature dux at school.

Since I was smarter than the other bums, the murderer chose me as his hairdresser. He didn’t trust anyone else near his throat with a pair of scissors. He was getting out soon, so didn’t want the sheep shearer. The prison barber was, literally, a sheep shearer. He just said, “If you cut me, I’ll kill you.” And, “If you make me look stupid, I’ll kill you.” That’s the sum total of my instruction as a newly minted barber. So we got a pair of scissors smuggled from the shoe shop. It was a half decent cut. When the killer looked at the results, he was thrilled. We then became mates, apparently.

A week or two later, the killer said I was going to pull a rotten tooth he’d been suffering with for ages. My instructions were simple. “If you don’t get it the first time, I’m going to kill you.” And, “If it hurts, I’m going to kill you.” Being told this from a guy who was in for multiple murders was sobering.

I got some pliers smuggled from the machine shop. On that day, we set up a chair and I got hold of the big man’s rotten, wobbly tooth with a pair of mechanic’s pliers. I braced myself for what I knew had to be a once off, do or die effort. I yanked with all my strength and, pop, out it came. Easier than expected. After a moment, he felt his mouth to realise it was gone.

I became a “champion” and praised as the greatest dentist ever. Over the years, I used that experience to pull wobbly teeth from my kids. I find it harder to do for myself, so usually leave them for months as they get worse. Though I’ve lost most of my top teeth, I still have enough left to get by without dentures, thanks to God.

I’ve forgotten the name of the murderer. He nicked my Walkman and some cassettes, as said. They were the only ones I lost inside. On the whole, a cheap enough experience and I got some stories out of it.

I had a much older girlfriend at the time. She used to visit me, together with my parents. My mom was pretty scandalised Lorrie was closer to her age. In the visiting yard, Lorrie gave me a blowjob. That was the high point, I guess.

Close to my release date, a young thug, in for gang rape, attacked my mate, Vince, who went down hard. Pushing my chair back, I stood up to confront this little arsehole, so he hit me too. We ended up on the ground. I was pretty smashed up, so ended up in the sick bay for a couple of days.

While in there, I heard about how the Aborigines had gone after Danny Green for attacking me. They’d adopted me as a good whitey, so saw it as an assault on one of their own. That fight took nearly two full hours. Danny and the toughest Aborigine in the prison just about beat each other senseless. The screws let it happen. The entire prison watched this gladiatorial combat. There was a second fight, too. I was the reason the blackfellas did this. I was and still am touched by their loyalty. Years later when I got locked up for about six months in Roebourne Prison, which was 95% Aborigines, my reputation among them followed, so I had a fantastic experience among them.

You’ve had so many jobs, and even factories making fireworks and kayaks. Now you’re unemployed. At your age, it’s extremely difficult to get any job. In Australia, some employers are still demanding Covid vaccination status. That is preposterous! At your caravan park, there isn’t much socializing, you told me. Cops come through daily to maintain order. Weed helps, but it’s outrageously expensive where you are. Living on a small pension, you don’t get out much, but you do have your rabbit. At my Substack, you even call yourself Rabbit Nexus

-I’m a grey nomad or gypsy living in a caravan with my companion rabbit, Bindy. She cheers me up daily. Even though she’s an arrogant little cunt and not particularly close to me yet, the love and adoration still in my heart for Ramzy, my first rabbit, are her inheritance. I’m as devoted to her as I would be to Ramzy, in whose memory I anointed her from the outset. Ramzy was better than any wife in most ways.

I’d largely turned my back on Western culture and still long for the warmth and culture I had when I had a Pakistani wife. We still communicate. I really feel lost on that score and never once thought of changing my religion again. I’m here for the duration, but am one lonely Muslim, given where I live. I’d embrace a Muslim community if there was one, but in some ways it would exacerbate the feeling of loss from Missi. I’m really hurt and confused by that. I’ve given up seeking female human companionship. I’m just hoping not to have to grieve the loss of more than one or two more rabbits. I grieve deeply and in a way all the losses flow into one for me.

—Steve, 63-years-old