Dark Dark Policing compels the reader’s concentration as it documents a nation polarised between the working poor and the uber rich at a time when ultranationalist groups are on the rise.
Written with hallucinatory intensity by one of Australia’s most experienced journalists, authorJohn Stapleton, it uses novelistic techniques to depict Australia during the early millennial period, a pivotal point in its history.
Dark Dark Policing is seen through the eyes of a crumpled old newspaper reporter whose visionary imagination drives him from the arid lands of the interior to confront the nation’s plethora of ultra-secret security agencies.
He speaks with an incandescent rage of the destruction of his beloved country.
Driven by the unalloyed greed of the nation’s oligarchy, indifference to the working poor and shocking levels of government incompetence, Australia is a polarised country where revolutionary sentiment and totalitarian impulses now thrive.
With incendiary intent and urgent flights of fantasy, entwined with extensive reportage, Stapleton responds savagely to a conservative government’s destruction of free speech and the surveillance of journalists.