The Conspiracy Collectors

An only child, I was born in 1984, a Piscean baby, a water sign. This was my earliest memory of identity. Drummed into me by my parents, it was predetermined that I would be artistic, creative, personable and have trouble with my feet. Although quite bright, they always seemed to live in an ethereal world where difficult decisions were made on a whim. Omens and oracles replaced more traditional decision making processes..

I was eleven when the unmistakable screech of a connecting dial-up modem came from its grey plastic box as my parents huddled in front of the alien glow of the monochrome monitor. This was their first computer and their introduction to the information superhighway. The information superhighway is only as good as the drivers on it. It is only as useful as its destinations. My parents' computer forays were like driving a Volkswagen beetle, blindfolded, blind drunk and very fast.

We lived in Brisbane, I attended Mount Gravatt State School, Dad’s office job paid the bills and Mum’s work in a jewellery shop saved for a rainy day. The rainy day pretty much came as soon as the information superhighway was connected. Minimal information literacy skills collided with an avalanche of unsourced, unreferenced information. Literacy lost.

It started with a thing they called IRC - I really didn’t know what it meant but they loved it. They spent hours ‘chatting’ even though they didn’t actually talk to anyone. The rot set in gradually, with my Mum starting discussions with people about crystals. She swore blind that she felt ‘uplifted’ when she had to rearrange the diamond ring display at work. A piece of quartz in the watch display window caused her angst and she developed a phobia about rubies. Dad gave her a chart of birthstones and she insisted I carry a piece of aquamarine wherever I went.That didn’t last long.

Salt suddenly became the enemy, combining poisons too awful to mention and a molecular crystalline structure reminiscent of a jail cell. At fifteen, I was doomed to eating bland foods. Olives were off the menu, but realistically, they were never on it. No more traditional corned beef, a righteously salt-free diet further compounded my hormonal teen angst. My mother was an awful cook and needed all the help she could get.

The Queensland Department of Education rolled out ‘computers in education’ about then. Seminars for parents were the order of the day. They were invited by the school to meetings about the newfangled gadgetry that would transform the way we lived and worked, give us more leisure time and lead to utopia by 2000, the very next year. I hid the invitations. There was no way I would let my increasingly computer-absent parents anywhere near that initiative.

In the meantime my dad got himself his own computer because it was clear the digital world was touching each of them in pleasant places.

He developed an unassailable awareness of environmental issues, biodynamics, homeopathy, naturopathy, wellness and animal welfare, finally rolling all of these into a new awareness. “Enlightenment” was hardly the right term. His office job was the life support system for his online revelations. When he raised significant scientifically unproven theories with workmates, like, “Water molecules have memory,” their scowling avoidance reaffirmed he was absolutely right. He was asked to leave when he was caught sprinkling a little black toner from the office printer into the staff room water cooler reservoir as he refilled it. Despite his protestations that it was helpful in building workers’ “immunity to the toxins in the toner”, management frowned on the attempt to poison co-workers.

This came after his repeated and increasingly strange actions to improve workplace health, if not safety. Liberally painting the insides of the air conditioning ducts with organic cider vinegar was relatively harmless. It didn’t combat legionnaire’s disease at all. Wearing heavy duty sunglasses, which I thought were closer to welding goggles, to reduce the radiation from the computer screen was, by comparison, one of his more endearing traits. He wasn’t the best at social skills, being completely clueless about when to stop talking. He was utterly incapable of reading body language and the online “social” world was his dream come true.

Social adroitness was unnecessary when he could dive down the multiple rabbit-holes of conspiracy, venal stupidity and just plain selfish awfulness. Online nut jobs became his friends, although he never actually met them. He and Mum would exchange increasingly weird theories over interminable cups of tea. I noticed they didn’t talk to the neighbours any more. If they did it was peremptory and never led to anything more than the neighbours suddenly having something very urgent to do elsewhere as my father would disclose frightening new secret developments in world events known only to him.

I finished high school in 2003; in February 2004 Facebook arrived. I lost my parents.

They had enough money to live on, sold the modest house in Brisbane and bought the only rural property they could afford, three hectares in Green Pigeon Road, Green Pigeon, just north of Kyogle in the Northern Rivers. Naive pecker.

The ‘dwelling’ was a shambolic, sad old farm house. The garden was overgrown,“permaculture” the real estate bloke said, no town water, self-managed sewage disposal. They thought it was heaven. I got a job selling shoes in Brisbane. Even though I was flat broke, in a shared flat in Sunnybank, mercifully working just up the road, the arrival of the removal van to whisk my parents off to a new life brought a palpable sense of relief. I felt as if I’d already lost them.

The move for them brought with it the radiance of the utterly self-assured. Facebook discussions ran rampant on what they would do with the property; it was decided it would be a place of complete harmony with crystal healing and homeopathy. The land would be given over to wildlife and nature as well as carefully tended vegetable gardens and rolling lawns too. They would rescue ill-treated livestock and provide sentient creatures retirement living in parallel with their own. They would only be ethical carnivores and perhaps opportunistic vegans. They would rescue battery chickens for eggs.

I suggested they use the battery chickens as an interim power source. The first obvious trait of the newly enlightened is no sense of humour. At all. No matter how lame the joke.

The first couple of years were spent reinforcing both the infrastructure of the property and their own unique set of utterly wrong beliefs with which they were to re-educate the world. Eschewing much contact with neighbours, they set about creating their haven in between long posts on Facebook and desperately tiresome YouTube videos. Despite their extensive social media “network”, they did it all themselves. To their credit they attempted everything, but I don’t think they asked anyone else either.

When I made one of the regular “how are you going?” phone calls in early 2008, things had settled. The house was functional and there was a small vegetable patch. In the background Alan Jones was his bellicose self.and I gently inquired what that was about. They used to be rusted-on ABC listeners. “He says what we’re thinking.” The cold hand of simpleton logic was strangling them.

By this time I was in the last year of an environmental science degree and increasingly despairing of my parents’ lack of engagement with the real world. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it, they jumped from one fantasy to the next, each one more devoid of intelligent scrutiny than the last. I was at a loss as to how two seemingly reasonably intelligent people had come to believe completely in the most corrupt online nonsense imaginable. I tried making a point of visiting during semester breaks and between jobs; the visits became more and more infrequent. My parents would actually be hurt if I pointed out the autism/vaccine connection was roundly disproved time and time again. They would shy away if I wouldn’t accept chemtrails as real and comfrey the new global panacea.

Their world descended into a critical thinker’s nightmare of impenetrable straw man arguments and desperate confirmation bias. Far from living a blissful life, they seemed to get angrier and angrier..

I see now it served a purpose for them. Their lives were mundane and the allure of the most awful, true or not, was irresistible. It defined them. Neither were terribly assertive and neither would challenge anything face to face. It's different for me, I'm their only offspring. The usual parenting rules applied, they were indeed loving parents but I wonder if I dodged a bullet. I shudder to think what might have happened had I been born ten years later.

About a year ago they found Norman, an unbranded poddy calf. Norman was pretty sickly and malnourished. The blokes at Norco Rural came to the rescue with carefully worded assistance after my mum flatly refused to accept the advice from ‘Future Beef’, an online resource for cattle farmers. She would not bring herself to take advice from people who would only kill the beast for meat. The Norco people I think were used to this. Norman survived and thrived. The novelty wore off as Noman stacked on the weight, thanks to regular bottle feeding by both my parents. They doubled up on the Dabsco BioCalf Probiotic Calf Milk Additive billed as “A premium quality probiotic powder – High performance, micro-encapsulated and multi-strain probiotic non-antibiotic powder milk additive.” Norman loved it a bit too much.

Having a free-range horny yearling bull on an inadequately fenced acreage, surrounded by alluring heifers, was a recipe for inevitable disaster. Norman became well known, infamous, throughout Green Pigeon. Dad would go and get him onto the tandem box trailer. It was easy. Toffee apples. He was a sucker for toffee apples, despite the fact he was getting much too big for the trailer. They would keep a stock of toffee apples in the freezer because Norman escaped so often.

He went missing for 48 hours only to reappear castrated, sporting an enormous cow bell and a scrawled note that said, “I’ll use the triple crush emasculator on you if Norman comes back.” My dad took the hint and my mum was mortified. I had to look up ‘triple crush emasculator’. Nasty.

My mum made an Irish linen tea towel into a dressing for Norman’s sore lack of balls. It was the thought that counted. Norman went from dangerously stupid to stupidly dangerous in two weeks.

His final solution did lead to both a seven month halt to vegetarianism and a bit of breathing space on the property for the menagerie that just seemed to grow. My mother’s version of ‘working dogs’ was a chihuahua and a dachshund, both adopted from the local pound because “they were adorable”. Hornswoggle, the lonely one-eyed goat would butt the dogs into next week if he caught them unawares. This was fortunately rare because he had pretty much no depth perception. This had a deleterious effect on his agility and he spent his pre-curry days forlornly fat. The resulting curry was redolent of goat piss, but I digress.

The chickens were in various stages of perennial moult and the entire roll call of rescued animals slept in ramshackle pens incompetently guarded by woven dream catchers and crystals. There wasn’t a ‘serious’ animal in the place. They were all dysfunctional in some way and I had to admire my parents’ tenacity in ministering to them. Hornswoggle sported a jaunty eye patch and the moulting chickens had sharp outfits made from op-shop jumper sleeves which would inevitably end up as wool spaghetti in a nesting box.

Their care of the menagerie was almost as evangelical as their theories about everything else. Unlike the everything else theories, this was real, immediate and with consequences. They told me earnestly their hearts were full of love for all God’s creatures.

That was when the alarm bells really went off.

In October 2008 ABC Local in Kyogle ran an article about the largest rabbit farm and abattoir in Australia, on Green Pigeon Road. Almost next door.

My parents only knew about it vaguely because there were bags of rabbit poo for sale at the gate with the usual country honesty box. My parents would often buy a couple of bags for the garden, completely clueless to where that amount of compost would have some from. As it turned out, the kids of the onsite abattoir manager bagged a bit of the rabbit manure and sold it at the gate for pocket money. The business itself had an entire commercial operation to recycle the rabbit manure. They were slaughtering thousands of rabbits a week to feed the ever increasing, lucrative demands of the Sydney gourmet market. I thought securely farming one of Australia’s most noxious feral pests for a tidy profit was a great idea.

Attempting to liberate 4000 free range breeding does from the neighbouring rabbit farm was one of the worst decisions my parents had ever made. The rabbits were kept in tight biosecurity designed to prevent their getting out and possibly more importantly disease getting in. My parents’ online network egged them on, the PETA people shrilly declaring “Rabbits’ Rights” as they furiously typed inflammatory messages like “Rabbits’ Rights”. They angrily put out the call to arms. The call to action. The call of nature, anything, to enlist people to storm the abattoir and liberate the poor rabbits.

My pleas about rabbits being an introduced feral pest, environmental destruction and reasonable argument about trespass and vandalism fell on deaf ears. If they were going to liberate refugees from a detention centre I’d have been in it like a shot. This was liberating rabbits that would breed like - well - rabbits.

In the end, one person arrived to help them liberate the oppressed bunnies. The Italian piano tuner who didn’t speak much English arrived a week after my mother sent him a direct message asking if he was up for “the action”.

The only things remotely approaching camouflage gear my parents had were ancient wetsuits from a long past surfing life and very late on a balmy spring night the three rabbit releasers crept 200 sweaty metres to the property boundary. Enzo sensibly wore black jeans and a black shirt.

The biosecurity involved complex fencing designed to keep the ‘free range’ rabbits in. The fearless three should have realised the rabbits would be housed in sheds, caged and well confined because of their proclivity for breeding and digging warrens under pretty much anything. This factoid completely escaped them.

Piano tuners’ little known skill is the ability to cut wire. Enzo brought to the task three sets of Starrett Piano WIre Cutters, the finest in the business. Which was incredibly good luck because the two pairs of Bunnings pliers my parents owned would be flat out cutting alfoil. They got to work, snipping entirely through three panels of three different gauge wire to create a gap for the liberated rabbits to run free. As they sat by the breached fence, admiring their handiwork a rabbit raced across the paddock in front of them. As one they sprang through the gap to herd the rabbit towards freedom, in their enthusiasm completely forgetting they were indeed trespassing. Of course the rabbit, uninterested in either freedom or three overheated humans, had disappeared.

I think they expected thousands of freed, grateful Easter Bunnies to storm out through the breached fence. The single disinterested animal was a monumental let-down. It was probably a wild horny buck, on a pretty good wicket, up to his ears in rabbit estrogen.

Exhausted, overheated, they headed for the gap through the fence and up Green Pigeon road as the local police car came cruising from the opposite direction, catching them squarely in its headlights. By all accounts it was the least dramatic collar in the history of the Northern Rivers.

The three of them were charged with entering closed land (it was called ‘trespassing ‘ then) and malicious damage. The social media traffic where they had planned the top secret mission was being loosely monitored by the NSW police, acutely aware that the ABC story would create some ripples. Local cops are really not stupid and had a fair idea about my parents.

The fence panels were replaced by dawn and no rabbits were either harmed or freed by the adventure, but a new problem arose. The NSW police in their casual vigilance brilliantly reinforced my parents' paranoid conviction that the police monitor their lives. The Kyogle court hearing was a farce. Mum and Dad tried to lecture the magistrate about the evils of rabbit farming and the likelihood the rabbit farmers were part of a carnivores cabal. It didn’t go down well. A nominal fine and a good behaviour bond was the extent of the punishment, imposed by an irritated magistrate who had a full court listing. One of the first tenets of the legal system is that you never represent yourself.

They were unshakably entrenched in their opinions. They would never intelligently engage in a discussion; it would start well, the reaffirming nodding and almost appropriate eye contact would preface a move into something, anything, truly loopy. They would sidestep unpredictably into utter dogmatism prefaced by, “You should do your own research,” then referring to Youtube videos, lunatic fringe Facebook groups, 4Chan and other gleaming examples of all that is unrelated to elementary scientific methodology.

In short, my parents' confirmation bias had taken over their lives.

The Rappville fires put an end to all that. In December 2019 bushfires tore through the district south of Kyogle in an unprecedented firestorm. The entire Northern Rivers was on edge. Spot fires were breaking out, stretching the Rural Fire Services thin. Conflicting accounts on social media, initially well intentioned, started becoming destructive. People were turning to social media for immediate information but the immediacy came at the cost of accuracy. The flood of posts did nothing to assist the effort to mitigate the disaster and in fact got in the way. The ABC and the Rural Fire Service carried the most accurate and timely information. Although most people in Green Pigeon were frightened, they methodically worked their way through the elementary bushfire precautions. The rabbit abattoir manager phoned to see if they were OK and my mum hung up on him.

My parents phoned me every hour asking what they should do then informing me that someone on one of their discussion boards had said the opposite. I told them to listen to local ABC. They refused and said that Sky News radio online was better. I was so frustrated and angry I hung up the phone and just stared at the wall for twenty minutes until I calmed down.

Their longtime distrust of everything gave them no solace because they didn’t know who to believe. They were so convinced that everyone and everything was trying to control, con, poison, infiltrate, kill, brainwash or confuse them they had nothing left. The air was thick with smoke and although the fires were on the other side of Kyogle, they were terrified.

The only other person who phoned them to see if they were all right was Enzo. He explained the fires were on the other side of the town and they were most likely in the clear. I said the same thing but I’m not one of ‘them’. Enzo turned into one of my staunchest allies. Although a dedicated animal liberationist, be thought clearly. He understood the principles of animal husbandry and while he didn’t necessarily agree with my parents, he had the empathy required to both support and gently counter their rabid meanderings.

He capitalised on their disorganised panic and I loved him for it. He got them to channel their terror while talking to real estate agents. He convinced them to harness their love of animals into building an effective animal pen and giving everything else to other farms that had stock of the same species. The ‘working’ dogs were long dead and my mother didn’t get others simply because of their propensity to kill things. Fortunate, because her dog training skills involved treating them like fur babies which seriously contributed to their killing things. Enzo convinced my father that actually engaging a real estate agent really was a good idea and doing your own conveyancing was silly. He likened it to crystal healers not trusting their crystals to do their jobs and water molecules outsourcing their memories. I have no idea how that illogic all worked but it did.

The 2020 pandemic was the final straw. That was the end-play for two people who had dug themselves as deeply as anyone possibly could into their closed world of irrational paranoia. Their increasing feeble attempts to make sense of the spread of the virus saw them descend into a paralysed state of panic. The competing conspiracies about big pharma, new world order, 5G and vaccines with microchips almost brought them undone.

Their social isolation caused - oh the irony - by social media was almost complete.

By the time they were ready to move they really had nobody they could use as a reference point. They had nobody they could trust apart from Enzo. They had friends who fed their mushrooming, insular nonsense with gong baths, smoking ceremonies and chakra-aligning chants, but they couldn’t find anyone to just tell them what was required. The first reason, because fairly smart people could see them coming a mile off and wouldn’t go near them. The second was because my parents just wouldn’t believe them.

It has been a very long struggle to moderate the cult-like beliefs they still haltingly cling to. Until the fires I thought there was no going back, that I had completely lost my parents to the cavalcade of conspiracy bullshit that passes for analysis. It was grieving when you don’t know you are grieving.

It took a while but with the emergence of the pandemic they sold the Green Pigeon house for an awful lot of money, sight unseen, to people from Melbourne who just wanted to get out of the plague.

Now they’re living with me until they find a place and I’m plotting murder. I’m sure there’s a Facebook group for that.