Hideout in the Apocalypse is about surveillance and the crushing of Australia's larrikin culture.<br><br>In the last three years the Australian government has prosecuted the greatest assault on freedom of speech in the nation's history.<br><br>The government knew from international research that when it introduced the panopticon, universal surveillance, into Australia it would have a devastating impact on the culture. <br><br>When people know they are being watched, they behave differently. Dissent is stifled, conformity becomes the norm. This is the so-called chilling effect.<br><br>Hideout in the Apocalypse, in the great tradition of The Lucky Country, takes Australia's temperature half a century on from Donald Horne's classic cautionary tale. <br><br>Now the future has arrived. Forced by a plethora of new laws targeting journalists to use novelistic techniques, in his latest book veteran news reporter John Stapleton confirms the old adage, truth is stranger than fiction.<br><br>Hideout in the Apocalypse takes up the adventures of retired news reporter Old Alex, first encountered in the book's predecessor Terror in Australia: Workers' Paradise Lost. But as befits the times, this book is more fantastical, intimate and politically acerbic in its portrait of his beloved country. <br><br>Alex believes believes he has been under abusive levels of government surveillance since writing a book called Terror in Australia, and as a natural empath can hear the thoughts of the surveillance teams on his track, the so-called Watchers on the Watch. Alex also believes he is a cluster soul sent with others of his kind to help save the Earth from an impending apocalypse, and has the capacity to channel some of history's greatest writers. <br><br>Australia might have the worst anti-freedom of speech laws in the Western world, but how can you sue a character like that? <br><br>Stapleton's essential theme: a place which should have been safe from an impending apocalypse, the quagmire of religious wars enveloping the Middle East, is not safe at all. <br><br>Ideas are contagious, and the Australian government is afraid of them. Australia is a democracy in name only.The war on terror has become a war on the people's right to know, justifying a massive expansion of state power. <br><br>Alex's swirling head, lifelong fascination with sociology, literature and journalism, and his deep distress over the fate of the Great Southern Land, makes him the perfect character to tell a story which urgently needs to be told.
