Dungog author Matt Thompson is moving to the United States, despite rising concerns in the country about the COVID-19 plague and racial tensions.
Dr Thompson isn't deterred by chaos. He immerses himself in it, practicing a style of journalism widely known as "Gonzo".
He utilised this style in his bestselling books, My Colombian Death, Running with the Blood God and Mayhem, and his work with the University of Newcastle's Centre for the Study of Violence.
Dr Thompson, who was born in the US before moving to Australia with his family in 1974 at age 2, has researched the race wars of the 1960s, including the Watts Riots in Los Angeles in 1965.
He said his father Phelan's expression for feeling on top of the world was "free, white and 21".
"He was happy settling in Australia because it reminded him of how America used to be - the harmonious Leave It To Beaver-style land of his youth."
His father saw this as a "better-mannered, more predictable world before the nation soured and splintered in the 1960s with assassinations and race riots".
Dr Thompson said his dad "liked it better back when one could savour being free, white and 21 without guilt - without truly putting himself in the shoes of those excluded or worse from that sweet state of affairs".
"Now he's dead, and last year my daughter and I took a portion of his ashes from our home in Dungog back to Oregon, spreading some of him in garden beds in his beloved hometown, Eugene."
The rest of his ashes were spread in the "lush green tumble of the coastal forests, a jaw-droppingly beautiful world in which to scatter the white powder and grit of his remains".
"Oregon, of course, like so much of the US is land that Native Americans were cheated out of, driven out of, and killed out of," he said.
Now, with America reeling from COVID-19 and another outbreak of civil unrest "sparked by thuggish policing aimed at African Americans", Dr Thompson is "reversing my father's move".
"When travel restrictions ease I'll be taking my family to that wild, wild country where a result of thuggish policing can be the burning down of police stations."
"Better that, as far as I'm concerned, than the shameful passivity of so much of NSW - where even lunchtime strip searches at Central Station didn't spark popular resistance."
So Dr Thompson will soon say "goodbye to Dungog", where the Gringai Aboriginal people "were cleansed to make way for today's white-bread community with its main road - Dowling Street - duly named after a white judge granted 'vacant' land on the Williams River".
Before his dad died, Dr Thompson tried telling him about a pow wow [a Native American ceremony] he went to in Portland, and how "sitting through the hours and hours of drumming had cut me raw, reducing me to a weeping mess".
Dr Thompson spoke to a native man afterwards, a university professor who teaches Native American studies.
"He said that when he goes through what has happened in America - the systematic crushing of indigenous nations and the eradication or discarding of their remnant peoples: genocide, in other words - his native students often start weeping," he said.
"White students, the professor said, don't know what the big deal is and often see the subject chiefly as a source of credit points towards their degree."
Dr Thompson was in New Jersey a few months ago "on an icy night just before the plague hit and hit hard [more than 12,500 people have died from COVID-19 in New Jersey alone]".
"I had dinner with two old friends, one white and the other black," he said.
"The white fellow was elderly. He had been to college with my father in the 1950s. We keep in touch, even after my dad's death.
"The other was a Dominican man closer to my age - 50-ish - whose path to naturalisation had come via serving with the US army at Abu Ghraib detention centre, as it swelled with tens of thousands of Iraqi men caught up in blanket sweeps through towns or denounced by others."
Over dinner, the conversation turned to the 2020 election race and "the nakedly outrageous antics of President Donald Trump: appointing his family to plum jobs; firing anyone who doesn't kowtow low enough; dissing people or spreading nasty rumours left, right, and centre, and so on".
"The Dominican, whose homeland was twice invaded by the US in the 20th Century, said that one good thing about Trump's reign was that now Americans, most particularly white Americans, could finally see the true face of American power.
"He said Washington usually displays a polite face for its domestic audience - acting genteel and statesmanlike and pandering to white America's self-image as noble leaders - while its representatives in the Third World act like thugs and goons."
But now Trump was acting like some "puffed-up consul in the colonies".
There was no more pretense at home, the Dominican told Dr Thompson.
One of America's invasions of the Dominican republic was ordered by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965.
"That was the year Johnson telephoned Martin Luther King Jr to ask for help settling matters in Los Angeles, when the Watts Riots - AKA the Watts Rebellion - had just been quelled with the help of 13,400 troops of the National Guard," Dr Thompson said.
"In rioting that broke out after a traffic stop ignited longstanding African American grievances with heavy-handed racial profiling and policing, 34 people were killed - mostly shot by security forces," he said.
"Around a thousand were injured and hundreds of buildings burned to the ground. The LA police chief, William Parker, said the rioters had been acting like 'monkeys in a zoo'."
Dr King's tone was subdued when he told President Johnson that without social reforms "a full-scale race war can develop".
"Perhaps he was a little jaded about Washington seeking his help, given that a year back King's wife received an anonymous package containing recordings of her husband with other women, along with a letter addressed to him.
"The letter, which calls King a 'filthy, abnormal animal' and an 'evil, abnormal beast', says that the preacher's extramarital sex life will be publicly exposed unless he does 'the one thing left for you to do' - a suggestion widely interpreted as meaning: kill yourself."
Dr Thompson said the Federal Bureau of Investigation sent the letter and recordings as part of a campaign of surveillance and harassment it conducted for years against Dr King and his associates.
"The FBI director John Edgar Hoover painted Dr King - who campaigned for higher wages and improved working conditions - as a communist stooge. Hoover publicly denounced King while ramping up intelligence operations against the civil rights leader, whom the bureau also categorised as the head of a 'black nationalist hate group'."
