07/06/2026
Signed Book is also available 4 sale at my shop PachaMama Bridgetown
💙🐝 Stickers and Bracelets and Caps
All monie$ goes directly to Michael & Kelli
Goodbye Road is now in The National Library.
Thank you for all these wonderful reviews.
Michael Gray Griffith’s Goodbye Road:
Grok Synopsis
Australia’s Broken Heartlands is not a conventional novel but a raw, riveting odyssey of essays and stories that reads like a modern epic of resistance.
Spanning 292 pages, it chronicles the author’s transformation from artist to de facto leader of Australia’s freedom movement during the COVID tyranny of 2020–2025. Griffith, founder of the Café Locked Out collective, weaves personal memoir with eyewitness testimony, creating a powerful testament to courage in the face of state overreach.
The opening chapter, “The Day They Shot Matt Lawson,” is visceral and unforgettable. Griffith’s account of the 2021 Melbourne protest—pepper spray burning his eyes, rubber bullets flying, strangers becoming brothers—sets the tone for the entire book.
What follows is a cross-country pilgrimage: the Deplorables Epic Road Trip, the Siege of the Shrine, encounters with persecuted doctors, nurses, truckers, and “scrub bulls” of Mildura. Each essay pulses with Griffith’s signature blend of spiritual fire and street-level honesty.
He doesn’t just report; he feels the heartbreak of a nation that turned on its own.
Griffith’s prose soars when he speaks of the “Australian Spirit”—that stubborn refusal to bow—and crashes when he confronts betrayal by media, government, and even friends.
The Facebook ban, PayPal shutdown, and relentless censorship are worn as badges of honour. Yet the book never descends into bitterness; instead, it offers hope through stories of resurrection (his own triple bypass becomes an Easter miracle) and quiet acts of defiance.
At its core, Goodbye Road is a love letter to the ostracised, the “orphans” who refused the jab, the mandates, the lies. It stands as essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how Australia briefly lost—and is still fighting to reclaim—its soul.
Passionate, poetic, and unflinchingly truthful, this book is both historical document and spiritual manifesto. In an age of forgetting, Griffith refuses to let the truth be buried.
Order a personal signed copy of Michael Gray Griffith's book here
https://cafelockedout.com/clo-shop/the-bbc/
Human reviews
"Have you been on Goodbye Road? If you learned to bake sourdough or enjoyed working from home, then I bet you haven’t. But if you lost your job, or your marriage, or your health, then whether you knew it or not, you were walking on Goodbye Road. Some of us had easier terrain than others, as if the grader had just been through when we hit Goodbye Road. The unlucky ones found themselves facing rocks and washouts and corrugations and bulldust holes and bog holes. That’s when you need your mates, to pull you out and jerry-rig repairs to your body and your soul. The sad truth though is that our mates abandoned us. And new mates take time to find.
Read the stories that Michael Gray Griffith re-tells. The stories we never heard while submerged under torrents of safe and effective advertising. Be thankful that nothing like that happened to you, or if it did, take comfort in knowing others understand deeply."
~Richard Kelly, Australian political commentator
full review https://www.spectator.com.au/.../goodbye-road-by-michael.../
"The collection’s greatest achievement lies in its preservation of voices that would otherwise vanish into silence. Griffith interviews hundreds of Australians whose stories the mainstream media won’t touch: nurses who faked vaccination records for their families, doctors who secretly admit vaccine injuries while publicly maintaining silence, workers who lost careers spanning decades for refusing a medical procedure. His essay “Australia: The Great Silence” crystallizes this suppression through a single conversation with a paramedic whose brother died after vaccination. The man refuses to go on record, fearing for his family’s employment, yet spends an hour pouring out details that contradict every official narrative—the explosion in myocarditis cases, the young trainees dying suddenly, the fertility clinic overwhelmed with stillbirths. Griffith becomes the repository for these dangerous truths, carrying them in his interviews until he can release them into the world, understanding that without his documentation, these testimonies would die with their witnesses."
~Frank Paul
Full Review https://unbekoming.substack.com/.../goodbye-road-by...
The book arrived safely, and reading it has been a roller coaster of emotions. I experienced moments of humor, sorrow, and outrage as I turned each page. I truly appreciate the effort you've made to document this pivotal period in Australian history. During that time, I worked in an organisation with over 200 employees where the vaccine wasn’t mandated—yet, to this day, I haven’t encountered another colleague who chose not to take it. Your book serves as a lasting reminder of how swiftly governments can assert control over our lives, and how reluctant they can be to relinquish it.
~Richard
Goodbye Road review
I consumed Goodbye Road in a single sitting. That tells you all you need to know. I went through a gamut of emotions, from anger and grief, too hilarity and hope, as Michael Gray Griffith debriefed me on the COVID war.
Goodbye Road isn't just a book, it's a historical document, a testimony, a love letter to the children and the as yet unborn. This is what they did to us, this is how we fought back, this is what we did for you so you might live free from tyranny.
This is our story, this is Goodbye Road.
~Simon O'Rourke, an ordinary veteran of the COVID war.
I wanted to tell you Michael how the journey of reading your book was for me.
Yes it certainly is a significant part of our Australian history during the covid era.
It is so much more than that.
As an avid follower of CLO since the Deplorables era and having listened to and watched many interviews and podcasts, I assumed there would be parts of the book that I might skim over .
How extraordinarily incorrect that assumption was!
My main reason for purchasing the book was really to help you guys out!
The other reason was for an historical record of this time.
Anyway reading it was a huge reminder to me of the power of the written word! Only a talented writer can evoke such emotion in a person that leads them to tears both of joy and heartbreak
Thank you Michael
Much love and peace to you both
~Lisa Anderson
At about 7.30pm I picked up Goodbye Road. From page 1. it was gripping. I turned page, after page, constantly cross-referencing your dates and experiences, to my own. On page 16 I shed a tear. Couldn’t help it. I have just lost my mum. She was just shy of 89 and unvaccinated. She had beautiful blue eyes. I returned back to Australia in 2020 to bring her back home from hospital after a debilitating stroke—one that had wiped out her entire language centre, among other bastard things. A woman who spoke German and English, and a little Icelandic and Dutch. A woman who read every day, could no longer read, write or generate more than two or three words at a time. But she still had her faculties, she knew wot was wot.
On the day that Matt Lawson was shot, I looked into those blue eyes, her eyes, as she searched mine in sheer dismay.
I had strayed onto Rukshan’s livestream, and together, on my little laptop, the one I am writing on now, we watched something diabolical unfold. Mum knew what she was seeing. She was born in the Polish partitions in 1937, annexed two years later by the N***s. Her family would be moved, and she would grow up in N**i Germany with a Polish name. On the day you met the rubber bullet squad, I wiped away a chocolate-stained dribble from the corner of her mouth. I will never forget the footage of tanks and stormtroopers in down-town Melbourne, or my mum’s eyes, and her disbelieving expression, grappling to make sense of it all.
At 9.30 p.m., I reluctantly broke from Goodbye Road to made a cup of tea and check X again. Still no updates. I have a noisy brain at the best of times, and processing your journey and the parliamentary machinations occupied so much of last night. They were not unrelated.
With my cuppa in hand, I went back to a book which felt thoughtful, personal, grounded.
You slide questions in. I try to answer them. It’s not easy. I keep reading.
I have always been a kookaburra fangirl, I love them— but the budgerigar chapter primes me. My Knight in Shining Armour knows how to survive in the wild. I like to think I would give it a red hot go too— but bird cages are comfortable and that is half the problem, I think.
My evening proceeds in comprehension exercises, until I look out the kitchen window. The neighbour’s lights are out. The street is quiet. I check the time. It is after 1 a.m.. Sleep is needed. Goodbye Road closes, and I do a final X check. Holy f**k. Pardon my French. You asked what sort of Australia we could build: NOT THIS ONE. I shudder.
I go to bed. I dream of sharks. I wake up, and the Knight in Shining Armour makes me a cup of tea. We talk; he seethes. We have plans. We make more. I eat my grapefruit and try to understand what the Party of Menzies has just done. After six years, however, we are all used to betrayals on every level. I reach for Goodbye Road again.
The last lines are consumed at 12.25 p.m. today. Bravo, Michael. This read has literally spanned the Old Australia with the New Even Scarier Australia. It was a wonderful read too—and it will be shared with others soon. I promise I will write a review. I just need a day or so to take stock and decompress. Tonight, the old baking dish heard what could be, under the new laws, actual hate speech.
Aside, to my mind there were only three little roadblocks in the book for me—in terms of repeated text, but otherwise, congratulations. What a read! I found myself thinking of Voltaire's, Candide when doing the dishes tonight. "We must cultivate our garden."
I am sorry this email is so long—just wanted to provide fresh feedback.
Thank you again for all your troubles. I loved Goodbye Road.
~Annabelle
My copy arrived safely with a cherished inscription thank you Michael. I never start a book at the start but just dove in near the end and I could not put it down. I then turned to the beginning and read properly. Before long I was reading it out to my mate Stew and we were both enthralled and would have loved to read it from cover to cover if farm work didn't call us away. I want to buy one for everyone for Christmas.
~Bee Winfield
It’s a historical record and keepsake of what we went through particularly in Victoria. Thank you again Michael for your superb, descriptive and hours of detailed work you have endured for an awesome result in this fabulous book.
Goodbye Road succeeds as both immediate witness testimony and lasting historical document because Griffith understands he’s recording a civilization’s nervous breakdown in real time. The book’s title itself—taken from the path traveled by those expelled from mainstream society—captures how millions of Australians experienced not just job losses or social exclusion but a fundamental severance from their previous lives. In my June 2024 interview with Griffith, he revealed the personal cost of this documentation: shot with rubber bullets at the Shrine of Remembrance, under constant surveillance, living in a bus because conventional employment became impossible. Yet the collection radiates not bitterness but astonishment at the communities that emerged from shared exile.
The 8:32 Gatherings he describes—modern corroborees of the displaced—represent something unprecedented in Australian history: a parallel society built by those who discovered, as Griffith writes, that “when we hugged, we hugged like people who’d found someone lost in the wilds.” This is the book’s ultimate achievement—it records not just what Australia lost during its descent into medical authoritarianism, but what the exiled found in each other when they had nothing left to lose.
~Sandy Turner
Order a signed copy here
https://cafelockedout.com/clo-shop/the-bbc/
