Painting Fakes

When I wrote a little post about trees earlier this year I was basically just talking through my hat.  What I know about trees would fit on the back of a postage stamp. However, I just read a book by someone who knows lots more about trees than I do, and he surprisingly confirmed what I was saying. The Forest Underground  by Tony Rinaudo has been heavily promoted in Christian circles and was named Australian Christian Book of the Year 2022 by Sparklit (the organisation which used to be known as the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge).  Rinaudo also received a Right Livelihood Award (a kind of alternative Nobel Prize) in 2018 for his work on reforestation. In 1981 Tony, his wife Liz and their infant son headed off from Australia to join what was then known as the Sudan Interior Mission in Niger.  After a few months language learning and cultural orientation they took up management of a farm school and associated Bible College in the town of Maradi.   Along with his other respons

Here's a little parable about plants.  In particular, a little row of street trees that I often walk past, just a few hundred metres from my home. I'm no botanist, but I believe these are Golden Penda trees, scientific name Xanthostemon chrysanthus.  They are Queensland natives but their natural range doesn't extend as far south as Brisbane. They are here because they were the official plant of Expo 88, planted in flower to provide visitors with a vibrant golden welcome.   The thing about these trees is that they love to grow.  What first attracted me to them was the way the foliage was starting to sprout from the base of the trees.  At the end of last autumn you could see that the growth was already strong. As I went out walking in the streets around my home I started watching the growth of these exuberant little sprouts.  Over a period of a few months last summer they went crazy, growing from modest little shoots to large new growths. Last summer was one of the wettest on

It's easy to criticise governments, but hard to be one.  How do you solve the pressing problems facing our world, in the face of powerful forces that don't want them solved and a population fed on distraction and disinformation?  This dilemma means, as I have been saying in various ways on this blog for some years now, that our problems won't be solved by electing the right government, they will only be solved by each of us working hard to change course and take our governments along with us. Sometimes this appears a forlorn hope but plenty of activists encourage us not to give in to this sort of despair.  Recently I reviewed Rebecca Solnit's lovely book, Hope in the Dark ,  in which she shows that despite what we might think, the activists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have had a surprising amount of success.  We should celebrate this success, and keep working to achieve more. Tim Hollo points us in a slightly different direction in his new book, Living Dem

I've somehow missed out on knowing anything about American writer and activist  Rebecca Solnit until this year, when a chance social media post referenced something she said.   My starting point has been her little book Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities,  first published in 2005 and re-issued with some more recent material in 2016.  She was writing in the wake of the invasion of Iraq and George W Bush's re-election to the US presidency.  There was a lot of despair around.  The massive peace movements in the US and UK opposing the invasion had seemed powerful, but the invasion went ahead anyway and both Bush and Blair were returned to power in their subsequent elections.  Were they all wasting their time, was the world doomed? I remember the time well.  Bush, Blair and Howard all pushed the line that the Iraqis had 'weapons of mass destruction' (which it turned out they didn't), and even hinted that they were harbouring Al Qaeda cells even thoug

In my musings about late 60s activism in the USA and here in Australia, I noticed a contrast between the hippie movement's emphasis on spirituality and deep renewal, and the Australian political activists' focus on causes and actions.  So just like that (Shazam!) I've come across something that beautifully bridges the divide.   Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in without Going Crazy  is a book by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, published in 2012.  It is based on a group process pioneered by Macy and others in the 1970s known as the Work That Reconnects , which has since spread around the world and is still active and widely used.  I believe Macy, now in her 90s, is still active in this work.  Her bio describes her as 'a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology'. Johnstone is a British doctor and psychologist who first met Macy at a Work That Reconnects workshop in 1989 and is now the main facilitator of this process in the UK.   The

As the Labor Party gets ready to introduce its climate change legislation into Parliament next week, the myth of the 'Greens 2009 sabotage of good climate policy' is doing great service in making Labor look like persecuted saints. We're even seeing the line repeated uncritically on supposedly neutral news shows like the ABC's 7.30. It's a myth or, if you prefer, it's a lie. Don't fall for it. The 2009 CPRS was a fatally compromised piece of pro-fossil-fuel greenwash, and the 2011-12 alternative was a big improvement. What the Greens should learn from their interactions with the Rudd/Gillard government is that blocking legislation can be a good move. They prevented a bad policy and negotiated a much better one. It achieved real emissions reductions, and CEFC and ARENA were cleverly set up so that they are still doing their work despite 9 years of Coalition sabotage. They should also learn that Labor can be mightily incompetent at promoting good legislatio

  A River with a City Problem  is such a fantastic name for a history book. Margaret Cook's history of flooding on the Brisbane River and its tributaries is in high demand at the Council library service thanks to our fresh flooding this year.   I wish I'd read this book in 1994 when we bought our house in Fairfield, but of course it was only published in 2019, prompted by the catastrophic 2011 floods .  When we inspected the house and decided to buy it we knew that in 1974 the property had been covered in over two metres of water, flooding the upstairs of the house.  We were also told that the completion of Wivenhoe Dam in the 1980s meant an equivalent flood event would be about two metres lower, meaning we would only have an inch or tow of water under the house.  This seemed like a small enough risk. What we didn't understand at the time, but learned in 2011, is that this story had two big 'ifs'.  If the rain fell above Wivenhoe Dam, and if the amount of rain did