Painting Fakes

Spent five days in Sydney - three days running focus groups with public housing tenants and two attending the National Affordable Housing Exchange , where they spelt my name wrong on the program.  This wasn't really a holiday but when work's this interesting it can be hard to tell the difference. Visited Eden , sleepy NSW coastal town and long term base for whaling and fishing.  Eden was the site for an amazing and maybe unique collaboration between human whalers and orcas in the capture of humpback and right whales, documented in Tom Mead's Killers of Eden .  Now people come to watch whales, and to visit the museum which celebrates their killing. Spent three days on Phillip Island , walking and enjoying beautiful scenery, failing to see any short-tailed shearwaters (except one that looked seriously ill) and joining thousands of tourists who miraculously appeared from nowhere to watch penguins walk up the beach at sunset. Drove to Adelaide via Lake C...

I'm off travelling.  One of my favourite clients is paying me to spend a week in Sydney, then we're off for a nice little holiday in Southern NSW, Victoria and South Australia including a visit to the ageing but still healthy in-laws in Adelaide. Internet access will be limited and so you may not see another post here until the end of April.  In the meantime talk among yourselves and don't get up to any mischief while I'm away.

Reading my Weekend Australian this week has really highlighted for me the complexity and confusion generated by the current debate around the Carbon Tax.  Of course being the home of climate change denial and front page for big business interests, The Australian has no incentive to simplify and clarify the debate.  The more confused and anxious people feel, the more likely they are to either disengage or vote no.  So, although my audience is a lot smaller than theirs, let me try to close the gap.  Of course I don't know all that much about it, but perhaps that will help. There are basically three parts to the debate about the Carbon Tax.  In The Australian these are thrown together in a blender so that they  come out as a kind of thick soup.  Let me try to seperate them out. Part 1 - The Evidence for Climate Change The debate is still going on, fuelled by the likes of The Australian, about whether the climate is actually warming and if ...

So I was sitting in Church last Sunday, as you do, and we read the passage from John's Gospel, Chapter 4, where Jesus has a conversation with a Samaritan woman at the well outside the town of Sychar.  The sermon has completely gone from my head, as most aural communication tends to, but I was struck by part of the story. Jesus starts by asking the woman for a drink, and she is amazed that a Jewish man will ask a Samaritan woman for water - crossing racial and gender barriers was a bit of a shock back then.  Then they have a complex conversation about living water which seems to be a metaphor for eternal life, and the woman asks Jesus to give her this life.  Having got to that point, they address two issues - her sexual morality, and the difference in doctrine between Jews and Samaritans.  Here's the first part. 15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” 16 He told her, “Go, ...

In betweeen reading all these Lives of Jesus  I managed to find time to read George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life .   I remember my first year literature tutor telling us Eliot's Middlemarch was the greatest novel ever written in English.  That's a big call but once I read it, particularly after the first 100 pages, I had to agree that she had a point. Eliot (real name Marian Evans) was a minister's daughter but as a young adult she abandoned the established church, "converting" to the ideas of German theological scholar David Freidrich Strauss, whose rationalist Life of Jesus  she translated in 1846.  By the mid 1850s when she started writing fiction she was living openly with a married man and one of the reasons she used a pseudonym was to avoid her writings being rejected because of her rather notorious personal life. Scenes of Clerical Life contains her first published works of fiction - three novellas which appeared seperately in one of...