Painting Fakes

I've just been reading a marvellous book by Tom Fort, fishing correspondent for the British Financial Times (the Financial Times has a fishing correspondent? I hear you ask) called The Book of Eels.   I've always been aware of eels.  One of my early Australian memories is going with my family and some neighbours for a swim and picnic on the Logan River.  Us kids (I must have been about eight) were terrified to discover there was a large eel in the swimming hole, so our neighbour stuck a bit of sausage on the end of his fishing line and five minutes later the eel was writhing furiously in a bucket.  Later attempts at eel capture were less successful.  My mates and I used to play down at Stable Swamp Creek behind the Sunnybank train station.  Once during the wet season when the creek was bulging with recent rains we saw a huge eel.  We were convinced it was four feet long.  They can actually grow thi...

So, the weirdest of elections just got nasty.  Not only did the Queensland Labor Party lose the house (which was expected) they lost the furniture (which was always possible) and their clothes as well.  In an 89 seat house they look like they'll have a maximum of 9 members.  One of these, former Premier Anna Bligh, has already announced her resignation from Parliament.  Far from losing in Ashgrove and leaving the rabble to govern themselves, President-elect Newman won easily with nearly twice the swing he needed and now gets to lead the biggest rabble in the history of the Queensland Parliament.  Labor's deperate last minute plea to voters to provide a decent opposition and their reported tactic of pretending to be Greens and handing out how-to-vote cards with themselves as second preference were to no avail.  Of course we've known for a long time that the Labor Government was on its last legs, but this is unprecedented.  I'd like to be able to say...

The end is nigh for one of the weirdest election campaigns I have ever witnessed.  My poor sitting local member Simon Finn, who Anthony Green's Election Tracker says will narrowly lose his previously safe seat according to the March 16 Galaxy poll, must be exhausted after weeks of listening, acting and getting results.  To all appearances he has had to do it on his own, with the Labor Party presence on his flyers getting so small that it has disappeared from some of them altogether - like this one where his mock ballot paper does not show his party affiliation even though the real one will.  Still, someone must be footing the bill for all these flyers. Meanwhile in another first in my 32 years as a Queensland elector, I can now tell you the result ahead of time because in a break with normal protocol, the Labor Party has officially conceded before election day.  The concession has come in the form of flyer addressed to my wife, which appears below.  ...

Here's a little something which appeared in my letterbox this morning.  It looks like an environmental flyer, doesn't it?  I'm not sure who it comes from because contrary to Section 181 of the Queensland Electoral Act 1992, it doesn't contain a name or contact details of the person who authorised it.  However, it does bear a few clues. Firstly, one column talks about "Simon Finn and Labor", while the other talks about "Campbell Newman's LNP".  So which party is promoting the identity of its local candidates while trying to smear the man attempting to become President of Queensland ? Secondly, you may notice that we are not explicitly urged to vote for any particular candidate - not, for instance, Greens candidate Libby Connors whose properly authorised flyer also arrived today.  So this is clearly not a Greens pamphlet.  It is certainly not a piece of LNP advertising.  We are, however, not very subtly encouraged to give our preference t...

Thom Stark's The Human Faces of God is a sustained critique of the concept of Biblical inerrancy, particularly as outlined in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy .  Stark is a young Bible scholar whose origins lie in the Stone-Campbell movement , a 19th century church reform movement which led, among other things, to the creation of the Churches of Christ.  Those who have had anything to do with members of this branch of the church will know them as conservative Evangelicals with a strong congregational ethos and (at least theoretically) a focus on ecumenism.  Stark was brought up on the idea of inerrancy, so in a sense this book is his "coming out". He cites many of the problems with inerrancy that will be familiar to readers of this blog.  He finds it impossible to read the Bible without seeing its mutiple points of view, its variants on the same story, its factual discrepancies.  The early chapters of this book focus on these questions, and th...

It's two weeks until the Queensland Election and the contest is an interesting study in contrasts.  In the blue corner we have perhaps the most Presidential campaign in Australian history.  Campbell Newman, the LNP leader, is not even a member of Parliament , trying to gain a 7% swing in Ashgrove as well as lead his party to success.  The campaign is all about Newman.  The LNP campaign slogan is his nick-name, "Can-Do", usually said in a slightly ironic tone.  His party is not bidding to be the government, it is bidding to make him the Premier. Meanwhile in the pale pink corner, beyond the daily media grind the Labor campaign is just the opposite.  Premier Anna Bligh is all but invisible in local campaign material, the focus firmly on the local candidates.  This is most obvious in the seat of Ashgrove, where Newman's bid for a seat is opposed by the " Keep Kate " campaign.  Labour MP Kate Jones quit her cabinet post almost a year ago...

In the rush to congratulate Julia Gillard on the coup of enticing Bob Carr to take on the role of Foreign Minister, no-one seems to have noticed that this is another sign of the Americanisation of Australian politics.  Even conservative critics are lauding the choice of Carr, one of the most able and intelligent men in Australian politics.  They are also, albeit sometimes backhandedly, expressing admiration for the fact that Gillard was able to assert her authority, over some apparent cabinet resistance, to make it happen. Here in Queensland we are in mid-election, and the man most likely to become our next Premier is not even a member of the current parliament , running a Presidential campaign which, almost as a sidelight, includes the need to win his own electorate.  I've been whingeing about this issue for a while, so let me do so again in relation to Carr's appointment. The issue is not whether Carr will make a good Foreign Minister.  Chances are he ...