Painting Fakes

I was a teenage cricket fan in 1977 when World Series Cricket split the cricketing world down the middle.  Kerry Packer, having recently taken over from his father as head of Channel 9, was rebuffed in his attempts to buy the broadcast rights to Australian cricket despite offering vastly more money than the ABC.  Not being one to take no for an answer, he set up his own rival cricket competition, recruiting virtually the entire Australian and West Indies teams (the two strongest in world cricket at the time) and a host of other elite players from around the world.  Rival international competitions were staged for two years, the cricket authorities filling their teams with second string players, before peace was finally made in 1979. I remember it well. So I watched Howzat! Kerry Packer's War  on Channel 9.  I was pretty underwhelmed.  For a start, it's just a poor piece of story-telling.  The cricketers, even ...

I spent most of my time at University not studying, and besides it was thirty years ago, so it's not surprising I don't remember much.  However, one thing that has stayed with me is the idea of first and second order change. We were introduced to the idea by Mal McCouat, a long-standing social work lecturer at the University of Queensland, and a 1974 book by Paul Watzlawick, John Weakland, and Richard Fisch which went by the rather unpromising title of Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Resolution.   The idea of first and second order change is simple in the way that so many brilliant ideas are.  Most of the changes we make in our lives, or in our society, are first order changes.  These are changes made within the established order or the normal pattern of relationships.  One of Watzlawick et al's examples was in the field of illicit drug supply.  In response to concerns about drug use, authorities bring in new laws which incre...

So, after months of deadlock and confusion, the Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers has provided Julia Gillard and Chris Evans with the fig-leaf they need to adopt large parts of the Coalition's policy on unauthorised boat arrivals. Of course the answer you get from an expert panel will depend very much on the question you ask.  This one was asked a number of questions, but the two pertinent ones were as follows. "....how best to prevent asylum seekers risking their lives by travelling to Australia by boat;" and "...the development of an inter-related set of proposals in support of asylum seeker issues, given Australia’s right to maintain its borders ;"  (with my italics) Their answer is that if you want to stop people coming to Australia by boat, you need to ensure that they get no benefit from doing so.  To acheive this the panel has made 22 recommendations.  The key ones for immediate implementation are: re-opening the detention centres on Nauru and ...

With the London Olympics winding to their close, it's hard to think anyone can have missed hearing about the woes of Aussie 100m freestyle swimmer James Magnussen and his team-mates, or missed out on seeing the Commonwealth Bank advertisement featuring his hopeful smiling face.  For those who forgot, the ad (which interestingly is now unavailable on the internet) features Magnussen out for a training run, followed by guys wearing the letters "C", "A" and "N".  They start talking him up: "Not long till you bring home gold for Australia." "Hope so," says Magnussen. "Know so!" Then a guy in a "T" joins them and starts to cast doubt on the expected gold medal.  "After all, it's not like you haven't been beaten before."  The ad ends with the "T" bloke tripping over the edge of a cliff and landing in the ocean below. Fortunately for our sometimes tenuous link with reality, Mag...

I have suggested that Jesus' miracles are not so much displays of power  as teaching events coded to the worldview of first century Palestine .  If this is the case, what is Jesus teaching through them? In one sense it is not really possible to answer this question, at least not in a blog post although perhaps in a hefty tome.  Each incident has its own meaning, its own message.  Jesus spoke on many subjects and responded to many different people.  Yet much of his message is organised around the central theme of the Kingdom of God or as Matthew calls it the Kingdom of Heaven. Right from the the beginning Matthew has him saying "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near".  Jesus is not a systematic theologian, and he never defines or describes in an orderly way what he means by this term.  Instead he illustrates it in multiple parables, and enacts it in various deeds miraculous and otherwise. So here are some key things I think Jes...

I'm not sure how I've managed to get through more than 250 posts on this blog without raving about Ian McDonald .  McDonald is a British science fiction writer based in Belfast in Northern Ireland, but his writing reveals a true world citizen. I've previously commented how much better current speculative fiction writers are than their counterparts in the 1960s and 1970s.  Of course there's still plenty of trash, but the sprawling space operas of Iain M Banks and the taut, adventurous cyberpunk of William Gibson are as good as any literary writing you will read.  McDonald is the equal of these and perhaps even superior to them.  He has a lot more in common with Gibson than Banks, his writing set in the near future, and his settings defined by where our current technologies might take us within our own lifetimes.  Yet where Gibson's novels are almost claustrophobic with their small casts of characters, secret rooms and secretive plot...