Painting Fakes

I'm always giving the Coalition a kick about various things, so it's time I got stuck into the Labor Party for a change.  Abbott, Hockey and co are for once on the right track and it's depressing to listen to their opponents' response. Budget emergencies are the height of political fashion at the moment.  Our current Queensland Government has been proclaiming one for the past two years.  It is a multi-purpose piece of rhetoric, allowing them to whack their opponents over the head, justify cuts to programs they don't like and soften us up for more quixotic asset sales.  Their colleagues over the border must think it's working because we now seem to also have one a Commonwealth level and the new Tasmanian Liberal Government has just announced one down there. The word "emergency" seems highly inappropriate to this context.  The credit ratings agencies don't seem too worried and the worst that has happened is governments going from AAA to AA+. ...

Earlier this year I spent a couple of days at Milmerran, a little town on Queensland's Darling Downs.  It has a population of a few hundred, surrounded by cattle farms and increasingly by CSG wells.  I was there for work, but I did get time to have a little walk around town (it didn't take long) and found this place. It's called Anzac Memorial Park, and it sits on Milmerran's main street, just out of the little strip of shops that passes for a town centre.  It's nothing that special - it has a few little bits of play equipment, a band rotunda, a public toilet, some nice trees and open lawns, a few benches here and there.  Pretty much like any park in any town or city in Australia. It also has this - a monument engraved with the names of all the local young men who lost their lives in the First World War.  Around the base has been added a second list of names, of those who died in the Second World War. This memorial is obviously well cared for. ...

It's Good Friday in two days, the day we commemorate Jesus' death.  At St Andrew's South Brisbane each year we have a series of meditations, and I'm responsible for one of them this year.  This meditation brings together three things.  The first is the chosen reading, from Matthew 26:46-68, which includes Jesus’ arrest in the garden and his sham trial before the High Priest Caiaphas. The second is the framework for this year's series, “Jesus the real King”.  In what sense is it possible to see Jesus as a king when he is so obviously powerless? The third is the religious thought of Leo Tolstoy .  Later in his life, after he had written his great novels, Tolstoy experienced a profound conversion.  He came to understand that following Jesus meant obeying his command to love our neighbours as ourselves, to do to others what we want them to do to us.  If we take this seriously, he says, we will not try to kill one another in war, we will not ...

I promise to stop banging on about Pink Floyd after this but I just wanted to share one more thing with you. It's one of my favourite pieces of Pink Floyd music, 'Careful With That Axe, Eugene'.  It was apparently first performed in 1968, written by Waters, Gilmour, Wright and Mason, and it exists in a number of different recorded forms as it morphed slightly from day to day and from year to year.  Here's a live performance from 1972. Pink Floyd's earliest studio recordings, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and A Saucerful of Secrets,  give a very imperfect idea of the kind of band they were.  Their early producer Norm Smith wanted them to be a pop band like The Beatles.   Syd Barrett and then Roger Waters and Rick Wright did their best to oblige, writing and recording their best approximations of three minute pop songs, and these formed the bulk of the first two albums. Their live performances, on the other hand, were highly improvisational affairs...