Painting Fakes

For Christians, the story of Christmas reveals something quite remarkable about God, which we often forget. A subtle piece of mistranslation has led us to have a peculiarly Western take on the birth of Jesus.  In Luke 2:7 we are used to reading something like this: And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. The result is that our Christmas cards show the holy family in the cow-shed among the animals since there were no vacant hotel rooms.  But the word translated 'inn' actually just means 'place to stay' and could just as easily apply to a spare bedroom - a much more likely destination in the context of Middle Eastern hospitality.  So it's a fair bet that the story played out more like this... Mary and Joseph were forced to travel to Bethlehem for the Roman census, even though Mary was due to give birth.  They arrived, tired from their journey, in the main str...

There are several ways to cover a classic song.  You can do the tribute, where you try to sing the song as close to its original as possible.  You can do a complete makeover, where you turn a song in one genre into one in a completely different genre. Or you can do this... 'From Little Things Big Things Grow' is a classic Aussie song celebrating one of the pivotal events of Aboriginal Australians' struggle for land rights, the Wave Hill walk-off.  In 1966 the Gurindji, led by senior elder and law-man Vincent Lingiari, walked off Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory in protest at their poor working and living conditions on their own country.  They stayed on strike until 1975 when the Whitlam Government finally granted them title over the land - or perhaps it would be better to say, recognised their ongoing ownership.   Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly wrote the song in 1991 and released separate versions of it over the next year or two.  Since then the...

Here's another little thing about imagination which neatly brings together the idea of animals having their own reasons , and the fact that Australia's First Nations have some different ways of seeing the world. The story of the orcas and whalers of Eden is one of those iconic Australian stories, popularised in Tom Mead's book Killers of Eden in 1961 and since the subject of various books and documentaries as well as a quite impressive little museum.   Eden sits on Twofold Bay in southern NSW, on the country of the Yuin people.  The story involves three generations of the Davidson family, who ran a shore based whaling operation out of Eden from the 1840s to the 1920s.  In the 1840s a number of different crews tried whaling from Eden, but only the Davidsons' survived.  They were successful because they, and they alone, had the assistance of a pod of orcas who acted like sheepdogs, driving the whales towards their boats and harassing them until the whalers could...

Here's another crack at opening up our imaginations about different ways to live, this time drawing on the experiences and knowledge of one of Australia's First Nations.  This is not my story, it's my reflection on someone else's story. We often think of the invasion and colonisation of Australia as having taken place in the 19th century.  In reality it was a gradual process and it continues to this day.  We see its continuation in our own time in Rio Tinto's destruction this year of the Juukan Caves, a site occupied by the Puutu Kunti Kuurama and Pinikura peoples for at least 45,000 years.  We also see it in the recent exclusion of Wangan and Jagalingou people from the site of the Carmichael Mine in Central Queensland. Both these nations have had to live with Europeans on their country for generations, but there are still people alive today who are among the first generation of their peoples to have contact with Europeans.  One of the most famous is the celebr...

Why do we find it so difficult to change what we are doing, to solve the pressing problems of our planet like climate change, pollution and poverty?  Of course there's a lot about power and wealth, but I've increasingly been thinking that a big part of the problem is lack of imagination.  We are unable to envisage different ways of viewing the world and assume that our mental constructs are the only possible reality.  In order to make the world different from what it is, or indeed to accept and build on the differences that are already there, we need to be able to see or imagine things differently. I've just finished reading  Vesper Flights,  by Helen Macdonald.  It's a collection of essays on natural history, mostly about birds and peoples' interactions with them. I'm not going to review it except to say it's beautiful.  In the final essay 'What Animals Taught Me', she says this: A long time ago, when I was nine or ten, I wrote a school essay on wha...

I just finished reading Marian Wilkinson's The Carbon Club.   It was horrific and depressing.  You should read it too.  Then afterwards you should read something nice and hopeful to cleanse your mind. Wilkinson is an investigative journalist who has worked for the Fairfax papers back when Fairfax was a thing, and for the ABC's Four Corners.  As part of this, she has covered climate change policy for many years and decided to put it all in a book.  The fact that I knew a lot of the story already didn't help, it was still depressing to see it all chronicled, step by step.  She tells the story of how Australia's climate policy was scuttled by the fossil fuel lobby, working through its friends in the Liberal and National Parties.  I don't need to rehearse the whole story, and it would take too long.  If you really want to hear it you can read the book yourself.  Let me just tell you six things I learned from the book which seem to me highly perti...

So, in honour of the Gas-Fired Recovery (TM) and the Technology Roadmap (TM) I have included the Minister for Energy and (ensuring there is no) Emissions Reduction Angus Taylor in my latest Dear Scomo letter. My source of hope (and don't we all need hope?) is that the federal Liberal and National Parties are part of a small and decreasing number of people and organisations who still don't get that climate action is essential.  The climate war is over, but our current Commonwealth Government is like one of those Japanese soldiers still holed up in some remote jungle, not having heard the news and still holding their posts for the Emperor.  We need to entice them out and give them the good news so that they can get on with their jobs. *** Dear Prime Minister and Minister I trust you and your families are well and thriving through the COVID crisis. Thanks to your success in keeping COVID-19 at bay so far (and trusting we continue to do a god job on this front!) we are now able to...

 As a kind of bonus on the whole Freud/Jung thing, I also treated my self to a read of  H. Rider Haggard's She , which Jung refers to several times as an exemplar of the archetype of the anima , the female (for men) figure who represents our souls, our unconscious or our inner life in both dreams and myths. She  was Haggard's second novel, following the phenomenal success of  King Solomon's Mines  in 1885.  Before publishing his first blockbuster Haggard was a British civil servant and, in the role of secretary to the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal, spent six years in Southern Africa where both novels are set.  Afterwards he retired to his native Norfolk and became a writer of fanciful and massively popular adventure stories, many set in exotic locations which at least in theory were in Africa.   Haggard was an early exponent of what these days we would think of as pulp fiction.  He was a forerunner of such prolific writers as Edgar Rice ...