Painting Fakes

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...