Painting Fakes

When I first read Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu  about three years ago I was, like many readers, mightily impressed.  Pascoe takes the myth of Aboriginal people as passive hunter-gatherers and turns it on its head.  He argues that Aboriginal people engaged in agriculture, aquaculture, building of durable permanent housing, food processing and storage and active management of pastures and the game animals that lived on them.  The picture he develops is of a highly intentional, sophisticated and sustainable food economy. Since then I have become aware that a lot of controversy swirls around Dark Emu.  This has grown in the three years since I first read it as the book itself has continued to gain popularity, spinning out into a dance performance by Bangarra and a version for children.   Some of the controversy seems to me to have less than noble motives.  For instance, some people have launched personal attacks on Pascoe, suggesting he has faked his own A...

Prompted by Extinction Rebellion and some of my friends who are involved in direct action protests on climate, war and other things I've been thinking a fair bit about civil disobedience.  This is what timid people like me do when faced with the option of being confrontational - we go away and think about it.  I'm planning to share various things with you over the next little while but here, by way of starters, are some reflections on Frederic Gros' little book Disobey: The Philosophy of Resistance. Frederic Gros is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris XII and the Institute of Political Studies, also in Paris.  This book is based on a series of lectures he delivered to his students, published in French in 2017 and in this English translation in 2020.  The subtitle is a little ambiguous - the cover says 'The Philosophy of Resistance', the title page 'A Guide to Ethical Resistance'.  I would go with the cover - this is a work of philosophy, not a...

This week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) released its Sixth Assessment Report .  It's a synthesis of the latest scientific understandings of climate change, put together and carefully vetted by a group of several hundred climate scientists.   The news is not good. The earth has already warmed by 1.09 degrees Celsius on average.  Australia has warmed by 1.4.   Scientists are more certain than ever that it's caused by humans (us, and particularly the wealthy oligarchs who are blocking action).   They are also much more certain than they were last report about the direct link between climate change and natural disasters.  Remember those bushfires, and the ones sweeping Europe right now, right after the floods that swept Europe?  There'll be more. Sea levels are rising.  It's hard to say by how much because it's hard to model how major ice sheets will melt.  But higher than now.  Some Pacific nations ...