Painting Fakes

It's easy to criticise governments, but hard to be one.  How do you solve the pressing problems facing our world, in the face of powerful forces that don't want them solved and a population fed on distraction and disinformation?  This dilemma means, as I have been saying in various ways on this blog for some years now, that our problems won't be solved by electing the right government, they will only be solved by each of us working hard to change course and take our governments along with us. Sometimes this appears a forlorn hope but plenty of activists encourage us not to give in to this sort of despair.  Recently I reviewed Rebecca Solnit's lovely book, Hope in the Dark ,  in which she shows that despite what we might think, the activists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have had a surprising amount of success.  We should celebrate this success, and keep working to achieve more. Tim Hollo points us in a slightly different direction in his new book, Li...

I've somehow missed out on knowing anything about American writer and activist  Rebecca Solnit until this year, when a chance social media post referenced something she said.   My starting point has been her little book Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities,  first published in 2005 and re-issued with some more recent material in 2016.  She was writing in the wake of the invasion of Iraq and George W Bush's re-election to the US presidency.  There was a lot of despair around.  The massive peace movements in the US and UK opposing the invasion had seemed powerful, but the invasion went ahead anyway and both Bush and Blair were returned to power in their subsequent elections.  Were they all wasting their time, was the world doomed? I remember the time well.  Bush, Blair and Howard all pushed the line that the Iraqis had 'weapons of mass destruction' (which it turned out they didn't), and even hinted that they were harbouring A...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the dirty little secret of the Stolen Generation and the valiant efforts of the late Archie Roach to bring it to our attention.  Since then I've been reading about the even darker and dirtier secret that came before that - the fact that the British colonisation of Australia, and in particular my home state of Queensland, was accomplished through the use of deadly force against its original custodians.   This is not a pleasant or a pretty tale and there is really no fair way to soften it.  In his book Conspiracy of Silence: Queensland's Frontier Killing Times , published in 2013, historian Timothy Bottoms quotes an estimate that at the time of the first British encroachment into what became Queensland - the establishment of the convict settlement in Brisbane in 1826 - there were somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 people living here.  By the end of the century there were only about 20,000 First Nations people left.  He ...

I feel slightly sad at the death of Queen Elizabeth. Not deeply sad. I didn't know her. I never had much time for the monarchy. The signs of her impending death had been there for a couple of years in her increasingly brief appearances at royal events and, in the past year, her frequent absences and cancellations. She was 96, the time had come. The closest encounter I ever had with her was in  1977 when she came to Australia. Among other engagements she opened the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Stadium at Nathan where the 1982 Commonwealth Games were to be held. School students were bused in from all over Brisbane for the occasion.  The ground had been levelled and the athletics track laid but as yet there were no stands. We sat on the grass while she made an extremely boring speech in her strange, plummy voice, then she and Prince Philip paraded around the track in their open-top limo treating us all to the royal wave. I felt a good deal sadder back at the end of July at the deat...

I've written before about the crazy world of drug policy and the arms race between dealers and police that marks our futile efforts to outlaw various substances.  We are caught in an endless loop of first order change , doing more of the same and hoping for a different result.  The victims, it has always seemed to me, are the poor people at the bottom of the heap - people with addictions, trauma and other issues in their lives who end up jailed or homeless as casualties of a pointless war.  So I was excited to learn about the existence of Johann Hari's Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction. A friend told me about Hari's most recent book, Stolen Focus , which looks at the prevalence of digital technologies and the way they are robbing us of our ability to concentrate and be present in the moment.  I really enjoyed it, if that is the right word for a great book about a terrible thing, but it was this earlier book that really made me take notice....

In my musings about late 60s activism in the USA and here in Australia, I noticed a contrast between the hippie movement's emphasis on spirituality and deep renewal, and the Australian political activists' focus on causes and actions.  So just like that (Shazam!) I've come across something that beautifully bridges the divide.   Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in without Going Crazy  is a book by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, published in 2012.  It is based on a group process pioneered by Macy and others in the 1970s known as the Work That Reconnects , which has since spread around the world and is still active and widely used.  I believe Macy, now in her 90s, is still active in this work.  Her bio describes her as 'a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology'. Johnstone is a British doctor and psychologist who first met Macy at a Work That Reconnects workshop in 1989 and is now the main facilitator of this process in the...

As the Labor Party gets ready to introduce its climate change legislation into Parliament next week, the myth of the 'Greens 2009 sabotage of good climate policy' is doing great service in making Labor look like persecuted saints. We're even seeing the line repeated uncritically on supposedly neutral news shows like the ABC's 7.30. It's a myth or, if you prefer, it's a lie. Don't fall for it. The 2009 CPRS was a fatally compromised piece of pro-fossil-fuel greenwash, and the 2011-12 alternative was a big improvement. What the Greens should learn from their interactions with the Rudd/Gillard government is that blocking legislation can be a good move. They prevented a bad policy and negotiated a much better one. It achieved real emissions reductions, and CEFC and ARENA were cleverly set up so that they are still doing their work despite 9 years of Coalition sabotage. They should also learn that Labor can be mightily incompetent at promoting good legislatio...