Painting Fakes

 In his book Collapse,  Jared Diamond uses mining as a metaphor to explain Australia's environmental predicament. Mining in a literal sense - i.e. the mining of coal, iron and so on - is a key to Australia's economy today, providing the largest share of its export earnings.  In a metaphorical sense, however, mining is also a key to Australia's environmental history and to its current predicament.  That's because the essence of mining is to exploit resources that do not renew themselves with time and hence to deplete those resources.... Australia has been and still is 'mining' its renewable resources as if they were mined minerals.  That is, they are being exploited at rates faster than their renewal rates, with the result that they are declining.  At present rates, Australia's forests and fisheries will disappear long before its coal and iron reserves, which is ironic in view of the fact that the former are renewable and the latter aren't. I thought of t...

If you read this blog from time to time you'll know that I'm a big fan of Bruce Cockburn.  So you won't be surprised to hear that I was very excited about the publication of his memoir, Rumours of Glory,  which hit the shelves in late 2014. I first heard Cockburn in the early 1980s and his music was a revelation to me.  He was the first singer I heard (and still one of a select few) who combined an overt Christian faith with a deep commitment to justice and an immersion in political and social issues.  He is a big name in his native Canada - winner of multiple Juno awards (the equivalent to our ARIAs) and inductee to the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.  Elsewhere he has a fairly low profile and a small but devoted following - especially from people like me. I read Rumours of Glory  over the Easter holiday as we travelled around western Victoria and New South Wales.  Among other things, it inspired me to fill some gaps in my collection of Cockburn CDS ...

I've been finding myself singing this Bruce Cockburn song to myself a lot lately. Strikes across the frontier and strikes for higher wage  Planet lurches to the right as ideologies engage  Suddenly it's repression, moratorium on rights  What did they think the politics of panic would invite?  Person in the street shrugs -- "Security comes first"  But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse   Callous men in business costume speak computerese  Play pinball with the Third World trying to keep it on its knees  Their single crop starvation plans put sugar in your tea  And the local Third World's kept on reservations you don't see  "It'll all go back to normal if we put our nation first"  But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse   Fashionable fascism dominates the scene  When ends don't meet it's easier to justify the means  Tenants get the dregs and landlords get the crea...

I'm loving Bruce Cockburn's new CD, Small Source of Comfort .   I don't think I've ever heard a Cockburn album that I didn't like.  For those unfortunate enough not to have heard of Cockburn, he is a Canadian singer-songwriter who first became famous in the 1970s with a brand of folk-tinged music and beautiful poetic lyrics dealing with spiritual and political themes.  Over the years he has branched out musically, taking on elements of electric rock-n-roll, jazz, soul and world music.  He is a passionate world citizen, travelling not in a superstar musician cocoon but with his eyes and heart open, and lots of his songs are inspired by visits to the world's trouble spots. It's five years since his last effort, Life Short, Call Now .   He comments in the sleeve notes to Small Source of Comfort , presumably with tongue firmly in cheek, that after that largely acoustic effort he had planned to do something "electric and noisy, with gongs and jackhammer...

I’ve read a lot over the years about the death of poetry. People ament that no-one publishes poetry, that books of poetry sell such pathetic numbers that publishers won’t touch them, and that poets live on air, government grants and their day jobs. Well I’m here to tell you that it’s not as bad as it seems. It’s just that we’ve forgotten what poetry is, and so we’re looking in the wrong place. Poetry was originally an oral form, not a written one, and intended to be sung or chanted. For people who don’t read, poetry is a lot more interesting to listen to than prose – it has rhythm, it often rhymes, it uses repetition. If it’s accompanied by music it has an added emotional resonance. The limitation of oral forms of communication, however, is that they require physical presence. The singer or reciter has to travel to his or her audience, or bring them in. The printing press made a big change in this, allowing mass reproduction of the verbal content of poetry – although much m...