Painting Fakes

  A River with a City Problem  is such a fantastic name for a history book. Margaret Cook's history of flooding on the Brisbane River and its tributaries is in high demand at the Council library service thanks to our fresh flooding this year.   I wish I'd read this book in 1994 when we bought our house in Fairfield, but of course it was only published in 2019, prompted by the catastrophic 2011 floods .  When we inspected the house and decided to buy it we knew that in 1974 the property had been covered in over two metres of water, flooding the upstairs of the house.  We were also told that the completion of Wivenhoe Dam in the 1980s meant an equivalent flood event would be about two metres lower, meaning we would only have an inch or tow of water under the house.  This seemed like a small enough risk. What we didn't understand at the time, but learned in 2011, is that this story had two big 'ifs'.  If the rain fell above Wivenhoe Dam, and if the amount of rain did

Back in early 2020, as we were all locking down for the first time and trying to work out what the hell this 'coronavirus' thing was, someone left a pile of books in the front of their house with a note saying 'please take'.  I picked up a book called In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea  by Danny Goldberg.  (The title is borrowed, seemingly without acknowledgement, from a 1968 album by The Moody Blues). Goldberg is a 50-year veteran of the US music industry, managing and publicising musical acts including Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, Bonnie Raitt, Steve Earle and The Hives.  Although he wasn't strictly 'there' in 1967 - that was the year he finished school, and he entered the music business in 1968 - he was very close, and worked and socialised closely with many of its movers and shakers.   Then again, having 'been there' is a somewhat nebulous idea.  It's not just that, as many people are credited with saying, 'if you remember th

I've just finished reading Simon Reid-Henry's Empire of Democracy: The Remaking of the West Since the Cold War, 1971-2017.   Because I could.  It's quite a tome and I read each of its three parts separately with a bit of time in between reading something a bit lighter. Reid-Henry teaches history, political economy and international law at the University of London as well as being Senior Researcher at the Oslo Peace Research Institute.  I'm super-impressed by people who can write books like this.  You would have to read and catalogue an almost unimaginable number of sources - the end-notes alone cover 87 pages - and then somehow make sense of all those little pieces of data to try and tell a coherent story.  I'm convinced that history writing is a kind of conjuring trick, but without historians we would have to do all that fact-checking ourselves, or just rely on our memories.  All the events he covers in this book took place in my lifetime, but there's plenty

Australia has many myths about its history, and particularly about our history of invasion and dispossession of Aboriginal people.  Among them are the myth that Australia was terra nullius , an empty land, prior to the arrival of the British; the idea that Aboriginal people were hunter-gatherers who roamed randomly around the country; and the idea that the Europeans named the various parts of the country , as if they did not already have names. Each of these myths has been comprehensively busted, but many Australians remain unaware of this fact.  Other myths also remain alive. Rosalind Kidd is a Queensland historian whose main work has been on the administration of Aboriginal affairs in Queensland.  At the start of the 1990s she was given access, through the intervention of Aboriginal academic and activist Marcia Langton, to the files of Queensland's Aboriginal Affairs Department going back to the foundation of the colony.  Aside from her doctoral thesis, the major results of

It is now thirty years since Robert Hughes published his brilliant history of Australia's convict period, The Fatal Shore .  The fact that it is still in print shows just how compelling it is. Years ago I bought a battered copy at a Lifeline book sale.  I put it on my shelf, and there it stayed until a couple of months ago when I took it with me on a holiday to Tasmania. Hughes tells the story of the Australian convict system from the first planning to the end of transportation nearly a century later.  He alternates between official records and the individual experiences recorded in letters, memoirs and case notes.  The result is a vivid portrayal of colonial life.  If you haven't read it, please do!  Let me just give you a little taste of its riches. Although Hughes doesn't ignore the tragedy of Aboriginal Australia during these years, this is very much a British story.  Britain in the late 18th and early 19th century was a troubled society.  The Industrial Revolut

In December 1945 an Egyptian peasant by the name of Muhammad Ali al-Samman found a stone jar buried on a mountainside near the town of Nag Hammadi.  Inside were thirteen leather-bound papyrus books. Over the next couple of years these books found their way, by various circuitous routes, into the collection of the Cairo Museum of Antiquities where in the decades that followed they were examined and translated by an international team of scholars.  The thirteen volumes brought together Coptic translations of over 50 second century Gnostic Christian texts, some completely unknown, some known only through quotes and references in other writings. This is one of the most important finds in the study of the origins of Christianity, opening up an avenue of understanding that had been closed for more than 1,500 years.  Elaine Pagels joined the team of scholars working on these documents in the late 1960s and has become one of the leading experts in the field.  She has written a number of te

I haven't been blogging for a while because I've been too busy with other things - a couple of weeks holiday in Western Australia, lots of work before and after to clear two weeks for a holiday, a journey to a strange land to do a job I can't tell you about.... Anyway, I can tell you about a book I've just finished reading which provides a kind of counterpoint to our current moral panic about Islam .  It's called The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity,  and it was written back in 2001 by Philip Jenkins who at that point was Distinguished Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University although he has since moved on to other academic posts.  To some extent it may be a little aged, but because it deals with long term trends (both past and future) it remains largely relevant in 2015. We often think of Christianity as a Western European religion, centred on Italy, France and Spain if you are Catholic, and on Germany, Netherlands and Britain i