Painting Fakes

I'm feeling slightly pleased with myself at the moment because after hearing about it for years, I finally made it to the end of John Harris's One Blood: 200 Years of Aboriginal Encounter withe Christianity - A Story of Hope.  I'm only 35 years late - the book was published in 1990, although I first heard of it around 10 years ago.  In my defence I would say that until recently it was out of print, and also that it's LONG at almost 900 pages.  This year I finally stopped making excuses, bought a second hand copy and have read it from beginning to end.   At the time he wrote the book, Harris was the Director of the Zadok Institute for Christianity and Society, an evangelical organisation dedicated to encouraging Christians to explore the implications of their faith for social issues and forerunner of what is now Ethos .  He was prompted to write it by the Bicentenary of Australia's colonisation and the fact that he was regularly asked to comment on Aborigina...

It's the first anniversary of the Voice referendum , and I've been reading Shireen Morris's Broken Heart: A True History of the Voice Referendum.  Morris is not an Aboriginal person but she is a constitutional lawyer and from 2013 onwards she worked for the Cape York Institute (CYI) under the leadership and guidance of Noel Pearson, first as an employee and later as an academic continuing their close collaboration.  No-one was closer than her to the events that led up to the Referendum, and I learned a lot reading her story. The story begins in 2012.  The then Labor Government had appointed an Expert Panel to advise on options for constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.  Its key recommendation was to add a racial non-discrimination clause to the Constitution as a way of fleshing out the race power added in 1967.  This proposal was quickly and roundly trashed by conservative lawyers, with Greg Craven, one of our leading right-...

There have been, and will be, plenty of post-mortems on the recent referendum, from people on all sides of the political fence, black and white.  A lot of those people will be more qualified than me to comment.  This statement from the First Nations leaders behind the 'yes' campaign is a 'must read'.  By comparison my thoughts carry little weight, but here goes anyway.... I come at this as a partisan.  I was active in the 'yes' campaign although far from central to it.  I went in the big march, joined with others to make a human 'yes' on a local football field, put up a 'yes' sign on the tree in front of my house, handed out flyers at the local train station, shared stuff on social media.  Most of this was done despite knowing it looked like a losing cause.  I didn't want to contribute to that loss with my own defeatist apathy.   There are lots of nuances to the explanation for the 'no' vote, and I think they all have some truth to t...

 I'll be voting 'Yes' to the Voice.  I don't say you should, you should make up your own mind, but here are my own reasons for doing so, and my responses to the criticisms being made by its opponents. The basics of the Referendum on the Voice are set out here .  The vote will ask us to approve insertion of the following words into the Constitution. Chapter IX Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples 129 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia: i. there shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice; ii. the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples; iii. the Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relatin...

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...