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...

 A few years ago I read and reviewed Neil Woods' Good Cop, Bad War, the story of his work as an undercover police officer in the UK infiltrating illicit drug networks.  Woods tells the story of his 14 years as an undercover operator, beginning in the early 1990s.  It's a hair-raising tale of subterfuge and danger written with a clear purpose.  Woods was the chairperson of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an association of former and current police and customs officers campaigning for drug law reform, and he wanted to use his own experience to highlight the futility of the 'War on Drugs'. I recently came across a Queensland equivalent to this story, Drugs, Guns and Lies: My Life as an Undercover Cop, by Keith Banks, published in 2020.  Banks was a Queensland police officer from 1975 to 1995, entering the academy as an innocent, naïve 16 year old intent on helping the good guys by taking out the bad guys, and leaving in 1995 with a more realistic idea of who ...

So, today is the 231st anniversary of the first British convict fleet landing in Sydney Cove.  This was the beginning of the British invasion of Australia, but far from the end of it.  In my home town, home of the Turrbal and Jagera peoples, and the surrounding country of peoples including the Quandamooka, Kabi Kabi and Mununjali, the invasion did not start in earnest until 1823.  In November of that year the surveyor Lieutenant John Oxley sailed through Quandamooka waters and slowly rowed up the Maiwar River, surveying as he went.  Unaware that the river already had a name, he renamed it the Brisbane River after his boss Sir Thomas Brisbane, Governor of NSW.  In consequence the surrounding land, originally called Meanjin, also came to be called Brisbane. Among more peaceful encounters with the land's owners was an ugly confrontation which resulted in a young Aboriginal man being shot and possibly killed.   A year later a small party of convicts and ...

Today as I was out walking at lunchtime I found myself thinking about one of the moral tales that formed part of our primary school reading .  It goes by various names including The Cobbler and the Rich Man, The Cobbler and the Financier or The Cobbler's Song .  This story was first made popular in Europe by Jean de la Fontaine , a seventeenth century French author, although it is much older than that and may originate on the Indian sub-continent. In this story a poor cobbler works in his shop each day, and as he works he sings loudly and cheerfully.  This singing is intensely annoying to his neighbour, a wealthy financier who lies awake all night worrying about his money and then is unable to sleep during the day because of the cobbler's noise.  Eventually the rich man hits on a plan - he gives the cobbler a purse containing 100 gold pieces. Immediately the cobbler's peace of mind is shattered and he ceases to sing.  Instead he lies awake at night worry...

Whatever modest musical ability I have I owe to my Dad. It took me a while to work this out.  When I was growing up, there wasn't lot of music in the house.  Mum and Dad had a small record collection and on rare occasions they would put something on the scratchy mono turntable Dad had built himself.  We also had a piano, but no-one played it much. As I got older I realised this wasn't how it had always been.  Dad was a decent pianist and also quite a good singer.  As boy he trained as a church chorister, and our photo album included a picture of him dressed as a policeman in a production of Pirates of Penzance  where he and Mum met and fell in love. Sadly by the time I was old enough to notice, Dad had lost a lot of his hearing and this ruined his enjoyment of music.  It's just not the same when you can only hear half the notes.  His only piano playing was an occasional rendition of Fur Elise,  which he could play fairly fluently by hea...

I was in Sydney a couple of weeks ago and went for a walk through Pyrmont on the shore of Sydney Harbour - a very swanky location indeed, but fortunately most of the actual harbourside is public parkland. I noticed something strange, though.  A lot of the trees had been painted blue.  At least, their trunks and lower branches were painted blue up to the leaf line, where the blue merged into the natural brown of the wood and green of the leaves.  The effect was quite striking and a little disturbing, like they were ghost trees, or space aliens. The sign told me that this was the work of an artist called Konstantin Dimopoulos, global citizen and current Melbourne resident, and is "an environmental art installation that draws attention to global deforestation by turning living, breathing trees bright blue, demanding we notice them before the planet's old forests are gone for good."  It adds that Dimopoulos has installed similar works around the world. Now I fin...

I had an epiphany the other day.  I was watching ABC's  7.30 report on Mohammed Ali Baryalei, the Afghani-Australian man who is reputed to be the most senior Australian member of Islamic State.  I had a profound moment of identification. Baryalei is a man with a colourful history.  He arrived in Australia in the early 1980s as an infant after his family fled Afghanistan, and grew up in Sydney in the home of his violent father.  The trauma of his personal abuse was exacerbated by the World Trade Centre bombing (he would have been about 20 at the time) which made him feel like an outsider in Australia, and his young adulthood included bouts of depression, periodic drug abuse and possibly petty crime.  On the brink of suicide, he turned back to Islam and within a short time became a fervent preacher, evangelising young men on the streets of Sydney. The 7.30 story included some Youtube footage (which has been cut from the on-line version) of Baryalei ta...

It's very interesting to see what's happened to Anzac Day over my lifetime. I attended a lot of Anzac Day ceremonies in my childhood.  On April 24 there would be a memorial service at school and we would all buy Anzac badges.  Then on the day itself my scout group would gather early in the morning with the other marchers at the Sunnybank shopping centre on Station Road.  Led by local war veterans, the various organisations would march - or rather stroll - down Station Road, turn left into Lister St (passing my house on the way, where Dad would wave from the verandah) and attend a short memorial service at the Municipal Hall.  Someone would play the Last Post, we would sing Lest We Forget and someone would give a short address.  I don't remember what they said, because I was always distracted by the honour boards listing the names of the local men who died in the two World Wars and whose names also graced our local streets. I stopped attending these e...

I don't really feel shocked when I hear about cases of sexual abuse in the church.  I feel deeply sad for the victims and angry at the perpetrators, and I feel betrayed when church leaders protect the abusers at the expense of their victims.  But I don't really feel shocked.  I've worked in child protection.  I know the statistics.  It is pretty much inevitable that somewhere in any big insitution there will be abuse going on.  When I read about it, my expectations are merely proved correct. Rolf Harris is another matter altogether.  With Rolf it's personal.  He was the first singer I ever loved.  Before I discovered pop music, he was my number one musical taste.  I had some of his records, and watched his show on TV.  His songs were also the first I ever performed in public.  I sang one of them at a scout concert and our leader (who despite the stereotypes was not the least bit abusive) was so taken with it t...

Obviously I was a bit fired up when I wrote a few days ago about George Pell's response to the announcement of the Royal Commission into institutional child sex abuse.  One of the things I was trying to say, though, is that cultures of abuse are widespread and not at all confined to the church.  One example I cited was the recent and still ongoing Peter Slipper/James Ashby affair.  For those who haven't heard, Peter Slipper resigned from the Liberal Party to take on the job of Speaker in Australia's hung parliament, and was subsequently accused of sexual harassment by a member of his staff, James Ashby. The accusation was a hot political issue because Slipper's defection shored up Labor's thin majority.  It's quite possible that Ashby's accusations are malicious and he certainly didn't help himself by conferring with senior Liberal Party figures before going public.  Nonetheless, the way the Labor Party turned on him and set out to discredit him w...