Painting Fakes

Here's a little parable about plants.  In particular, a little row of street trees that I often walk past, just a few hundred metres from my home. I'm no botanist, but I believe these are Golden Penda trees, scientific name Xanthostemon chrysanthus.  They are Queensland natives but their natural range doesn't extend as far south as Brisbane. They are here because they were the official plant of Expo 88, planted in flower to provide visitors with a vibrant golden welcome.   The thing about these trees is that they love to grow.  What first attracted me to them was the way the foliage was starting to sprout from the base of the trees.  At the end of last autumn you could see that the growth was already strong. As I went out walking in the streets around my home I started watching the growth of these exuberant little sprouts.  Over a period of a few months last summer they went crazy, growing from modest little shoots to large new growths. Last summer was...

Prompted by Extinction Rebellion and some of my friends who are involved in direct action protests on climate, war and other things I've been thinking a fair bit about civil disobedience.  This is what timid people like me do when faced with the option of being confrontational - we go away and think about it.  I'm planning to share various things with you over the next little while but here, by way of starters, are some reflections on Frederic Gros' little book Disobey: The Philosophy of Resistance. Frederic Gros is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris XII and the Institute of Political Studies, also in Paris.  This book is based on a series of lectures he delivered to his students, published in French in 2017 and in this English translation in 2020.  The subtitle is a little ambiguous - the cover says 'The Philosophy of Resistance', the title page 'A Guide to Ethical Resistance'.  I would go with the cover - this is a work of philosophy, not a...

Well friends, you'll be happy to know that the Great Barrier Reef has been saved.   Over the past few months our government has been pulling out the stops to prevent UNESCO from listing the Reef as 'In Danger'.  The Government's 'Ambassador for the Reef', Cairns MP Warren Entsch, took a bunch of foreign ambassadors on a tourist jaunt to some choice snorkeling spots.  Meanwhile the woman who holds the title of Minister for the Environment, Sussan Ley, hopped on a RAAF jet with a bunch of advisors and visited capitals around the world, twisting the arms of the governments of the 21 countries on UNESCO's World Heritage Committee.  In the end, at least 11 countries voted to delay a decision for at least another year.  The list apparently includes Saint Kitts and Nevis, Ethiopia, Hungary, Mali, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Russia and Spain. Minister Ley said : “Our concern was always that UNESCO had sought an immediate ‘in danger lis...

Why do we find it so difficult to change what we are doing, to solve the pressing problems of our planet like climate change, pollution and poverty?  Of course there's a lot about power and wealth, but I've increasingly been thinking that a big part of the problem is lack of imagination.  We are unable to envisage different ways of viewing the world and assume that our mental constructs are the only possible reality.  In order to make the world different from what it is, or indeed to accept and build on the differences that are already there, we need to be able to see or imagine things differently. I've just finished reading  Vesper Flights,  by Helen Macdonald.  It's a collection of essays on natural history, mostly about birds and peoples' interactions with them. I'm not going to review it except to say it's beautiful.  In the final essay 'What Animals Taught Me', she says this: A long time ago, when I was nine or ten, I wrote a school essay on wha...

 As a kind of bonus on the whole Freud/Jung thing, I also treated my self to a read of  H. Rider Haggard's She , which Jung refers to several times as an exemplar of the archetype of the anima , the female (for men) figure who represents our souls, our unconscious or our inner life in both dreams and myths. She  was Haggard's second novel, following the phenomenal success of  King Solomon's Mines  in 1885.  Before publishing his first blockbuster Haggard was a British civil servant and, in the role of secretary to the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal, spent six years in Southern Africa where both novels are set.  Afterwards he retired to his native Norfolk and became a writer of fanciful and massively popular adventure stories, many set in exotic locations which at least in theory were in Africa.   Haggard was an early exponent of what these days we would think of as pulp fiction.  He was a forerunner of such prolific writers as Edgar Rice ...

 Among the backlog of unread books on my shelf was a copy of Sigmund Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.   It consists of a course of 28 lectures delivered by Freud at the University of Vienna in 1915 and 1916, designed to introduce students to the main ideas involved in psychoanalysis.  I gave this book to my father many years ago, I forget why, and eventually it made its way back to me and sat on my shelves until this year, when I finally read it.  Perhaps there is some kind of subconscious significance to the fact that the volume fell apart as I was reading it, so I had to bin it when I got to the end. My first introduction to Freud's ideas was not encouraging.  When I did introductory psychology subjects at the University of Queensland in 1979 and 1980 as part of my social work degree, the psychology faculty there was very much dominated by the idea of psychology as an experimental science, driven by scientific methodology and randomised co...