Painting Fakes

I remember travelling to Petrie as a child to play against the Pine Rivers soccer team.  It seemed like a long way away.  Reading Tom Petrie's Reminiscences of Early Queensland makes it seem even further.   Tom Petrie was born in Scotland in 1831.  In that same year his father Andrew accepted a post as supervisor of works in Sydney, and in 1838 the family transferred to the penal colony in Brisbane, then a ramshackle affair just over a decade old.  When Queensland was opened up to free settlement a few years later and his position was abolished, Petrie senior refused the offered transfer back to Sydney in favour of setting up his own building business in the younger colony, and the Petries became pillars of early Brisbane society. All this meant that Tom had a very unusual childhood.  Brisbane in 1838 was not really a community, it was a prison.  Although there were some women prisoners the population was dominated by male convicts and soldiers. ...

Tony Abbott wants to be the Prime Minister for Aboriginal Australia.  Then again he also wants to be the Minister for Women.  When he was asked what he had achieved in this portfolio he said he had abolished the carbon tax.  Perhaps as Prime Minster for Aboriginal Australians his main achievement is stopping the boats.  Only 227 years too late but I guess there's no use crying over spilt milk. Now Abbott has flagged another seminal achievement in Aboriginal affairs by supporting the Western Australian Government's decision to stop providing basic infrastructure to approximately 150 outstations - small Aboriginal communities, often remote, that have been set up by Aboriginal people since the 1960s as overflow from the towns and larger Aboriginal communities.  The Western Australian Government says continuing to provide services to these communities is too expensive, and Abbott says that governments shouldn't pay for the people's "lifestyle choices". ...

This young girl is my hero. She appears in an advertisement for Holden Commodore which has been on high rotation on all the commercial TV channels recently.  In it a group of children present their designs for the Holden Commodore of the future. Holden (the Australian arm of General Motors) announced last year that it would stop producing cars in Australia by the end of 2017.  This is, of course, not a popular move with the Australian public and GM are very keen to convince us they have a future here even if it is only virtual.  What better way than to use children? The children are asked to create pictures of a future Holden Commodore (Holden's flagship vehicle) and then explain them on camera.  I can't find anything online that tells me how genuine this is.  Did each of the children really sit down and draw their imagined car of the future, or is it all staged and scripted?  But let's assume for the sake of argument that these are real juvenil...

A few years ago I wrote a series of posts on the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy , and for a while after that I kept coming back to the subject.  I stopped eventually, partly because I ran out of things to say, and partly because it was like shooting fish in a barrel.  The idea of an inerrant Bible just doesn't make any sense once you've read it and realised what kind of book (or collection of books) it actually is. However, at the risk of going over old ground and boring everyone, I've just read a fantastic book by Peter Enns called The Bible Tells Me So...Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It.   Don't bother reading my laboured posts on the subject, just read this book instead. Enns is an Old Testament scholar.  He currently holds a chair in Biblical Studies at Eastern University in Pennsylvania.  His book jacket also tells us that he has taught at Harvard, Princeton and Fuller.  Interestingly it doesn't mention Westminster The...

I've finally taken the time to read an actual complete book by Noam Chomsky, as opposed to reading the odd article or hearing snippets on the radio.  Chomsky is now 86 and has been publishing books and articles on a bewildering array of subjects for the past 50 years.  What took me so long? By profession Chomsky is a linguist, often referred to as the "father of modern linguistics".  I'm not very interested in linguistics but he is more widely famous as a political activist and as America's most prominent anarchist.  Ever since the Vietnam War he has provided a steady stream of dissident commentary on US politics and particularly on its international affairs. Anyhow, I may be slow but I get there in the end.  I've just finished reading Hopes and Prospects , an interlinked set of essays published in 2010 and dealing with various aspects of US foreign policy. The book revolves around two simple maxims.  The first, from Adam Smith, suggests that "'...

I've often thought the world can be described in a single diagram.  After all, how complicated can one planet be? This is not it, but it's a little bit of the way there - a diagram which explains how we need to understand current world events by means of a pyramid.  If I was really clever I'd make it an iceberg with the top item and half the second sticking out of the water but if you want cute and pretty you'll just have to look elsewhere.  (If you click on it, at least you'll see it full size). The idea behind this diagram is that we spend a lot of time focused on surface symptoms of deeper problems.  Because we spend so much of our effort on the symptoms we often fail to see what lies beneath them, so we opt for superficial solutions too.  We focus on cleaning up after natural disasters, playing with monetary and fiscal settings to smooth out fluctuations in our economy, surveillance and policing to prevent terrorist attacks, "stopping the boats...

Sometimes the pleasure I get from being right is far outweighed by the pain of wishing I had been wrong.  This is one of these times. About a month ago I suggested that the media and government assault on Human Rights Commissioner Gillian Triggs over an obscure immigration case was merely a preliminary skirmish before the release of the Commission's report into children in detention.  I'm deeply sorry to have been proved right. On February 11 the government tabled the Commission's report, The Forgotten Children,  which it has been sitting on since November while it engaged in its initial softening up process.  I've only had time so far to read the summary and skim the rest, but it is not pretty reading. Over an eight month period, teams of Commission staff and assistants, including experts in child health, interviewed over 1,000 children and family members in eleven Australian immigration detention centres.  The Commission also received a couple of h...