Painting Fakes

It being NAIDOC week, and us all talking about the voice to parliament, treaties and so forth, it's only fair that I should write a review of Sarah Maddison's book, The Colonial Fantasy: Why White Australia Can't Solve Black Problems. Sarah Maddison is Professor of Politics at the University of Melbourne.  She is not an Indigenous person, but she has written and researched extensively on Indigenous politics and a good deal of this book consists of direct quotes from Indigenous authors and leaders.  She doesn't claim to represent or speak for Aboriginal people. She is careful to represent the diversity of Indigenous views rather than pretend to consensus. Still, her extensive quotes show at least that there is no shortage of Indigenous people who share her view, even if others have a different opinion. Why, she asks, after decades of debate and effort, are we not succeeding in solving the issues of inequality that face Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communitie...

Experiencing serious trauma can change your life, and rarely for the better. People who have experienced trauma are more likely to experience a range of other things - chronic mental illness, addiction, homelessness, marriage breakdown.  Trauma rewires our brains, changes the way we react to situations, makes us prone to 'fight or flight' in situations which are benign for other people. *** You would think that the bigger the trauma, the more serious the effect, but this is not necessarily so.  Case in point: last year I read and reviewed  Jimmy Barnes' two-volume autobiography.  Barnes suffered a horrendous childhood, witnessing domestic violence, experiencing physical and sexual abuse, being abandoned by his mum and left with his siblings to fend for themselves while their dad spent all his time and all the family's money at the pub.   Hardly surprising that Barnes' adult life was a train wreck of addiction, violence, self-destructive behavio...

Here's the text of a letter I just sent by snail mail to our dear Prime Minister. Dear Prime Minister First of all, let me begin by congratulating you on your and your party's recent election win.  You have been handed a huge and difficult responsibility, and I pray for wisdom and compassion for you and your colleagues as you lead us over the coming three years. I should perhaps say, by way of honesty, that I didn't vote for your party.  I disagree with you on a number of things I regard as important.  However, one thing I know you and I will agree on is the value of a democratic system in which governments are elected and removed peacefully by the people.  This system requires all of us to compromise at times.  So I am happy to have the opportunity to graciously accept the choice of the majority of my fellow citizens, as I know you would have graciously accepted the opposite outcome. I am also not a member of any political party, nor a loyalist. ...

Climate change and energy policy go hand in hand.  The biggest source of greenhouse gases, and the easiest to change, is electricity generation.  Of course we need to reduce emissions in other areas too but the electricity system, as a unified system relying on a relatively small number of large scale generators, is an ideal place to make a big impact.  No surprise, then, that in Australia this is the policy area that is most fraught, as politicians and industry players jostle for position and advantage while trying to deflect blame for things that go wrong.  Sometimes it seems impossible to get at the truth in the cacophony of mutually incompatible assertions and accusations. I've recently been trying to get more of a handle on this subject and among other things have just finished reading Matthew Warren's new book, Black Out: How is Energy-Rich Australia Running Out of Electricity? Warren is an energy economist who has worked for the Minerals Council of NSW, th...

I was sad to read Clive Hamilton giving short shift to the role of traditional religions (including Christianity) in dealing with the Anthropocene.  After all, I mix with quite a few Christians who are passionate and active on environmental issues. Still, I have to sadly admit that Clive has a point.  Christian climate activists are decidedly in the minority.  Aid agencies like TEAR  and lobby groups like Common Grace  and ARRCC have picked up the issue, but many Christians are disengaged and it is not something that has been talked about regularly in any of the churches I have been part of.  When it does come up there will be the predictable skeptics and deniers, but many Christians will respond that while it's true and important, it's much more important for Christians to 'preach the gospel', by which they generally mean 'make converts'. I find this frustrating but also familiar.  It is exactly the same response I have heard over many year...

A few years ago I read Affluenza: When Too Much is Never Enough  by Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss.  The authors examine the ubiquity of over-consumption in Western societies, what drives it, why we keep doing it even though it doesn't make us happy, and some ideas for countering it. I remember agreeing with it, but largely from the standpoint that I had heard it before.  Back in 1975, the English theologian and later bishop John V Taylor wrote a little book called Enough is Enough  which urged Christians to resist the temptation to over-consume.  I still remember his advice to families watching TV - when the ads come on, cover your ears and shout 'Who are you kidding?'. I haven't really been paying attention to Hamilton since then, but recently I saw a reference to his book Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene  in an article I was reading and decided to check it out.  I'm both glad and sad that I did.  Glad because it i...

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 ma...