Painting Fakes

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...

So, over the past few years the fight has been on over the Beetaloo Basin.  This piece of ground in the Northern Territory, home to the Gudanji, Yanyuwa, Garrwa, Jingili, Mudburra and Alawa nations for tens of thousands of years, has the misfortune to be the site of a massive gas-field.  Never mind that we are cooking the planet, and that the world is trying to grope its way towards reducing its emissions.  Our massive energy companies and their flunkies in our parliaments are determined to 'open up' these gas-fields to fracking.  The Commonwealth Government has so far subsidised this enterprise to the tune of close to $200m.  The traditional owners don't want it and have been opposing it for years.  They have succeeded in getting the Senate to mount an inquiry into the enterprise.   So I followed the prompting from the Australian Conservation Foundation and made a submission.  You can do the same if you like, just follow the prompts her...

 After my speculations, aided by various authors, about whether trees are intelligent , or even fungi , Peter Godfrey-Smith has settled me down a little.  While I was returning Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life  to the library I saw his book  Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness  sitting awaiting re-shelving, begging me to borrow it. Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher of science who teaches at the University of Sydney and spends much of his spare time diving in the various bays around the Sydney area.  One result of this is an obsession with octopuses, about which he has written another book and which feature strongly in this one as well.  Both books deal with the question, part scientific and part philosophical, of what constitutes a 'mind' and what kind of creatures have them. Historically, theories of mind have varied widely.  One view is that the mind (perhaps equivalent to or similar to the soul) is an add-on which co-habits the b...

 I can't remember where I heard about Flatland.  I suspect in more than one place.   Edwin Abbott Abbott was famous in his own time as the principal of a prestigious London school and a writer of school textbooks.  It's fascinating that almost a century after his death, the only reason he is remembered is for a a little book he published in 1884 which the editors of the British Dictionary of National Biography  didn't even feel was worth noting in their entry on him. Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions  is, at one level, an extended set of mathematical jokes.  They begin on the title page, where we learn that the tale is narrated by A. Square, a play on Abbott's own name (in mathematical notation his initials could be rendered EA 2 ).  I would not be surprised if many of the geometrical illustrations in the book began their lives as jokes to liven up dull geometry lessons for his pupils. The first part of the story describes the land of Fl...

When I published a short post about fungi last month, a friend suggested I should read a book called  Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds and Shape our Futures, by a chap called Merlin Sheldrake .  So I did.  Thanks! Merlin Sheldrake is an English mycologist - a person a who studies fungi - with a PhD from Cambridge University which he earned studying fungi in the rain forests of Panama.  He is like the opposite end of the pole from me.  I know barely anything about fungi, he is a fungal tragic.  He studies fungi for a living and in his spare time he does fungus-related things for fun.   In researching this book he brewed wines and beers from all sorts of organic matter using the yeast already present on their skin and in the air (yes, yeast is a fungus).  He took LSD, an artificial hallucinogen modelled on hallucinogenic mushroom compounds, as part of a scientific experiment.  He immersed himself in a fermentati...

 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 ...

While I've been recovering from a piece of minor surgery I've spent a bit of time reading Philippa Mein Smith's A Concise History of New Zealand. Strange reading for a health break, you think?  Well, I've spent most of my life in Australia, just a short trip across the Tasman from New Zealand, and yet I'm ashamed to say I know less about the place than about many countries further from me.  The closest I have come to visiting is a quick change of planes in Auckland Airport, and before reading Mein Smith's book I knew almost nothing about its history. Like most Australians I guess, I see New Zealand as like a younger sister.  They are near us, they were founded by the same British colonialists, they speak the same language, they share a history of displacement of their original inhabitants.  Like younger sisters everywhere, they are similar to us, but a bit nicer.  Their people are a bit friendlier, their race relations a bit less oppressive, their politics a bit...