Painting Fakes

When I first read Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu  about three years ago I was, like many readers, mightily impressed.  Pascoe takes the myth of Aboriginal people as passive hunter-gatherers and turns it on its head.  He argues that Aboriginal people engaged in agriculture, aquaculture, building of durable permanent housing, food processing and storage and active management of pastures and the game animals that lived on them.  The picture he develops is of a highly intentional, sophisticated and sustainable food economy. Since then I have become aware that a lot of controversy swirls around Dark Emu.  This has grown in the three years since I first read it as the book itself has continued to gain popularity, spinning out into a dance performance by Bangarra and a version for children.   Some of the controversy seems to me to have less than noble motives.  For instance, some people have launched personal attacks on Pascoe, suggesting he has faked his own A...

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...

This week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) released its Sixth Assessment Report .  It's a synthesis of the latest scientific understandings of climate change, put together and carefully vetted by a group of several hundred climate scientists.   The news is not good. The earth has already warmed by 1.09 degrees Celsius on average.  Australia has warmed by 1.4.   Scientists are more certain than ever that it's caused by humans (us, and particularly the wealthy oligarchs who are blocking action).   They are also much more certain than they were last report about the direct link between climate change and natural disasters.  Remember those bushfires, and the ones sweeping Europe right now, right after the floods that swept Europe?  There'll be more. Sea levels are rising.  It's hard to say by how much because it's hard to model how major ice sheets will melt.  But higher than now.  Some Pacific nations ...

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...