Painting Fakes

One of the favourite political books from my young days was The Deep North  by Deane Wells.  It was published in 1979, the year I started university, and Wells was a Lecturer in Philosophy at my university.  His book analyses the political philosophy of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who at that time was Queensland's Premier.  Joh was a figure who loomed large over our State, an authoritarian pro-business leader who outlawed political protests and set the police onto protestors.  During his reign the Police Special Branch spied on activists and union leaders and kept secret dossiers on them, trying to find ways to implicate them in crimes.   Wells' thesis was that Joh was a genuine, dinky di fascist.  He didn't mean this in the general sense that left-wing activists often use for right-wing authoritarians.  He meant that Joh followed the philosophy outlined by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, even though he had probably never read Hitler's writings .  ...

I was too busy to get my head into writing a Christmas post this year, but this is almost it.  After all, there are 12 days in Christmas, right? This Christmas I've been thinking about something that's not strictly a Christmas story - Jesus' inauguration message in the Nazareth synagogue, as told in Luke 4. He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me,     because he has anointed me     to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners     and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free,     to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’ Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were faste...

 In his book Collapse,  Jared Diamond uses mining as a metaphor to explain Australia's environmental predicament. Mining in a literal sense - i.e. the mining of coal, iron and so on - is a key to Australia's economy today, providing the largest share of its export earnings.  In a metaphorical sense, however, mining is also a key to Australia's environmental history and to its current predicament.  That's because the essence of mining is to exploit resources that do not renew themselves with time and hence to deplete those resources.... Australia has been and still is 'mining' its renewable resources as if they were mined minerals.  That is, they are being exploited at rates faster than their renewal rates, with the result that they are declining.  At present rates, Australia's forests and fisheries will disappear long before its coal and iron reserves, which is ironic in view of the fact that the former are renewable and the latter aren't. I thought of t...

Just in time for COP26, our government released it's new-but-not-new climate policy, Australia’s Long-Term Emissions Reduction Plan: A whole-of-economy plan to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.  As The Juice Media so aptly put it (with language warning!), it's not so much a plan as a planphlet.  A few weeks later, in the dead zone of a Friday evening, they released a thing which they said was the modelling behind it. It's kind of like Schroedinger's cat, simultaneously promising to cut emissions to 'net zero' and to do no such thing.  People who know what they are talking about have analysed it - like here ,  here  and here .  I'm not sure they've quite captured how absurd it is.  So in the interests of progressing the theatre of the absurd, here are seven of the many absurd things about it.  1. 'Net Zero' = 'Not Zero'. Our Minister for Emissions Reduction, Angus Taylor, has said several times that 'it's net zero, not absolute...

 I've just finished reading a wonderful little book by Melissa and Chris Bruntlett called Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives.   The Bruntletts are Canadian cycling advocates who moved from their home in Vancouver to the Dutch town of Delft to pursue their cycling dreams.  They knew they were moving to the home of commuter cycling, having already written a book about the Dutch cycling revolution, but they were unprepared for just how great it would be. Delft itself is a small town but it's in the middle of the Randstad, the urbanised western part of the Netherlands that includes The Hague, Rotterdam and Amsterdam with a population of over eight million people.  These cities are pretty much the global leaders in active transport, with dense networks of protected cycleways and walkways and lots of areas which are 'no go' for cars.  Delft is at the forefront of this movement, with cars progressively barred from more and more of the town's st...

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...