Painting Fakes

  A River with a City Problem  is such a fantastic name for a history book. Margaret Cook's history of flooding on the Brisbane River and its tributaries is in high demand at the Council library service thanks to our fresh flooding this year.   I wish I'd read this book in 1994 when we bought our house in Fairfield, but of course it was only published in 2019, prompted by the catastrophic 2011 floods .  When we inspected the house and decided to buy it we knew that in 1974 the property had been covered in over two metres of water, flooding the upstairs of the house.  We were also told that the completion of Wivenhoe Dam in the 1980s meant an equivalent flood event would be about two metres lower, meaning we would only have an inch or tow of water under the house.  This seemed like a small enough risk. What we didn't understand at the time, but learned in 2011, is that this story had two big 'ifs'.  If the rain fell above Wivenhoe Dam, and if the...

Back in early 2020, as we were all locking down for the first time and trying to work out what the hell this 'coronavirus' thing was, someone left a pile of books in the front of their house with a note saying 'please take'.  I picked up a book called In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea  by Danny Goldberg.  (The title is borrowed, seemingly without acknowledgement, from a 1968 album by The Moody Blues). Goldberg is a 50-year veteran of the US music industry, managing and publicising musical acts including Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, Bonnie Raitt, Steve Earle and The Hives.  Although he wasn't strictly 'there' in 1967 - that was the year he finished school, and he entered the music business in 1968 - he was very close, and worked and socialised closely with many of its movers and shakers.   Then again, having 'been there' is a somewhat nebulous idea.  It's not just that, as many people are credited with saying, 'if you remember th...

I hesitated before reading Oliver Milman's The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires that Run the World.   I knew it would be depressing.  I made myself read it anyway because it's important not to look away. I was right, it was a depressing read.  There are multiple strands of evidence that the past few decades have seen substantial, sometimes dramatic, falls in insect populations around the world.  Various longitudinal surveys in different places - primarily Europe and the USA - show declines in insect numbers that are generally in the range of 20-50% but in some places are as much as 90%.  Some formerly abundant species, like North America's Monarch Butterflies or some species of European and North American bumblebees, are now threatened, but even species that are far from being threatened, like our common domesticated honeybees, are facing increasing pressure.   A caveat is in order.  None of these are comprehensive region-wide studies, ...

I just read Bill McKibben's Oil and Honey , his memoir of the early days of 350.org, published in 2013.  Of course I already knew who McKibben is - he is the key founder of 350.org and a long-time writer and activist on climate change - and I'd read a few short articles he's written, but this is my first long-form encounter with him, almost a decade after the event.  I may be slow but I get there in the end. McKibben has been writing about climate change for decades.  In 1989 he published The End of Nature , one of the first books to explain climate change to a broad audience.  He kept writing in the years that followed, expecting that sooner or later the penny would drop and governments and corporations would act rationally and reduce their emissions.  Around 2006 he realised this wasn't going to happen without a fight and he teamed up with a few of his students at Middlebury College, Vermont to form 350.org and launch a rolling series of global actions. Oil an...

It rained.  And rained.  It rained more.  The river was rising.  There would be minor flooding.  It rained more.  Actually, it would be moderate.  More rain.  No, sorry, major. We moved stuff upstairs.  The lights went out.  We headed for higher ground, and there we stayed for five days.  We were lucky, we just had a couple of inches of water in the rooms we had emptied.  Our neighbours, a few metres down the hill, not so much.  The rain headed south, wreaking havoc wherever it went.   Amidst all this, along with the war in Ukraine and the ongoing global plague, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report saying how bad the impacts of climate change are, how much worse they will be, and how much we're not doing to adapt.  Tell us something we don't know.  If you listened to our politicians, you wouldn't know the report had been published.  From many of them, you wouldn't even k...