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The Great Australian Nightmare

I don’t usually talk about my work on this blog, since I talk about it so much in the rest of my life. However, I had a curious experience recently. I’ve just taken on a bit of work around support for low income home purchasers, and to get a bit of historical context I tracked down a 1983 book called “The Great Australian Nightmare” by Jim Kemeny . I had never read this book, or even seen a copy, before the last couple of weeks. Yet its influence on my work has been huge. In the mid to late 1980’s this book was constantly quoted in articles on housing policy, and his arguments even if not attributed were the staple of left-wing housing comment. I was surprised, then, by a couple of things. First, how short the book is – at a little over 100 pages its volume hardly matches the weight it carries. Second, I was intrigued by the slightness and at times the confusion of its arguments. There was little data, a lot of assertion, and plenty of missing logical steps. His argument is rea

The Saints of Fromelles

A bit of a post-script on the popular religion thing. Not long after Anzac Day, Australian news reports featured the exhumation of the remains of 400 Australian and British soldiers killed in the Battle of Fromelles, in the north of France. This engagement in 1916 resulted in thousands of deaths, and many soldiers were buried in mass graves. Recent historical research has led to the location of one of these graves, and the Defence Departments of Britain and Australia are sponsoring the DNA testing of the remains to identify the soldiers. Afterwards they’ll be re-buried in individual graves. Three reasons are given for doing this. it will allow the living relatives of lost soldiers to finally know what happened to their ancestors it will honour the men themselves who gave their lives to “save” the people of France it will “help the people of Fromelles to erase the wounds of the war”. Given that these young men died over 90 years ago, they are unlikely to have any living relati

Anzac Day

Speaking of Australian folk religion, yesterday was Anzac Day. For those readers from outside Australia, this day commemorates that landing of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (the ANZACs) at Gallipolli in Turkey in 1915. In military terms this landing was a complete disaster. Originally planned as a surprise attack, the Turks found out about it and placed machine guns at the top of the hill. The ANZACs had nowhere to go and spent months trapped in the cove, gunned down whenever they tried to advance beyond their trenches, until months and thousands of deaths later they retreated. Yet in Australian folklore the obvious command failures were overwhelmed by the bravery of the ordinary soldiers. Anzac Day became Australia’s main military commemoration. I remember as a child buying and selling Anzac ribbons at school to raise money for veterans, and then on the day marching with my scout group down the street past my house to the service in the Sunnybank Municipal Hall. There, ben

Shawn Mackay meets Paul Tillich

One of the stories that has featured in the news this week is the death and funeral of Shawn Mackay, a young ACT Brumbies rugby union player who died after being hit by a car during a tour of South Africa. A low-profile player, unknown to even many rugby fans, has become a celebrity in death. Why is the media, and the public, so interested in the ordinary death of an unknown young man? Why did we follow the daily details of his injury, initial recovery, death and funeral? Partly I suppose it is the genuine fame of a number of his team-mates, and partly the fact that it’s just a tragic story that tugs at our heart-strings. But there's more. We like to hear about the intimate lives of famous people, and sports stars play a particular part in this fascination. Whereas the lives of Hollywood celebrities just seem bizarre, and politicians carry an aura of power, sports people seem very ordinary. Sure, they can run, swim, hit or kick a ball better than anyone else, but they are

Back from the dead

In order to stop this from becoming a dead blog, I feel a deep-seated need to post something, so here it is. I've been occupied with a few things including the illness and death of a close family member. That sort of stuff makes you lose heart, and you tend to look at the world in a more distant, cynical way. It can do two things to your relationships. At its best it can make you value them all the more. However, I find that there's a danger (because I'm an introvert anyway) of it working the other way. Like "you're going to die sooner or later, so maybe its better not to invest too much in this relationship". Not that I really think that way consciously. I just find myself being more distant, and I think that's why. Or maybe my emotions are just a bit over tired. Speaking of returns from the dead, Queensland just re-elected its Labor government for a fourth term, and for the first time with a woman leader in Anna Bligh who is almost my local member

The Great Days Are Passed

I've been re-watching Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films. One of the aspects of the story that Jackson underlines so clearly is it's setting during the decline of Middle Earth. The films are littered with telling images - the elves in procession to the Grey Havens, the ruins of Moriah, the Fellowship looking in awe in the giant statues of the sons of Elendil. The first movie begins with the tale of the Last Alliance of Men and Elves, where Isildur cuts the ring finger from Sauron's hand and appropriates the ring for himself. Elves and men together face their foe in open battle and win. In the Lord of the Rings, on the other hand, such a battle is impossible. Men and elves are too weak for anything but a skirmish. Nor is Sauron what he used to be. Perhaps literally disembodied, he sits in Barad Dur directing his fractious minions from afar, unaware of the hobbits carrying the ring right through his own country. Our heroes may be victorious, the power of Sauron ov

Cricket and Terrorism

Being a huge cricket fan, I've been following the story of the England cricket team's response to the Mumbai terrorist attacks via http://www.cricinfo.com/ . Of course I'm fascinated by the batting and bowling stuff but it's also interesting to see how people react under pressure. As soon as the attacks happened, the England team flew home from India. This is fairly logical - Mumbai was their next stop and in fact their gear had already been sent on ahead of them to one of the hotels at the centre of the attacks. I believe it's still there. There followed a debate about whether the team would return for the test series, demands for a "presidential" level of security, talk of some players not touring no matter what, and so on.  It went without saying that the test scheduled for Mumbai would be moved to another city. As of now it seems a full strength team is heading back to a training base in Abu Dhabi, with the commencement of the Test series likel

Deep Purple Sing the Blues

I’m sitting here watching a DVD of Deep Purple – “Live in Concert 1972/73”. They do those standards – “Highway Star”, “Strange Kind of Woman”, “Black Night”, “Smoke on the Water”. Deep Purple were one of the first bands I ever got excited by, back in the mid-70s when I was at high school. I remember the end of one year (probably 1975 or 76) when instead of sitting in class reading and playing cards a group of us were detailed to dig weeds out of the cricket pitch on the school oval. It was a great assignment – no classes, not timetable, a bit of work, a lot of goofing off. And all done to a Deep Purple soundtrack. It was my first exposure to “Strange Kind of Woman” as performed live with the singer exchanging licks with the guitarist, trying to match the guitar sound with his voice. We all had a go at imitating him imitating a guitar but our voices had only recently broken so most of us were hopeless. It was a few years before I listened to Neil Young and heard music that I wanted to p

Death of Poetry Greatly Exaggerated

I’ve read a lot over the years about the death of poetry. People ament that no-one publishes poetry, that books of poetry sell such pathetic numbers that publishers won’t touch them, and that poets live on air, government grants and their day jobs. Well I’m here to tell you that it’s not as bad as it seems. It’s just that we’ve forgotten what poetry is, and so we’re looking in the wrong place. Poetry was originally an oral form, not a written one, and intended to be sung or chanted. For people who don’t read, poetry is a lot more interesting to listen to than prose – it has rhythm, it often rhymes, it uses repetition. If it’s accompanied by music it has an added emotional resonance. The limitation of oral forms of communication, however, is that they require physical presence. The singer or reciter has to travel to his or her audience, or bring them in. The printing press made a big change in this, allowing mass reproduction of the verbal content of poetry – although much m

Real Men

I really would like to write more often. Ideas pass through my brain and I think, “I should put that on my blog”, but I get busy and then I forget what I was going to say. However, part of it is my incompetence as a blogger, because I keep writing at such length. Most people’s blogs contain really short articles, just quick paragraphs. I guess having grown up in the age of the book, I’m used to going into detail so even the length I write at here seems over-compressed sometimes. One blog cum chat site I recently joined in my local church’s new mychurch.com site ( http://www.mychurch.org/churches/world/AU/Queensland/Brisbane/257600/St-Andrews-Anglican-Church ). It’s interesting because in the discussion you see a side of people that you don’t see on Sunday mornings. One of the guys started a men’s group off with a discussion about a book called “Why Men Hate Going to Church” by David Murrow. I haven’t read the book but I have visited his website www.churchformen.com . In a nutshe

The Worlds We Create

That’s enough of theology for a while. Not that I really know much about it but the joy of having a blog is you don’t have to be an expert. “Everything in this blog may be wrong”, to paraphrase Richard Bach. I’ve been thinking a lot about how writers create their worlds. I've just finished doing a red pen job on the draft of my cousin Allan Smith’s second book, Owleye’s Songs of the Night. He’s self-published the first in the series, Quid and Harmony, with all proceeds going to the Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia – you can find out more about it at http://www.smithysbook.com/ . It’s worth a read and if you don’t like the book, at least you're supporting a great cause. These are fantasy works but knowing Allan as I do, I can see various bits of the world that are drawn from his world – places and customs that are similar to his own, and ideas that fit Allan’s world view. All fiction writers create artificial worlds. For many, the resemblance between their world and the

Beyond the Law

This weekend I did one of my occasional preaching gigs at my church. The topic was “what is a good Christian?” and the passages Matthew 11:25-30 and Romans 8:1-17. It’s kind of an introduction to a huge subject which is at the heart of Christian teaching. The background to the passages is a religious environment in 1st century Judaism dominated by the Pharisees. In human terms, the Pharisees were not bad people – in fact, they could be seen as very good. They had a strict interpretation of the Jewish faith, believing it was essential to obey not only the entire laws of Moses, but various extrapolations, interpretations and additions to the law and prophets by Jewish rabbis. The result was 100s of different laws, dealing with issues from how to punish murderers to how men should cut their hair. Being faithful to God involved obeying all of these laws. There’s nothing unique about the Pharisees. There are plenty of Christian Pharisees around, whole churches of them in fact. A