Painting Fakes

So, I'm having a change of scene for a little while.  Can you believe it, someone is paying me to travel to the other side of Australia and talk to people (or rather listen to them) about social issues for three weeks.  So here I am in the beautiful Dampier Peninsula in the far north of Western Australia, where I've never been before. Of course I'll have to work but since I've signed a confidentiality agreement I can't talk to you about that.  Instead, I just thought I'd mention that Australia is an EXTREMELY BIG PLACE.  In something like eight hours in the air we flew across over 5,000 km of territory.  As I looked out of the window I saw huge swathes of bushland, mountains, desert, coastline, and very occasionally a little sign of human habitation - a long straight road, a town, a distant light. Of course we so rarely see Australia this way because we are, naturally, always at the places where humans live.  For a city-dweller like me, I am nearly always at

Some of my family have been having a heated Facebook argument (as you do) sparked by recent troubles in the support base for Catherine Hamlin's Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia.  Sadly, there appears to be a dispute about the religious affiliations of supporters which is interfering with funding for this important work.  This charity is dear to the hearts of a number of family members and they are shocked.  I don't really understand the dispute and the ABC report of it is not all that enlightening. Still, my favourite and much-loved atheist relative's instant emotional reaction was to blame the Christian faith for the problem.  Religion poisons everything, as Christopher Hitchens would have said.  Of course Hamlin herself is also a Christian, but what are such details before the power of confirmation bias ? Anyway I know I shouldn't let my caustic wit get the better of me, but here goes.  Our current crop of New Atheists like to view religion as a product of evolution

I have long been perturbed about the large number of Christians who uncritically support the state of Israel. This concern was strengthened recently when a copy of the latest edition of Israel and Christians Today found its way into my house. This news magazine is published every two months by an organisation called Christians for Israel . The edition sitting in front of me now is titled Israel and Christians Today Australia and is distributed by the Australian branch of the organisation, but it contains no Australian content and is identical to the international edition of the magazine produced by the head office in the Netherlands. Christians for Israel was founded in the Netherlands in 1979 and now operates in 15 different countries in Europe, North America, Australasia and Africa. As far as I can work out it is an independent organisation, funded by donations from supporters. Its aims include educating Christians about current issues in Israel and their view of the plac

In my reading of various works of apologetics I noticed that quite a few Christian writers refer in approving tones to GK Chesterton's Orthodoxy, so I thought I'd have a read. Chesterton was one of those archetypal English "men of letters", a high-class journalist who churned out books on a massive range of subjects.  He was a jack of all trades and master of none, an eccentric individual famous as much for who he was as for what he wrote.  Most of his works are rarely read these days, but the Father Brown   mysteries are still popular, as is this little book.  It was published in 1908 when Chesterton was 35, and explains his reasons for converting from agnosticism to orthodox Roman Catholic Christianity. I find it interesting not only that this book is still read, but that it is beloved of more or less orthodox Protestants like CS Lewis and Philip Yancey, who wrote the foreword to this edition.  It's interesting because Chesterton is quite uncompromisingly

I've just been reading a marvellous book by Tom Fort, fishing correspondent for the British Financial Times (the Financial Times has a fishing correspondent? I hear you ask) called The Book of Eels.   I've always been aware of eels.  One of my early Australian memories is going with my family and some neighbours for a swim and picnic on the Logan River.  Us kids (I must have been about eight) were terrified to discover there was a large eel in the swimming hole, so our neighbour stuck a bit of sausage on the end of his fishing line and five minutes later the eel was writhing furiously in a bucket.  Later attempts at eel capture were less successful.  My mates and I used to play down at Stable Swamp Creek behind the Sunnybank train station.  Once during the wet season when the creek was bulging with recent rains we saw a huge eel.  We were convinced it was four feet long.  They can actually grow this big, but it's also possible it grew in the telling.  We went back late

So, the weirdest of elections just got nasty.  Not only did the Queensland Labor Party lose the house (which was expected) they lost the furniture (which was always possible) and their clothes as well.  In an 89 seat house they look like they'll have a maximum of 9 members.  One of these, former Premier Anna Bligh, has already announced her resignation from Parliament.  Far from losing in Ashgrove and leaving the rabble to govern themselves, President-elect Newman won easily with nearly twice the swing he needed and now gets to lead the biggest rabble in the history of the Queensland Parliament.  Labor's deperate last minute plea to voters to provide a decent opposition and their reported tactic of pretending to be Greens and handing out how-to-vote cards with themselves as second preference were to no avail.  Of course we've known for a long time that the Labor Government was on its last legs, but this is unprecedented.  I'd like to be able to say something witty a

The end is nigh for one of the weirdest election campaigns I have ever witnessed.  My poor sitting local member Simon Finn, who Anthony Green's Election Tracker says will narrowly lose his previously safe seat according to the March 16 Galaxy poll, must be exhausted after weeks of listening, acting and getting results.  To all appearances he has had to do it on his own, with the Labor Party presence on his flyers getting so small that it has disappeared from some of them altogether - like this one where his mock ballot paper does not show his party affiliation even though the real one will.  Still, someone must be footing the bill for all these flyers. Meanwhile in another first in my 32 years as a Queensland elector, I can now tell you the result ahead of time because in a break with normal protocol, the Labor Party has officially conceded before election day.  The concession has come in the form of flyer addressed to my wife, which appears below.  They know they'