Painting Fakes

I've been working on a theory about why elite sportsmen seem to get in trouble so regularly. We've been hearing a bit about this recently.  Australian cricketer  David Warner has two strikes to his name - tweeting angrily at journalists, and punching an opposing player in a pub.  Souths and Queensland Rugby League player Ben Te'o  found himself drunk and in the company of two former team-mates and woman none of them knew.  What happened next is a matter of dispute - did he punch her, or did she injure herself in a drunken meltdown? - but either way the whole situation is completely dumb.   Another Rugby League player, Blake Ferguson , has been charged with sexual assault of a woman in a bar on a Sunday evening while in the company of another former team-mate.  All this in the last month.  A fairly typical month, really. Of course you could blame alcohol, which is involved in all three incidents.  It's a convenient scapegoat,...

When I write about music, I almost always find myself writing about middle aged men.  My songwriting pantheon includes the holy trinity of Bruce Cockburn, Richard Thompson and Tom Waits, as well as minor deities like Shane Howard, Paul Kelly...I could go on but you get the picture. Now I'm an equal opportunity sort of guy and recently I started to worry that all my musical heroes are men.  Is this a hidden corner of chauvinism in my otherwise PC world?  Of course I could argue that music is very personal and that I found people I could relate to.  I could argue that my choices are purely emotional and nothing to do with gender or power.  But when you claim not to be prejudiced yet consistently favour one group over another, the chances are you are kidding yourself. Of course I could initiate an affirmative action program, and start to review music by women I don't like that much.  On the other hand, I could just tell you about the marvellous Martha Tils...

Anyway, enough of this angry politics. I promised you a little while ago that I would write some posts about the Apocrypha , so here is the first. The book of Tobit is the first book in the Christian Apocrypha, and it tells you immediately why most Christian and Jewish authorites give these books less authority than the other parts of Scripture.  Probably written in the second century BCE, it is a kind of literary mash-up - a narrative spiced with extracts from wisdom literature and a couple of lovely pieces of poetry. It's framing story is, I think, best understood as a piece of historical fantasy.  Some scholars think it may combine two stories that were originally unconnected.  We have an angel disguised as a human, a besetting devil, the symbolic use of the number seven, a magic fish and a curious and unexplained dog. Tobit is a faithful Israelite of the tribe of Naphtali, taken captive to Nineveh when the Assyrians invaded the Northern Kingdom in the se...

Sorry everybody, I'm going to break the rule again and talk about something related to my work.  It's because I'm feeling frustrated.  To put it mildly. In Queensland we have a service called the Tenants' Advice and Advocacy Service (TAAS).  It's a network of little services that provide advice to, and advocate on behalf of, tenants who are in dispute with their landlords.  The service is funded from the interest on tenants bonds held in trust by the Residential Tenancies Authority. In the midst of their cost-cutting frenzy last year, the then Housing Minister Bruce Flegg announced that the program would be discontinued and the funds reallocated to build new public housing.  Flegg and his successor Tim Mander have been unmoved by the outcry that has followed this decision.  Not so the Commonwealth Government, who stepped in with interim funding to keep the services open until the end of June this year.  They even offered another $2.5m to tak...

On the weekend, prominent Aboriginal AFL player Adam Goodes was racially vilified by a 13 year old Collingwood supporter who referred to him as an "ape".  He took immediate action, asking security to remove her from the ground, which they did.  Collingwood president Eddie McGuire, one of Australia's most prominent media figures, was quick to visit Goodes in the dressing room and apologise on behalf of the club. Later on the young girl was very contrite, ringing Goodes to aplogise.  He was forgiving.  Thirteen-year-olds do stupid things.  She needed to be told firmly, then left alone to do better next time.  Hopefully she will. Forty-eight-year-olds do stupid things too, but they are entitled to be cut a lot less slack, especially when they are as prominent and media-savvy as Eddie McGuire.  Because only a few days later, with the vilification incident still echoing around the media, McGuire suggested on morning radio that Goodes could be used in a ...

After finally catching up with Twilight , I thought I'd go the whole hog and read Bram Stoker's Dracula .  Stoker didn't exactly invent the vampire genre.  Vampires are figures of folklore and mythology, and other vampire novels preceded his, but he set the template for what was to follow.  Abraham Stoker was an Irish protestant, a member of Dublin's governing class with a promising career in in the Irish public service.  His first book sounds particularly exciting -  The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland , published in 1879.  However, by the time it was published he had already run away to join the theatre.  To be precise, he accepted the role of business manager at actor Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre in London, where for the next thirty years he acted as the calm, organised foil to Irving's charisma and persuasive powers.  His own creativity also blossomed and when he was not pandering to Irving's ...

I'm preaching on June 2 - next Sunday.  Here's what I think I'll say. The main passage is from Luke 8:1-21, which includes the Parable of the Sower plus a couple of stories which reinforce its central message.  Supporting passages come from Isaiah 6:1-13 and 1Peter 1:17-25. The Parable of the Sower is one of those stories of Jesus that we learnt about in Sunday School, and it's unique in being the only one of Jesus' parables which comes with its own explanation attached.  This can mean we think we understand it.  However, I wonder if we really do get it's full message, or if our familiarity blinds us.  The story starts off with the parable itself. 4 When a great crowd gathered and people from town after town came to him, he said in a parable: 5 ‘A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell on the path and was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up. 6 Some fell on the rock; and as it grew up, it withered for lack of moisture....

You would have thought there was not much in common between Tom Waits and The Eagles.  Waits is a jazz singer who grew into an  avant garde cult musician, makes a comfortable living and has artistic credibility to burn.  The Eagles are a country rock band who grew into a stadium rock behemoth with money to burn and comedians lining up around the block to lampoon them.  The Eagles are all lush harmonies, smooth backing and pedal steel guitar.  Waits has a gruff, raspy voice, halting piano and, as time passes, an increasing assortment of antique instruments and junkyard percussion.  I'm not sure what the various members of the Eagles think of Waits.  In 1977 Waits said he thought listening to the Eagles was like watching paint dry.  He later apologised and explained he "was just corking off and being a prick". However, things are not always what they seem.  Despite all these differences, the two actually have an amazing amoun...

I've been on holiday in Tasmania for the past week.  While I was there I visited the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and it got me thinking about George Robinson and the fate of the original Tasmanians. We were taught in school that the Tasmanian Aborigines had been wiped out.  The last of them, Truganini (at least that is one variant of her name) died in Hobart in 1876.  Of course this version of history is not quite true.  There are still descendents of the first Tasmanians living now.  I'll get back to them later.  In the meantime, George Augustus Robinson. Robinson was a bricklayer and Methodist lay preacher who moved to Tasmania as a free settler in 1824.  In the 1830s he abandoned his bricklaying business and went on a mission to the remaining Aboriginal people in the eastern part of Tasmania.  His mission was prompted by the state of all-out war that had broken out between the European settlers and the original inhabitants....

Sometime ago I had an odd dream, which stuck in my head the way very few dreams do.  I can't remember anything about the context, but I was looking for something in my Bible and noticed a whole lot of books at the end of the Old Testament that I hadn't previously seen.  They had odd names that seemed vaguely ancient and Jewish, none of which I can now remember.  I was a little surprised but mostly just fascinated, eager to read this new stuff and find out what it was all about. Recently I've been repeating this experience in real life, and thereby hangs a tale. In the bibles we have as Protestants, the last book of the Old Testament is the prophetic book of Malachi, and the last historical period addressed is the immediate post-Exilic time covered in the books of Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther.  There is then a break of over 400 years until the New Testament begins with the birth of Jesus. What was God doing in the intervening 400 years?  Well, it seems he...