Painting Fakes

Jimmy Barnes won't need any introduction to my Australian readers.  He's been in our ears since the early 1980s, first as lead singer of Cold Chisel and later as a solo rocker.  He has played big stadiums, he performed to an audience of billions at the Sydney 2000 Olympic closing ceremony, and his voice is never far from our radios. He's not everyone's cup of tea.  Often he's not mine.  He tends to scream rather than sing.  Yet I also have a sneaking admiration for him, like a kind of dirty musical secret hidden amidst my supposedly more cerebral tastes.  When he has great songs to sing, for instance those written by Don Walker for Cold Chisel, or singing Andy Durant's ' Last of the Riverboats ', he can pull back the intensity and deliver as well as any singer in the country. Lately his musical output has dropped off, and instead he has written and published two volumes of his memoirs - Working Class Boy,  which tells the story of his childhood, and

Thanks to my friend Tricia, I've been reading a great book by Parker J Palmer called Healing the Heart of Democracy: The courage to create a politics worthy of the human spirit.   Although this is a book about the US, it has a lot to say to Australians and others in democratic societies.  He writes simply and elegantly so that you think what he is saying must be obvious, but he covers territory that is not often discussed in 'political' books and debates. Palmer is an American Quaker activist, now in his late 70s.  This book, published in 2011, arose out of what he describes as a 'season of heartbreak - personal and political heartbreak - that soon descended into a dark night of the soul'.  This arose partly out of his awareness of his personal mortality on turning 65, and partly from feeling increasingly out of step with wider American culture. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had deepened America's appreciation of democracy and  activated d

It is now thirty years since Robert Hughes published his brilliant history of Australia's convict period, The Fatal Shore .  The fact that it is still in print shows just how compelling it is. Years ago I bought a battered copy at a Lifeline book sale.  I put it on my shelf, and there it stayed until a couple of months ago when I took it with me on a holiday to Tasmania. Hughes tells the story of the Australian convict system from the first planning to the end of transportation nearly a century later.  He alternates between official records and the individual experiences recorded in letters, memoirs and case notes.  The result is a vivid portrayal of colonial life.  If you haven't read it, please do!  Let me just give you a little taste of its riches. Although Hughes doesn't ignore the tragedy of Aboriginal Australia during these years, this is very much a British story.  Britain in the late 18th and early 19th century was a troubled society.  The Industrial Revolut

In the wake of the marriage survey and parliamentary vote with its 'freedom of religion' shenanigans, it has become a bit of a thing for Christians to talk about how out of step our society is with the Christian faith.  Conservative Christians are now battening down the hatches in readiness for attacks on their religious freedom, which may possibly take the form of being forced to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. Of course the Christian faith itself is a diverse thing.  I can hardly speak for the Christian faith as a whole.  All I can do is tell you what I think it means.  Still, there are plenty of Christians who, like me, think opposition to same sex marriage was a mistake.  Even some who were uncomfortable with same sex marriage were not fans of the Coalition for Marriage's homophobic TV campaign. Still, I think there is something in the idea that both our society, and much of the church, is out of step with a Christian view of what society ought to be - the Kingd

People smugglers are the comic book villains of Australian asylum seeker policy.  When he was Prime Minister in 2009, Kevin Rudd described them this way in the wake of a tragic event on an asylum seeker boat. People smugglers are engaged in the world's most evil trade and they should all rot in jail because they represent the absolute scum of the earth.  People smugglers are the vilest form of human life. They trade on the tragedy of others and that's why they should rot in jail and in my own view, rot in hell. Yet people smuggling has not always had such bad press.  As young Christians we were encouraged to read the inspiring story of Corrie Ten Boom, the Dutch woman who was imprisoned by the Nazis for smuggling Jews out of the country.  Later we all heard about Oskar Schindler, the wealthy German industrialist who used his right to Jewish slave labour as a cover for an operation which smuggled some 50,000 Jews out of Poland. In even more recent history Betty Mahmoody

A few years ago my daughter and I developed an addiction to the American crime drama Bones.  The story centres around a group of forensic scientists, the most brilliant of whom is forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.  This team of impossibly good looking and brilliant people work in a shiny laboratory at the Smithsonian Institution and solve grisly murders rapidly on the basis of the tiniest scraps of evidence.  In one episode they solve a murder in which the only evidence is a single finger-bone of the victim. If we switched the TV on a bit early, we would get to see the end of the previous show, which for a long time was one of those police docu-dramas where the cameras follow a group of real police officers as they go about their daily business.  The contrast could not have been more stark.  Real police work turns out to be amazingly pedestrian.  The officers pull someone over for a faulty tail-light and find drugs in the glove-box.  A serious offender is caught because som

So, over the next couple of months we are going to be talking a lot about same sex marriage thanks to the governments decision to hold a 'national survey' on this question in place of the promised plebiscite.  Debate is hotting up already.  The level of vitriol from some conservative Christians has risen appreciably, and it is not only directed at proponents of same sex marriage.  I have seen savage things said to and about quite conservative Christians who have gently suggested that their fellow Christians could consider voting yes , or even just abstaining  without compromising their own view of marriage.  The fear and anger in the air is palpable. I don't want to rehash those arguments.  You can follow the links or find them, and many like them, on the internet if you are masochistic enough to want to read them.  Personally I will be voting yes, but you need not let that influence your decision.  Follow your own conscience wherever it leads you. The thing is, I thi