Painting Fakes

There is one thing that keeps me awake at night - climate change.  I don't worry about it in the abstract, I worry very concretely that my two little grandsons will inherit a world that is hostile to human habitation. I spend a day with my grandsons every week, and they are cheerful, innocent little people.  They enjoy life in the moment, trusting that the adults in their lives are caring for their needs.  But I think, perhaps we are not.  What if we are taking away the possibility for them to have peaceful, prosperous lives and storing up hardship and danger for them? It keeps me awake at night.  Which is silly.  Not because the anxiety is irrational or unjustified - the science is quite clear, my worries are absolutely within the possible future consequences of our current behaviour.  It is silly because it achieves nothing.  My tossing in my bed does not save a single gram of emitted carbon, does not take a single micro-meter off the projected sea level rise.  I may as well

Another day, another US massacre by a problematic person with a licensed, high-powered firearm.  We have seen so many of them, and the aftermath is so tired and predictable, that they all become a blur. Right now, in the wake of the Florida school shooting, there is a lot of hope. The survivors are young, intelligent upper middle class adults, and they are prepared to use the sudden media attention to push for change.  No politician, even Donald Trump, dare trample on their grief by dismissing them out of hand.  Perhaps they will succeed in making change.  Perhaps they won't. As Australians we tend to feel a bit smug about this.  In 1996, after the Port Arthur massacre, the Howard government introduced tough new gun controls and there have been no mass shootings since.  Our crazy school attacks are carried out with knives, and no-one dies.  Then again, there were not many mass shootings in Australia before 1996 either, once Europeans stopped massacring our first peoples.  Cons

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