Painting Fakes

I was sad to read Clive Hamilton giving short shift to the role of traditional religions (including Christianity) in dealing with the Anthropocene.  After all, I mix with quite a few Christians who are passionate and active on environmental issues. Still, I have to sadly admit that Clive has a point.  Christian climate activists are decidedly in the minority.  Aid agencies like TEAR  and lobby groups like Common Grace  and ARRCC have picked up the issue, but many Christians are disengaged and it is not something that has been talked about regularly in any of the churches I have been part of.  When it does come up there will be the predictable skeptics and deniers, but many Christians will respond that while it's true and important, it's much more important for Christians to 'preach the gospel', by which they generally mean 'make converts'. I find this frustrating but also familiar.  It is exactly the same response I have heard over many years to suggestion

A few years ago I read Affluenza: When Too Much is Never Enough  by Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss.  The authors examine the ubiquity of over-consumption in Western societies, what drives it, why we keep doing it even though it doesn't make us happy, and some ideas for countering it. I remember agreeing with it, but largely from the standpoint that I had heard it before.  Back in 1975, the English theologian and later bishop John V Taylor wrote a little book called Enough is Enough  which urged Christians to resist the temptation to over-consume.  I still remember his advice to families watching TV - when the ads come on, cover your ears and shout 'Who are you kidding?'. I haven't really been paying attention to Hamilton since then, but recently I saw a reference to his book Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene  in an article I was reading and decided to check it out.  I'm both glad and sad that I did.  Glad because it is a brilliant book,

Australia has many myths about its history, and particularly about our history of invasion and dispossession of Aboriginal people.  Among them are the myth that Australia was terra nullius , an empty land, prior to the arrival of the British; the idea that Aboriginal people were hunter-gatherers who roamed randomly around the country; and the idea that the Europeans named the various parts of the country , as if they did not already have names. Each of these myths has been comprehensively busted, but many Australians remain unaware of this fact.  Other myths also remain alive. Rosalind Kidd is a Queensland historian whose main work has been on the administration of Aboriginal affairs in Queensland.  At the start of the 1990s she was given access, through the intervention of Aboriginal academic and activist Marcia Langton, to the files of Queensland's Aboriginal Affairs Department going back to the foundation of the colony.  Aside from her doctoral thesis, the major results of

So I fell off my bike.  No-one helped me do it, I was not a victim of anti-cyclist road rage or a careless driver using their mobile phone.  I was just riding down Mt Gravatt one morning six weeks ago after a little bit of rain and the wheels slipped out from under me. I landed on my right shoulder.  Quite hard.  I broke my collarbone, bruised a rib and did something or other to my hip which meant I couldn't walk.  Six weeks on my hip is getting better although I'm still limping a bit, my rib is still slightly sore and I have a metal plate holding my collarbone together so it is gradually healing. Still, it's not all bad.  At least I get an opportunity to learn stuff.  Here's some things I've learned. 1. Don't Fall Off Actually I already knew this.  It's just that now I know it more.  Don't ride too fast for the conditions.  Concentrate around the bends.  Brake appropriately.  Etc etc.  Hindsight is a wonderful thing. 2. Wear a Helmet My list o

I don't watch breakfast TV.  I have better things to do with my day.  On the odd occasions I've seen these shows, usually sitting in a waiting room somewhere, they strike me as cheap filler for the time of day when no-one is really watching.  People sitting in a studio talking about stuff, much of it inane; paid product promotion; news updates; stunts.  On the odd occasion a host says something controversial it is tempting to see it as a publicity stunt, a way of creating the illusion that the show has some substance. So I was tempted to leave Kerri-Anne Kennerley's spat with Yumi Stynes alone.  I know little about Kennerley, and had never heard of Stynes before their argument hit the headlines. I was also tempted to leave the issue to the various articulate Aboriginal people who have objected to the comments.  However, I remember that years ago when Pauline Hanson first achieved fame on the back of racist comments, a senior Aboriginal person said to a group of us t

So, today is the 231st anniversary of the first British convict fleet landing in Sydney Cove.  This was the beginning of the British invasion of Australia, but far from the end of it.  In my home town, home of the Turrbal and Jagera peoples, and the surrounding country of peoples including the Quandamooka, Kabi Kabi and Mununjali, the invasion did not start in earnest until 1823.  In November of that year the surveyor Lieutenant John Oxley sailed through Quandamooka waters and slowly rowed up the Maiwar River, surveying as he went.  Unaware that the river already had a name, he renamed it the Brisbane River after his boss Sir Thomas Brisbane, Governor of NSW.  In consequence the surrounding land, originally called Meanjin, also came to be called Brisbane. Among more peaceful encounters with the land's owners was an ugly confrontation which resulted in a young Aboriginal man being shot and possibly killed.   A year later a small party of convicts and soldiers arrived to found a co

In Lady Windemere's Fan  Oscar Wilde has one of his characters define a cynic as someone who 'knows the price of everything and the value of nothing'.  This much quoted aphorism provides the title of Mariana Mazzucato's recent book, The Value of Everything: Making and taking in the global economy. Mazzucato is an academic economist, born in Italy, educated in the USA and currently working at University College, London.  Her central concern is, how does value get created in modern economies?  In an earlier book, The Entrepreneurial State,  she examines the often overlooked role of government in creating valuable and even game-changing innovations.  This book repeats some of that, but focuses mainly on the position of the financial industry.  Does this industry create value, or simply extract it? The problem, she says, is that economists, and hence the rest of us, are confused about what value actually is.  The classical economists - Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Ma