Painting Fakes

In the third chapter of Genesis we read that one of the consequences of eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is that Adam and Eve will have a life of hard toil. By the sweat of your brow     you will eat your food until you return to the ground,     since from it you were taken; for dust you are     and to dust you will return. After announcing this consequence, Yahweh banishes them from the Garden of Eden. And the Lord God said, ‘The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live for ever.’  So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.  After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life. In my youth I was taught, or perhaps just allowed to believe, that being barred from the Garden

Here's a different kind of stretch of the imagination .  One of the perennial political debates around the world is the question of budget deficits.  In every election we see politicians vying to present themselves as the more financially responsible alternative, meaning that they will balance the budget, that government spending will match government income and extra borrowing will not be required. Although this appears to be a partisan debate, it is based on assumptions which all mainstream politicians share - that government money is limited and that they can't perpetually spend beyond their means, that the money governments borrow needs to be paid back with interest in the future.  The partisan debate then focuses on how to do that.  Progressive politicians will favour increased taxes on the rich to pay for more generous social programs, conservative politicians will favour budget cuts and if possible tax cuts.  In budget terms they have the same aim - to balance the budget

So, back in late December Ellyse Perry was named the International Cricket Council's Female Cricketer of the Decade  as well as sweeping up the T20 and ODI player awards.  She is that rare cricketer who can change a game with either bat or ball, or both.  Not only that but she is also an international soccer player, having debuted for Australia in both soccer and cricket in 2007 at the age of just 16.  She continued to star in both sports until 2014, when the increasing professionalism of both meant she had to choose. Not only is she a super-gifted sportswoman, she is also a published author.  In 2016 she added her name to the growing sub-genre of children's books featuring the fictionalised exploits of sporting heroes.  Then in 2019 she published a more serious book of reflections on life as an elite sportsperson, Perspective.   It's fair to say her literary skills are not quite at the same level as her sporting ones.  I'm pretty sure most of the writing in her childre

Here's my latest letter to our dear Prime Minister.  I've broadened the ask to take in three things that are uppermost in my heart at the moment.  After all, you're allowed to ask for more than one thing for Christmas aren't you? *** Dear Prime Minister I trust you have an excellent Christmas and New Year, and return to work ready to face the considerable demands that 2021 will bring. I have many wishes for 2021, some of which have nothing to do with you.   However, one of my wishes is for better government in 2021, from you and your colleagues.   This wish could be summed up in one main theme – end the divisive, partisan slanging match that politics has become, and get on with making the difficult decisions that we all need. The silver lining in the cloud of 2020’s pandemic is that for a short time, our governments (State/Territory and Commonwealth) worked together irrespective of political colour via the National Cabinet.   However, it didn’t take long to return

For Christians, the story of Christmas reveals something quite remarkable about God, which we often forget. A subtle piece of mistranslation has led us to have a peculiarly Western take on the birth of Jesus.  In Luke 2:7 we are used to reading something like this: And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. The result is that our Christmas cards show the holy family in the cow-shed among the animals since there were no vacant hotel rooms.  But the word translated 'inn' actually just means 'place to stay' and could just as easily apply to a spare bedroom - a much more likely destination in the context of Middle Eastern hospitality.  So it's a fair bet that the story played out more like this... Mary and Joseph were forced to travel to Bethlehem for the Roman census, even though Mary was due to give birth.  They arrived, tired from their journey, in the main str

There are several ways to cover a classic song.  You can do the tribute, where you try to sing the song as close to its original as possible.  You can do a complete makeover, where you turn a song in one genre into one in a completely different genre. Or you can do this... 'From Little Things Big Things Grow' is a classic Aussie song celebrating one of the pivotal events of Aboriginal Australians' struggle for land rights, the Wave Hill walk-off.  In 1966 the Gurindji, led by senior elder and law-man Vincent Lingiari, walked off Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory in protest at their poor working and living conditions on their own country.  They stayed on strike until 1975 when the Whitlam Government finally granted them title over the land - or perhaps it would be better to say, recognised their ongoing ownership.   Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly wrote the song in 1991 and released separate versions of it over the next year or two.  Since then they've often perform

Here's another little thing about imagination which neatly brings together the idea of animals having their own reasons , and the fact that Australia's First Nations have some different ways of seeing the world. The story of the orcas and whalers of Eden is one of those iconic Australian stories, popularised in Tom Mead's book Killers of Eden in 1961 and since the subject of various books and documentaries as well as a quite impressive little museum.   Eden sits on Twofold Bay in southern NSW, on the country of the Yuin people.  The story involves three generations of the Davidson family, who ran a shore based whaling operation out of Eden from the 1840s to the 1920s.  In the 1840s a number of different crews tried whaling from Eden, but only the Davidsons' survived.  They were successful because they, and they alone, had the assistance of a pod of orcas who acted like sheepdogs, driving the whales towards their boats and harassing them until the whalers could secure