Painting Fakes

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the dirty little secret of the Stolen Generation and the valiant efforts of the late Archie Roach to bring it to our attention.  Since then I've been reading about the even darker and dirtier secret that came before that - the fact that the British colonisation of Australia, and in particular my home state of Queensland, was accomplished through the use of deadly force against its original custodians.   This is not a pleasant or a pretty tale and there is really no fair way to soften it.  In his book Conspiracy of Silence: Queensland's Frontier Killing Times , published in 2013, historian Timothy Bottoms quotes an estimate that at the time of the first British encroachment into what became Queensland - the establishment of the convict settlement in Brisbane in 1826 - there were somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 people living here.  By the end of the century there were only about 20,000 First Nations people left.  He engages in some techn

I feel slightly sad at the death of Queen Elizabeth. Not deeply sad. I didn't know her. I never had much time for the monarchy. The signs of her impending death had been there for a couple of years in her increasingly brief appearances at royal events and, in the past year, her frequent absences and cancellations. She was 96, the time had come. The closest encounter I ever had with her was in  1977 when she came to Australia. Among other engagements she opened the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Stadium at Nathan where the 1982 Commonwealth Games were to be held. School students were bused in from all over Brisbane for the occasion.  The ground had been levelled and the athletics track laid but as yet there were no stands. We sat on the grass while she made an extremely boring speech in her strange, plummy voice, then she and Prince Philip paraded around the track in their open-top limo treating us all to the royal wave. I felt a good deal sadder back at the end of July at the death of

I've written before about the crazy world of drug policy and the arms race between dealers and police that marks our futile efforts to outlaw various substances.  We are caught in an endless loop of first order change , doing more of the same and hoping for a different result.  The victims, it has always seemed to me, are the poor people at the bottom of the heap - people with addictions, trauma and other issues in their lives who end up jailed or homeless as casualties of a pointless war.  So I was excited to learn about the existence of Johann Hari's Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction. A friend told me about Hari's most recent book, Stolen Focus , which looks at the prevalence of digital technologies and the way they are robbing us of our ability to concentrate and be present in the moment.  I really enjoyed it, if that is the right word for a great book about a terrible thing, but it was this earlier book that really made me take notice.  Publi

In my musings about late 60s activism in the USA and here in Australia, I noticed a contrast between the hippie movement's emphasis on spirituality and deep renewal, and the Australian political activists' focus on causes and actions.  So just like that (Shazam!) I've come across something that beautifully bridges the divide.   Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in without Going Crazy  is a book by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, published in 2012.  It is based on a group process pioneered by Macy and others in the 1970s known as the Work That Reconnects , which has since spread around the world and is still active and widely used.  I believe Macy, now in her 90s, is still active in this work.  Her bio describes her as 'a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology'. Johnstone is a British doctor and psychologist who first met Macy at a Work That Reconnects workshop in 1989 and is now the main facilitator of this process in the UK.   The

As the Labor Party gets ready to introduce its climate change legislation into Parliament next week, the myth of the 'Greens 2009 sabotage of good climate policy' is doing great service in making Labor look like persecuted saints. We're even seeing the line repeated uncritically on supposedly neutral news shows like the ABC's 7.30. It's a myth or, if you prefer, it's a lie. Don't fall for it. The 2009 CPRS was a fatally compromised piece of pro-fossil-fuel greenwash, and the 2011-12 alternative was a big improvement. What the Greens should learn from their interactions with the Rudd/Gillard government is that blocking legislation can be a good move. They prevented a bad policy and negotiated a much better one. It achieved real emissions reductions, and CEFC and ARENA were cleverly set up so that they are still doing their work despite 9 years of Coalition sabotage. They should also learn that Labor can be mightily incompetent at promoting good legislatio

  A River with a City Problem  is such a fantastic name for a history book. Margaret Cook's history of flooding on the Brisbane River and its tributaries is in high demand at the Council library service thanks to our fresh flooding this year.   I wish I'd read this book in 1994 when we bought our house in Fairfield, but of course it was only published in 2019, prompted by the catastrophic 2011 floods .  When we inspected the house and decided to buy it we knew that in 1974 the property had been covered in over two metres of water, flooding the upstairs of the house.  We were also told that the completion of Wivenhoe Dam in the 1980s meant an equivalent flood event would be about two metres lower, meaning we would only have an inch or tow of water under the house.  This seemed like a small enough risk. What we didn't understand at the time, but learned in 2011, is that this story had two big 'ifs'.  If the rain fell above Wivenhoe Dam, and if the amount of rain did

Back in early 2020, as we were all locking down for the first time and trying to work out what the hell this 'coronavirus' thing was, someone left a pile of books in the front of their house with a note saying 'please take'.  I picked up a book called In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea  by Danny Goldberg.  (The title is borrowed, seemingly without acknowledgement, from a 1968 album by The Moody Blues). Goldberg is a 50-year veteran of the US music industry, managing and publicising musical acts including Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, Bonnie Raitt, Steve Earle and The Hives.  Although he wasn't strictly 'there' in 1967 - that was the year he finished school, and he entered the music business in 1968 - he was very close, and worked and socialised closely with many of its movers and shakers.   Then again, having 'been there' is a somewhat nebulous idea.  It's not just that, as many people are credited with saying, 'if you remember th