MONTMARTRE SOUS LA PLUIE.

We were on a tight schedule after arriving in Paris, we had this particular day pencilled in for some time. It was to be a day of pilgrimage to Montmartre. I had been to the mount once previously, thirty years ago.

Since I was fifteen I have been fascinated by the French Impressionist artists, their works and their movement, intoxicated might be a better word. For such a group of artists to break with tradition – influencing each other in developing an original approach to painting so original that it outraged and inspired officiandos, patrons and lay art watchers alike, and still does 120 years later – it captured my imagination. They were Degas, Renoir, Cezanne, Sisley, Lautrec, Monet, Manet, Utrillo, Van Gogh, Pissaro, Seurat, Gaugin, Cassatt, Valadon et al.

I was in France to launch my second book in French. Travelling with my wife, we were housed at the Australian Embassy apartments and had Melbourne author Rosalie Ham as a roommate, arranged by our cultural attaché in Paris.

On Montmartre Day it rained heavily all morning but we were not deterred. The day previous it rained also, Rosalie joined my wife and I visiting the Musée d'Orsay, the converted railway station on the River Seine, on the opposite bank to the Louvre. The Musée d'Orsay houses the largest collection of French Impressionist in the world, transferred from the Musée du Jeu Paume in 1986 where they were when I last saw them. The three of us headed off, found the underground Metro at Bir-Hakeim near the Eiffel Tower and surfaced at the foot of Montmartre at the Abbesses station. It was still raining, but lightly.

Without a detailed map of Paris we set off up hill on foot. Of course we found the long way round and the rain became torrential. We had one umbrella and I chivalrously left it to the women … my clothes were soon soaked. Suddenly my heart quickened as I realised we had stumbled upon one of Maurice Utrillo’s immortalised streets near the summit. My wife took the following picture – see Utrillo’s painting below.

We eventually completed our pedestrian tour of the area seizing a moment of respite from the wet inside the Sacred Coeur. A young novice nun was singing en solo soprano. Her extreme timbre resonated throughout the building with an arresting sweetness that I can hear still.

Electioneering

" .... and if you elect me as school captain I’ll … I’ll stop Asian enrolments, you know their parents throw their children in the ocean to drown, yes they do … true… and … and we will all be allowed to bash Abo’s anytime we want. "

Black Art of Dog Whistling.

Australia’s Prime Minister, John Howard, this week capped off a long career of anti-Aboriginal politics which has earned him my title of Public Racist Number One. His abuse of power runs true to form as he again targets black people after receiving a report into alleged sexual abuse of children in some Northern Territory Indigenous communities. On Monday he received the report, the following week our army is occupying Australia’s black communities, all funds are cut off, bank accounts frozen, administration offices occupied, computers and records are seized and every child is to be medically examined and questioned. Were other measures even considered?

The black community of Mutitjulu at Uluru is now run by John Howard.

I cannot imagine these happenings in any other Australian community under the guise of stamping out paedophilia.

After ten years of knowing neglect, this Prime Minister acts now. Now when his career is almost over. He’s past pension age with public ratings lagging far behind a much younger opponent. Whatever spin John Howard puts on his recent show of force against a totally demoralised minority, I cannot accept it. He has a history of playing racist politics and I believe he is at it again.

I feel despair for the families and communities that John Howard has invaded with calloused regard for the innocent, bloody utter despair.


New South Wales Parliament - Ms Sylvia Hale [15 December 2006 - 3.29 p.m.]:

‘During his first term as Opposition leader, John Howard saw potential electoral advantage in playing racial politics. His comments in July 1988 promising a reduction in Asian immigration if he became Prime Minister established his credentials as a politician willing to play the race card if he thought it would win him votes. He was widely condemned for those comments and forced to withdraw them, but the lesson he learned was not that this sort of politics is destructive and wrong. Rather, he learned that his appeal to racism had to be more subtle. He learned the black art of dog whistling.’







Mutitjulu women hit back at pedophilia claims.


http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/mutitjulu-women-hit-back-at-pedophilia-claims/2006/09/15/1157827160823.html

GREAT ARCHITECTURE

I was struck recently by a friend canvassing a small of group over dinner about what makes great architecture. Is it form, function, frugality, all these things or other things. Great buildings: what immediately came to my mind was Jørn Utzon’s Opera House. This should not be surprising, I live in the city that is the location for this master’s work.

As a designer myself in a past life, I was fortunate enough to be commissioned to do the Scenic Design and Art Direction on a Royal Command Performance for Queen Elizabeth which was staged in this venue. It was my workplace for several months, so I was able to absorb the function and form of the building, close up, worts and all.

It is easily the most visually unusual, pleasing and remarkable building I have ever seen. It captivates the viewer, drawing on non verbal aesthetics, stirring deeply felt emotions. The scale of the soft sweeping gothic shells as roofing juxtaposed against brutal geometric lines of the base walls, floors and windows is at times breathtaking beside the sparkling waters of Sydney Harbour.

For those of us who have had difficult clients, imagine dealing with the bureaucracy and machinations of changing governments, fuelled by the out-of-control egos of the politically appointed team of architects, each one harbouring competitive jealousies, plus the economic project managers who ultimately held sway over everyone and every thing to do with the project

.

Outraged that his concept was becoming a patchwork quilt, Mr Utzon resigned before construction was completed. His masterpiece had been modified by a committee that cut the quilt to cover their own various agendas

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Financed from the proceeds of a government lottery, cost overruns caused by unique construction materials and engineering methods became a moot point. A gambling nation foot the bill for Australia’s only internationally recognised man made masterpiece

.

I’ve been away.

For the past two weeks I travelled north to the petite village of Federal, situated in the hilly hinterlands of Byron Bay. We have five acres there – our slice of paradise, peaceful refuge from the ravages of contemporary society.

Presently we have a three bedroom cedar and glass home, rural rustic, which we plan to occupy permanently next month while we build a new place at the far end of the property 400 metres away, around a bend. Here I will write my next book while taking up a post one day a week, lecturing in the English department at the Southern Cross University, Lismore.

I have three competing storylines that I am compelled to write once ensconced at Federal, but one requires attention right now, it’s will unfurl remarkable social incidents and a great deal of intellectual stamina surrounding a landmark case in Australian law in 1816. Research has uncovered lengthy accounts of the young barristers and old governing farts involved and reads like a generational saga: full of romance, immense wealth created from modest beginnings, and of course large slices of the pomp and egocentric behaviour of the British ‘settlers’, arrogant in the extreme.

We were never meant to live this.

Not all people are on the money system, drive cars. live in crime-ridden over-crowded cities, own guns, are scared to go out at night, work 60-80 hours per week, have 2.2 children, have numerous credit cards, are slaves to bank mortgages against their domestic shelter. Humans simply have not evolved genetically, physically or psychologically far from being hunters and gathers – millions of people still are. It stands to reason that 60,000 years may not be long enough for positive evolution to have modified us to live without ill the way we do.

Not long ago I went to a pedestrian community where money has no value, where people hunt game, fish and harvest fruits and vegetables from wild bushes. I came back to my sprawling city of 5 Million people and I took a hard look at our deteriorating, unhealthy society and my own sycophantic lifestyle.

To me it became clear: we went from hunting and gathering to herding and cultivation, right into market based city-states and into economic rationalised nationhoods, job protection, globalisation and world banks before our physiology and psychology had time to prepare us for such changes

Increasing incidents of crime, terror, mental illness, cancers, ulcers, anxieties, drug and alcohol dependency, obesity, anorexia as well as pollution and global warming are what we now accept as normal crosses to bear in contemporary societies.

Do you believe humans have evolved sufficiently to absorb the rigours of our self-modified new world?
	Yes I do
	No I don't
pollcode.com free polls

MOBILE LIFE

My son, James, created the witty video below - I had to put it out there. It tells the story of a simple mobile phone. Bored with its existence ...

WHERE I WAS BORN

Redfern, where I was born, is said to house the largest concentration of Indigenous Australians in this country. I was about 10 years old when most of these pics were shot. Although my Koori family connection to the land is in and around Coonabarabran, I have an extremely strong affinity with Redfern.

UTOPIA

Le docteur Jack Nugent n’avait jamais aimé regarder les morts et il aimait encore moins les toucher. Il avait malgré tout acquis une profonde connaissance de ce qu’il advenait des restes humains après la mort. Dans la petite communauté d’Utopia, au cœur de l’Australie, il allait apprendre des techniques qu’il n’aurait tout simplement pas pu apprendre à New York : il s’y déroule très peu de meurtres rituels aborigènes.


Éditions Traversées

Pour acheter le livre / Anne Bihan: Antidote@lagoo.nc

KATE GRENVILLE

I first met Kate Grenville at the 2002 Brisbane Writers’ Festival. All out-of-town writers were staying at the same hotel and each morning we early risers gravitated toward a common breakfast table. It became a daily occasion that I much looked forward to, with breakfast always stretching over two hours. Regulars at our table were Romona Koval, Alex Miller, Gabrielle Lord, Gail Bell, Kate and myself – others came and went but we were the regulars.

Kate and I bumped into each other several times after that back in Sydney and it was at these meetings that she told me about the book she was writing and about some of the predicaments she had to deal with. The book was The Secret River and her predicaments involved the vanishings of large numbers of Aboriginal clans from the Hawkesbury/Nepean River region, west of Sydney.

I loved the book and told her so, when only 40 pages into it, it only got better from my viewpoint. And the book received ravings from international reviewers. Domestically there were several dissenters from the praise, notable among these was Jennifer Byrne on ABC Television’s First Tuesday Book Club programme who said she felt she was being preached to from Kate’s book pages.

Recently Kate agreed to an interview with me that I included as part of my doctoral thesis. There is one question and answer from the interview that I want share.

PM: Look, I read one particular critic … that I don’t agree with … who said that in The Secret River you sounded like an apologist for the invading people. What do you say to that point of view?

KG: I‘m … I’m disappointed that anybody could read The Secret River and feel that. The vast majority of responses have been the opposite. In fact many people have told me that they find the end of the book very confronting and quite a lot have been prepared to say that they didn’t finish the book - non Indigenous Australians - because they actually couldn’t face what they knew was about to come.

KG: For anyone to read this and think I am an apologist for settler Australians is misreading it. I think everybody has a right to read a book in their own way. It is certainly not what I intended. It was a balancing act in the book, that I had to do. I didn’t want to make the whites the villains or simplistic evil characters. That seemed to me to miss the whole point, and in a way let the people off the hook. So it was a balancing act, when you are balancing on a tight rope like that some people might perceive that you have fallen off on one side or the other.

As a writer of Aboriginal subject matter I knew exactly what Kate meant.







http://www.gleebooks.com.au/default.asp?p=displaybook_asp?bookId=179478&isbn=9781921145254&from=search

Thomas Keneally and Aging

I sat on a chair at the Sydney Writers’ Festival a few years back, not long after I had sat on its committee as vice-chair, and listened to what Thomas Keneally had to say. That day he was entertaining as usual, mindful he was there to promote his latest book. Then, without warning he veered sharply off-topic and began talking about ageing.

‘You know lately almost every time I’m in a crowded room I look around and surmise that I am probably the oldest person in that room, it’s not always the case but mostly it is,’ he said, nodding and blushing as he scanned his readership before him.

Acting on his cue, I looked around at his audience, others did too, many bore fixed smiles, lingering on his every word. He was right, at least to me they did appear younger than him. But they also appeared younger than me!

My God, what had happened to me. My God, I had grown old. But only last year I was a youthful person playing touch football at Newport. Or was it the year before …



I went off and checked into this aging thing. According to the 2003 Australian Bureau of Statistics census, males who were fifty years of age had 9,667,600 younger than them and only 1,948,600 older. It was official, I was older than 80% of the population.



You can protest all you want, with a little luck it will happen to you.



















Tom's latest book - The Widow and her hero

http://www.gleebooks.com.au/default.asp?p=displaybook_asp&bookId=222192&from=search

Indigenous Art

Earth’s Creation
by Emily Kame Kngwarreye

Last Wednesday night an Australian Aboriginal female's painting fetched over $1,000,000 at auction for the first time. This enormous artwork by the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Earth’s Creation, is a masterful work but the price tag again brings into question what can be done for present day artists living in poverty while their art is sold and resold for very high figures. All people involved in marketing Aboriginal art are making good profits from the selling and reselling of these works except for the original creator.

To remedy this I propose that Aboriginal art simply be sold strictly under license. If the work changes ownership by way of gift to a person or public museum, gallery or foundation the value of the work is to be estimated and a residual paid by the institution every year to the artist or the artist’s heirs.

Licensing royalties is not a new thing it has applied to many creative endeavours for over 100 years. Literature, music, film, television, inventions, computer software &etc, all have economic systems in place that return money to their original creators.

A Contemporary Starting Point.

From a certain date every sale and resale of an original Indigenous Australian artwork, and/or a reproduction of the work, is made on condition that 10% of the gross figure paid for the art, or reproduction, will go directly to the artist; if the artist is deceased, to the artist’s heirs for 75 years.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye, who didn’t take up painting seriously until she reached her eighties, lived in a community known as Utopia in central Australia. She fostered an art movement there and many artists, mostly women, are now making their own reputations internationally thanks to her. I visited Utopia when researching my latest book interestingly enough titled Utopia. I saw first hand the artists at work and heard stories of deals being done by unscrupulous ‘buyers’.




http://www.aboriginalartonline.com/regions/utopia-2.php

MABO

Succesful activist for land rights for his people, the late Mr Eddie Mabo won a long and bitter legal battle against the government, colonisers, who incredibly annexed his land on the premise of 'Terra Nullius' ... that it was an empty land, void of people.

Following is a short film that I wrote and directed concerning the neglect of consecutive Australian governments in their dealings with Indigenous Australians.

Violent electrical storms across Australia mystically connect hundreds of Indigenous youths who set off on a graffiti awareness campaign. They write one word beautifully … Mabo. The Police step in and arrest one young man, but he stands defient.

Imprisonment

Prison systems and penal detention philosophies should be analysed and modified to bring an antiquated mindset into line with the thinking and expectations of contemporary societies.

Particularly heinous and sociopathical offenders are psychological disturbed individuals and should be as treated as Psychological Offenders. The behaviour of criminals, especially violent criminal behaviour should be analysed, diagnosed, categorised then modified by use of advanced psychiatric management techniques. The behaviour of such offenders can never be termed normal.

Present systems permitting violent sociopaths to congregate in an enclosed environment does not make good sense. It is antediluvian, so much so that avoiding seeking better solution amounts to gross neglect, since we acknowledge there are also enormous problems encountered in the day-to-day management of offenders.

Extremely difficult psychiatric behaviours have been modified and managed successfully in modern psychiatric facilities for more than fifty years. This is done firstly to assist the individuals to cope with their condition but also to enable carers in the administration to carry out their duties in safety.

Prisons are violent places for inmates and administrators alike, cesspools. Aggressive ways and means are used on both sides just to subsist, worse they have been created and tolerated by us for hundreds of years.

We regularly modify prisons as buildings of incarceration, applying ingenious advances in architecture and engineering. But we neglect to address the way we think about the people we place in these environments.

Human systems in prisons are far behind in applied and accepted modernity found in other social features such as medicine, education, transportation, and communications.

It is time we put advanced theories into practise.

Alexis Wright

I was heartened to see that colleague, Alexis Wright, had been shortlisted for Australia’s premier literature prize, the Miles Franklin Award, for 2007 for her book Carpentaria.




I met Alexis in New Caledonia. We were invited to the inaugural writers’ festival Salon du livre de Poindimié, established by their national library in 2003. It is on such occasions that writers who are encamped together for a week, have an opportunity to discuss our work and ideas.



Carpentaria, is set where her people come from, the Gulf country in north western Queensland. It tells of the tumultuous life in the fictional town of Desperance, balanced precariously between the appalling rednecks, the Eastend and Westend mobs and the Gurfurrit mine. It’s Alexis’s black characters that light up the page, more real than those put forward by most white authors that I’ve read – there’s Fisherman Norm Phantom and his son Will, wife Angel and evangelist Mozzie Fishman. Spirits of land and sea abound in this book. The mine is an outrageous scar across the land and the Gurfurrit management think nothing of destroying locals who stand in the way of their plans.

Her first novel Plains of Promise was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize, the Age Book of the Year Award and the NSW Premier's Award for Fiction. It is also translated into French.