We are living fearful lives. Our politicians are keeping us that way and the media are assisting them eagerly. Although we live in the ‘information age’, we are not given ready access to the information we need to make informed choices or to intelligently debate the issues that affect our lives. (more…)
If printed books disappear, what will happen when the lights go out – when we can no longer run our computers? Will we have anything to read? Will there still be anyone who knows how to read and will anyone still be able to write? Will the profession of scribe be resurrected? (more…)
The first wave of foreign insurgents onto a large island continent lying between the Indian and Pacific Oceans in 1788 can be examined as a metaphor for the dire straits all life on earth finds itself in today.
The passengers and crew of those eleven ships came from a society that considered the ‘great unknown continent’ to be empty and ripe for exploitation. There was a disregard for the existing inhabitants and their culture, as well as for the land with which those inhabitants were intimately and inextricably bound. The foreigners manipulated the official record so that they could consider themselves as having come into a vast land with unlimited resources, in relation to which there were no competing interests. (more…)
“What’s in a name?” Call a rose a squirrel, it will smell the same. Or will it? Would my preconceived idea of what a squirrel smells like – I’ve never smelled one – change my experience of the flower’s scent? Was Shakespeare wrong? (more…)
Living in a democracy, we spend a lot of time considering the merits of the people who want us to vote them into positions of government. And then we spend a lot of time discussing and arguing about and contemplating whether we used our vote correctly, or voicing our disappointment at the shortcomings of the present incumbents. (more…)
We are all different, unless you are the old bearded man in the crowd in Life of Brian who insisted he was the only one who was not an individual. None of us is identical to any other person – get used to it.
The problem we face is the result of chimeras: we are, it seems, wired to grouping people and then treating all members of a particular group as identical and to believing them to be fundamentally different from members of every other group, including our group. And then we start to fear the other and that fear leads to unhelpful, even destructive, behaviour. Next, we notice that some members of our group are not the same as us and they have to be re‑grouped. Take that to its logical conclusion and each of us will belong to a group of one. Funny that! (more…)
They come onto the train and look around. She leads the way to a group of empty seats and sits down. He sits opposite her. They’re silent as the train takes off. Both have their legs leaning to the left so that their knees don’t touch. She is holding her bag on her lap with both arms. He is clutching a book.
She looks through the windows at the back fences streaming past, the colourful graffito tags indecipherable. He starts reading his book: Life of Pi.
They both wear school uniforms, from different schools. He looks to be three years older than she. She turns to him. “That was a cool film.” “Yeah, but the book’s better.”
I wonder about their relationship. Casual? Romantic? Just met? (more…)
In the entertainment we watch on TV, we are used to there being a sliding scale between fiction and non-fiction. ‘Fictional’ stories are often ‘based on true events’ and documentaries can be ‘dramatised’ to make them more interesting.
An interesting discovery was made recently in an attic in a very old house in Guilford, England. It is a metal box, like a biscuit tin with a hinged lid, containing scores of small pieces of paper, each with a short message in tiny writing. (more…)
This is coming to you from a different kitchen. The morning sun is flooding the courtyard of the Neram Harvest Café at the New England Regional Arts Museum in Armidale, northern NSW. Despite the sun, it is still too cold for me to sit outside – the air temperature has risen from an overnight low of -4°C to around 10°C – although the hardened locals are sitting out there in their shirtsleeves.