Australia Votes : We get the ---- we deserve.

        

"Every nation gets the government it deserves."

Joseph de Maistre, 1811

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Australia Votes : Climate Change? What Climate Change??

      

THE AGE editorial today:

        
As the world warms, Abbott goes backwards

      

Like the anectodal frogs in a gradually heated pot of water, our would-be leaders seem inured to climate change. While the major economic blocs are moving to tougher carbon pricing regimes to cut planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, Australia's contenders for government have shown little urgency on this issue during the federal election campaign. Coalition leader Tony Abbott has just walked away from a long-term, albeit modest, bipartisan commitment to a 5 per cent reduction in the nation's emissions from 2000 levels by 2020. He now promises only ''as much emission reduction as we can for the spending that we've budgeted''. That is not nearly enough, according to several independent analyses of the Coalition's ''Direct Action'' policy of taxpayer-funded payments to primary producers and industry to cut emissions.

          

Mr Abbott has shed any pretence that he sees emission cuts as a priority. Good governments, though, heed expert advice, and the advice from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, the CSIRO, the World Meteorological Organisation and national scientific and climate research agencies around the world is clear.

Warming levelled off in recent years when we had a coincidence of natural cooling factors - a sustained La Nina event and very low solar activity - but this has not reversed the one-way trend in which each decade is warmer than the last and no one born since 1976 has lived in a cooler than average year. Every year this century so far is among the 14 hottest since record-keeping began in 1880. The world has warmed by almost half the agreed 2-degree limit for avoiding irreversible change. Sea levels are rising and Arctic sea ice shrank to a record low last year. And Australia has just had its hottest 12 months on record. ''It's global warming being manifest locally,'' the Bureau of Meteorology's head of climate analysis, David Jones, says.

So what is the local political priority? The scrapping of the demonised carbon tax if the Coalition wins office. (Labor would shift to a trading scheme from July.) Having shamelessly exaggerated the economic impact of carbon pricing, the Coalition insists election victory would give it a mandate that Labor must accept. That is not how politics works. As Labor leader Kevin Rudd observes, election defeat does not mean you ''junk all of your long-standing policy positions''. Parties are entitled to stick to the policies on which their MPs have been elected.

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Mr Abbott is also being hypocritical. He did not accept Labor had a mandate when it won in 2007 promising an emissions trading scheme (as the Howard government belatedly did too). After the ETS came before Parliament in 2009, Mr Abbott ousted Malcolm Turnbull as leader, withdrew Coalition support and blocked the legislation. So much for respecting a mandate. If Mr Abbott cannot secure the parliamentary numbers to axe carbon pricing, it is his prerogative to call a double-dissolution election. Australia might then benefit from a proper, focused debate about the urgent challenges of climate change.

      
     
"Everybody knows that Direct Action is a joke." 
Christine Milne, Leader of the Australian Greens
National Press Club (here)
4 September 2013


Today F.I.A.P.C.E. released it's own Direct Action.


  

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The only moving thing

         

One of Christine's favorite poets was Wallace Stevens. 

We had this one in common :

 

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window

With barbaric glass.

The shadow of the blackbird

Crossed it, to and fro.

The mood

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,

Why do you imagine golden birds?

Do you not see how the blackbird

Walks around the feet

Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds

Flying in a green light,

Even the bawds of euphony

Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut

In a glass coach.

Once, a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The shadow of his equipage

For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.

   
     

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And another such, from recently departed Seamus Heaney - you can listen to him read it here.
      

            
St Kevin and the blackbird

         
And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so
      
One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
and Lays in it and settles down to nest.
            
Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,
         
Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.
         
*
          
And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time
      
From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth
        
Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,
‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,
      
A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.

       

     

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Christine's first anniversary

    

Second day of Spring, the winter blanket lifts. 

Today a blue sky, as it was a year ago. 

Chris read widely and deeply. This found form in the extremes of her 12 years of five cancers - five major operations, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, the awaiting and receiving of test results, and the continuing - when she spoke with rare expression.

At the start of this lot, as she awoke from the exploratory operation turned seven hour surgery: 

"I am in a cauldron of pain."

Twelve years later, days before the end:

C : "I feel as if I have the bounty of the world upon me."

P : "What do you mean?"

C : "I feel so lucky."

Thank you again to all who loved and cared for Chris. 

 

  

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Vale Seamus Heaney

      

The great Irish poet Seamus Heaney has died.

Tributes paid to ‘keeper of language’ Seamus Heaney:
Poet's death has brought a 'great sorrow' to Ireland
The Irish Times : read article here
Friday 30 August 2013  
                

       

What a refuge and inspiration, still, to listen to Heaney online.

         

Click here for Seamus Heaney reading his translation of Beowulf

      

To be reminded of the power of language at this time in Australia when we are a week from a Federal Election and everyone is sick to death of the bombardments of exhausted and debased wordage.

Click here for Seamus Heaney's 1995 Nobel acceptance speech

"It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power..." 

  

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Regarding No Visible Means of Support

      
"Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger."

Psalm 8:2 (King James Version)

     

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1969: The Black Box of Conceptual Art

For many years, Ann Stephen has been the foremost advocate for the art work of Ian Burn.

Now she is re-staging an exhibition by Burn, Mel Ramsden and Roger Cutforth first shown in 1969 at Pinacotheca Gallery, St. Kilda, Melbourne.

1969: The Black Box of Conceptual Art  
at the University Art Gallery, University of Sydney, until October 25.
     
The full catalog is available online : click here
      

 l - r : Ian Burn, Roger Cutforth, Mel Ramsden in New York, 1969

In the online version of an article about this 
re-exhibition - Shock of the new still reverberating by Nick Galvin - we observed above the reference to Ian Burn's Xerox Book ...

The third work, from Ian Burn, is a series of books made up of 100 sheets of paper copied and re-copied on a commercial Xerox machine.

''The books accumulate a kind of electrostatic layering,'' Stephen says. ''As you go through, the layering thickens. It begins, in a sense, with nothing and is a work made out of time."

... an advertisement for Yellow Pages (the telephone directory) with a yellow Post-It note attached. Of course, in the great enfolding, yesterday's concept is today's promo for anything.
 

We might further image Xerox Book as the model for 100 iterations of the 1969 exhibition. Over the years, degrading upgrading grading un-becoming re-becoming being, even

#1_1969_Pinacotheca Gallery, St.Kilda, Melbourne

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#2_2013_University Art Gallery, University of Sydney, Sydney

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#3_2015_Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, Brisbane

        

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#4_date yet to be set_Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 

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Australia Votes : Focus Groups

  
So-called!
  

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Get Better

          

a meta mural

for a

baw baw paw paw

pal
          

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JN & PT @ NGV

     

detail : Julie Clark made some impromptu portraits of John Nixon and Peter Tyndall. 

J.N.

click on images to enlarge  

 

 P.T.

 See these and others at Anything But Human

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