FEAST OR FAMINE

For the third consecutive year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has rated Australia top of their Better Life Index. The top three nations include Sweden and Canada. The OECD says there is no such thing as an absolute number one because all criteria are treated equally and people have their own opinions about what matters most to them. Each year OECD ranks 34 developed nations (members of OECD) on 11 criteria for “good living.” Each criteria, such health, work-life balance, civic engagement, natural environment, urban air pollution, and education, is given equal weighting. Each criterion is marked out of a maximum of 10 points. When all points are added, Australia comes top of the ranking. Australia rates first in civic engagement. More than 70% of Australians trust their political institutions and about 93% vote (the highest proportion in the OECD). This is higher than Canada which also has compulsory voting. Not only do Australian...

Wisdom of the Last Farmer: Harvesting Legacies from the Land (2009) is part of a series of books about the author's peach, nectarine and grape farm in Central Valley, California.  Matsumoto is best known for his first autobiographical novel, Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on my Family Farm (1995). Masumoto tells of three generations of family farming, from the first time his grandparents arrived in America from Japan in 1899 when alien land laws prohibited non native-born Asians from owning land, to his father’s purchase of land in the 1950s, and to the author’s increasing responsibilities and ownership as he looks to past legacies and eventually leaving his own. Farming is a hard life, and organic farming is even harder. Organic farming works in harmony with nature, using as many natural means of production as possible. Masumoto, in a simple easy graceful style, tells of the movement toward alternative and unproven farming methods as he strives for perfect...

Held on May 26 each year, since 1998, Australia recognizes National Sorry Day. It is an annual commemoration and rememberance of those impacted by government policies of forcible removal of children from families that have resulted in “The Stolen Generations.” The commemoration was a direct result of the National Inquiry of 1997 into the Separation of Torres Strait Islander children from their families and the report “Bringing the Home.” Soon afterwards the National Sorry Day Committee was formed with its main mandate to inform the public and encourage awareness raising campaigns. The first National Sorry Day was held in Sydney on May 26, 1998. Events in Canberra commenced on Monday May 20 at the National Gallery of Australia and will continue until Monday May 27 with the Calvary’s Health Care’s Commemoration. The National Gallery of Australia collaborated with ABC Classic FM’s program “Notes and Strokes” in which selected music was played to accompany a 2009 untitl...

On the fiftieth anniversary, the Golden Jubilee, of the African Union, Australia celebrates Africa Day on May 25, 2013. Celebratory programs, such as sports, debates, campaigns, information sessions, and displays will take place in Australia and globally. In 1963 leaders of 32 African nations met in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to discuss continental issues such as colonialism and apartheid. They agreed to form the Organization of African Unity (OAU). On May 25, 2001, the OAU was replaced with the African Union consisting of 54 African member states to place greater emphasis on unity and cooperation. The African Union also has a representative body, the Pan African Parliament, which consists of 265 members elected by the national parliaments of the AU member states. The AU is the body through which individual member states coordinate foreign policy in addition to each nation’s own determinants. Australia’s Foreign Minister, Senator Bob Carr, sees a great deal of fu...

My 2011 novel, Bardot’s Comet , was a finalist in the 2013 National Indie Excellence Book Awards announced on May 22, 2013. Bardot’s Comet was a finalist in the Cross-Genre category. Cross-genre is a term in fiction that blends themes and elements from two or more different genres. For example, the Twilight series can be categorized as a mixture of three genres: paranormal, fantasy, and romance. Bardot’s Comet is a combination of the mystery genre with suspence, crime, science, and historical fiction. Why write across genres? Writing across genres is increasingly becoming more popular with many authors. Historical fiction, in particular, lends itself to the inclusion of other themes—in the case of Bardot’s Comet, set in The Sixties in Adelaide, South Australia, these themes include real events, scientific theories, films, dress codes, social conditions, and the morals of the times. The rise of feminism, uni-sex dress codes, the Vietnam War, the moon landing, the relig...

The naming of Canberra, the capital of Australia, turned 100 on March 12, with centenary events and exhibitions planned for the whole of 2013. The first half of the year, during summer and autumn, included many outdoor events and festivals. Now that the cooler months are coming, a winter theme will proliferate—but so too will events such as auctions. Canberra Times has reported the results of the auction of the first set of the Centenary of Canberra number plates. Fifty car number plates will be made and distributed among local charities so that they can use them to raise funds. Why only fifty? I’m not sure. However, the first one (C 100) went under the auction hammer online through PicklesPlus. Expecting a reserve price of $500, the winning bid was $9,350 placed by plasterer Stefan. The first auction was held at the Timor Leste Embassy with the funds going to the charity “Dollars for Dili” which is an official Centenary of Canberra project (in collaboration with th...

Most of Australia has four seasons: winter from June to August, spring from September to November, summer from December to February and autumn from March to May. The tropical north of Australia has two seasons: the wet and the dry. However, First Nations peoples, especially in the north, recognize more seasons, such as the wet, the end of the rain, the start of the heat, the cool dry, the humid, and the rainy humid. The temperate climate of the south brings autumn (fall) at this time of the year. Now, almost over, and soon entering the winter months, the trees are at their most brilliant colours, with leaves of golden yellow, orange and red. The days often have blue skies, with wind and falling leaves. Here in Canberra, the night time temperatures drop to zero to 3 degrees Celsius, but the day time temperatures are about 12-18C.     MARTINA NICOLLS MartinaNicollsWebsite   Martinasblogs Publications Facebook Paris Website Animal Website...

Award-winning sculptor—known for his artworks in public spaces—Wolfgang Buttress (1965-), exhibits his work at the Australian National University’s Drill Hall Gallery. The exhibition, “Space,” from 10 May to 23 June 2013, is an assemblage of paintings, maquettes, and drawings. Inside the gallery are his drawings and preparations for the larger sculpture called UNA 013, commissioned by the Australian National University (ANU) College of Science in 2012. In a separate room is a time lapse video of the creation and installation of RISE, a public work of art in Belfast, Ireland, which is a geodesic sphere suspended within a larger 30 metre diameter sphere by discreet, pre-tensioned galvanised wires. The structure illuminates in darkness. For Canberra's ANU, Buttress designed, created, and installed UNA, inspired by ancient palimpsests—manuscripts that have been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible. Buttress colla...

  Last night, Friday May 10, at the iconic Albert Hall, the 19 th Canberra International Music Festival commenced. It was the gala performance of the festival's 10-day event, concluding on Sunday May 19. Concert 1, the “Canberra Times Opening Gala: The Summoning” set the scene for the Centenary of Canberra celebrations that honours a hundred years of the naming of the city and the design and creation of the nation’s capital city.  Acknowledging the Ngunnawal people (past and present), the traditional owners of the land on which Canberra was built, the two-hour show featured the haunting tones of William Barton’s didjeridoo solo. The sound of his music, entitled “Didjeridu,” echoed throughout the hall, which for me was the highlight of the evening. Interspersed into the performances were the “retrospective” personas of Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marion Mahony Griffin. The Griffin Architects from Chicago won the international competition, an...

With one eclipse gone, another is on its way. They always appear in pairs, two weeks apart—one at the new moon and the other at the full moon. The first eclipse of 2013 was on Thursday April 25. It was a partial lunar eclipse in which part of the moon was obscured. It was visible in the evening in Western Europe and West Africa at moonrise, and in parts of Australia, Japan, Eastern Russia, and Indonesia it was visible at moonset. The entire eclipse was visible in Eastern Europe, Eastern and Southern Africa, India, most of China, and most of Russia. It’s “pair” is during the full moon on Thursday May 9/Friday May 10. The second eclipse will be an annular solar eclipse in which the sun is blocked by the moon. It will be visible from Western and Northern Australia, Eastern Papua New Guinea, and the South Pacific over a wide path of between 170-225 kilometres. Starting in Western Australia at 22:33 Universal Time (UT), it will travel northeast across the Northern Territ...

Arabesques: A Tale of Double Lives (2008) by Australian author, Robert Dessaix, is a literary travelogue. The starting point is the prolific French author, Andre Gide (1869-1951), who died when Dessaix was seven years old, just after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. Gide was regarded as one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers and thinkers. Following the tracks of Gide, from Portugal, France, Algiers, and Morocco to Italy, Dessaix explores the writer’s influences on his literary works—such as If it Die, Fruits of the Earth, The Vatican Cellars, The Immoralist, The Counterfeiters, and his later works, So Be It and Strait is the Gate—from an introspective analysis. Though there is no “real connection” between Dessaix and Gide, the author wanted to explore Gide’s “moral courage” and “openness about who he was and what he believed” from religion to relationships. The Roman Catholic Church placed Gide’s works on the Index of Forbidden B...

Four nights of fashion, four nights of style, four nights of innovation! From 1-4 May, Canberra held its inaugural fashion bonanza. FASHFEST was the idea of Zoo advertising managing director, Clinton Hutchinson, and his wife Andrea, whose vision was to showcase 22 of Canberra’s new and established designers over four nightly shows. Not only does it showcase the fashion labels, but also a line-up of local models, sylists, and musicians. I attended Night 2: Thursday 2 May, with a front row seat. Held in an unfinished construction in Brindabella Business Park at Canberra Airport (a soon-to-be airport hotel), the venue was advertised as “a raw industrial space with a massive atrium.” Indeed it was, although it was transformed into a bar, DJ area, and an angular U-shaped catwalk. Guests were advised to “rug up” to brave the evening temperature of -2 C, but with entry limited to 400, it was a sell-out crowd, although last minute standing room tickets were sold on the night...