The Fabled Gated Kangaroos of Morisset

Morisset (33 ° 7' S 151 ° 30' E) has a rather curious reputation. While local Australians might associate it negatively with the mental institute which opened here in 1909, more recently it became famous with foreign visitors attracted by the wild kangaroos that can be encountered in huge mobs on its grounds. Nanny State had the last say, unfortunately, and the hospital was sealed off with gated bridges to stop the punters from getting in. More fool Nan. As I previously mentioned, for close to 10 years I was held under virtual house arrest at my parents' property south at Lake Haven, on Budgewoi Lake. Even though Morisset was only 20km or so distant, I found it almost impossible to visit. In 2013 I had bravely caught the train which connects Wyong and Newcastle, and disembarked at Morisset. I sloshed around in the rain and mud, looking for a Buddhist temple which was supposedly existed around here. I was hoping it would be something like Nan Tien Temple, in the Illawarra, but it was actually fairly basic in comparison.

Cham Shan Temple, in Morisset (Australia, 2014)

It took almost a decade for my agoraphobia to recover sufficiently enough to allow me to return to Morisset, but this time I had my heart set on locating the kangaroos which had gone viral at the Psychiatric Hospital. As it turned out, this was a rather futile gesture, as the authorities had discretely put a stop to this unauthorized caper by sealing off all access roads to the facility. It is a pity because the hospital sounds fascinating in its own right. There is also reputed to a haunted ruins in the vicinity, with the rather ominous name of "Hospital for the Criminally Insane", and a cemetery containing many unmarked graves. It made me wonder: Wouldn't it be better to capitalize on your assets when it comes to tourism, rather than shutting the whole game down??? (For the full report of my defeat searching for the now gated kangaroos of Morisset, click here.)

Pham Luc, North Vietnam's Soldier-Painter, and Living Legend

I received an email yesterday from a certain Mr Phuc (of Vietnam Pathfinder Travel) in Hà Nội which read: "I found your website and contact at Crowded World and would like to sell some paintings of Pham Luc Artists in my collection (at attached files). Pham Luc artist live in Hanoi, Vietnam. He is around 70years old now and some of my paintings bought from him that was painted during Vietnam war time (60-70)."

Nude with flowers, by Pham Luc (courtesy Vietnam Pathfinder Travel)

In a land which reveres patriots, Phạm Lực occupies a particularly hallowed position among the pantheon of heroes: he served in the North Vietnamese army as a painter-propagandist, using art not just as a witness, but as a weapon. That said, his paintings don't appear particularly militaristic: nudes, still lifes and pastoral idylls are among his most common motifs. While the Americans and other counter-revolutionary forces that he confronted brandished state-of-the-art cameras to record their side of the war, Phạm had to make do with good old-fashioned paint, canvas and brush. When canvas dried up, he reverted to painting on burlap rice sacks, as one foreigner who visited his home in Hà Nội remarked. "The paintings from the war are rat-eaten and shrapnel-ridden but embody an irrepressible spirit," the visitor wrote. "They are darker in composition and content than his later works, which are equally fine. The painting which I call Forbidden was painted in 1974 at the close of the war. This painting of a beautiful woman during wartime conditions was against socialist dictum of the time. Phạm Lực hid the work for over a decade before he could display it." (Note: this is not the nude painting depicted above, which I received from Mr Phuc, but there is doubtless some resemblance between the works. It all goes to show that despite being a nationalist and patriot, Phạm was no stooge. In his mind, perhaps, the revolution could never be curtailed by dogma, or realpolitik. As Trotsky famously proclaimed, the revolution should be eternal! But that is my take on the story, so it ought to be disclosed as such.)

Flowers with lamp, by Pham Luc (courtesy Vietnam Pathfinder Travel)

The picture above is a still life, one of the literally thousands of paintings Phạm Lực has produced over the years. If you are in Hà Nội and have the chance, you can visit the artist at his home, and perhaps even have your portrait painted by him. He has become something of a celebrity in the northern art scene, something of a living legend. Ambassadors from other countries own his works.

Pastoral landscape by Pham Luc (courtesy Vietnam Pathfinder Travel)

The landscape above has something of a pastoral dimension. As with the two other paintings featured on this page, it is available from Vietnam Pathfinder Travel in Hà Nội. If you represent an artist or gallery in Vietnam and would like to promote your works on this site, please let me know. Leave a comment below, contact me on Facebook or Soundcloud or YouTube or Quora or Twitter or whatever, or just send me an email. I am always keen to make new friends!

Greenland's Vikings, Victims of Climate Change

I have been reading a lot lately about the vanished Vikings of Greenland, how they just disappeared from the history books in the Middle Ages, never to be heard of again. I have been thinking a lot about them recently, those Europeans who for a couple of centuries eked out a civilization on the edge of the Arctic, trading in walrus ivory, worshipping in churches... they seemed to be flourishing and then one day they went MIA like the crew of the Marie Celeste, or those jet fighters swallowed by the Bermuda Triangle. It is worth pointing out at this point that I am in fact Australian, and thus hail from another European colony which was transplanted with all things Christian and European onto a barren, alien land, and left there to fend for itself. The Australian experiment worked, however -- the Greenland experiment didn't (at least not for the Vikings LOL!) Interestingly enough, Climate Change was the major culprit in the Greenland Vikings' demise -- not the Anthropogenic Global Warming we are (apparently) confronting now, but rather the Global Cooling of the Middle Ages (whose cause is still a matter of conjecture). Southern Greenland, once as verdant as its name suggests, presently chilled, then got snowploughed beneath a slowmotion avalanche of ice. The Vikings were snapfreezed out of existence; their neighbors the Inuit, who had migrated into the region at about the same time, somehow managed to adapt, and survived. Perhaps a similar fate awaits Australia in the future -- the white civilization which has ruled the roost for 200+ years will be forced to retreat from waves of heat and drought and searing fire, and the longsuffering Aborigines will crawl out from the margins to repossess their beloved homeland. History has a strange way of working like that. You never can really tell who is going to win the race, and revolutions are all too frequent. Gods hold grudges, and patiently plot their revenge. The laws of physics cannot be ignored, and neither can the science of Symbolic Exchange. Thus we have been warned! Thus we will be warmed.

Greenland is on the path to independence from its colonial master Denmark, and now has its own flag and a new name, Kalaallit Nunaat

Anything can happen in life, and history is full of sudden reversals. Global Warming could well be just a beat-up, the latest strain of the Armaggedonist virus whose DNA was identified in the Year 2000 bug, SARS and the Bird Flu Epidemic, and which has consistently frightened more people than it has actually harmed (infecting them not through physical germs but rather exposure to sensationalist reports on TV and the like.) I believe these hysterias are in fact media viruses, and mark a mutation of the virus from the physical world in which it has proliferated for billions of years, into the Baudrillardian mediaswamp we humans now inhabit. We're going to have a lot more media viruses in the future, that's my theory at least! Some people just love to think the world is about to end, and indeed such a deathwish is built into the mythology of the capitalist system itself. How it works is like this: somewhere in the "real" world (eg, China, Vietnam, Africa, anywhere Third World) a new virus arises in animals and kills a handful of people, triggering a pandemic alert. The media, ever hungry for a good scare story, jumps on to the case, and proclaims that the end of the world is nigh. What WHO fears is that the virus will jump the species barrier, but actually a more profound evolutionary leap is taking place: the virus is becoming digital. Panic takes on a life of its own, and becomes viral... this is how the pandemic spreads, this is what gives it energy. There's a run on flu vaccines... everyone on the streets of East Asian megacities are suddenly wearing surgical masks. Little do the masses know that it's too late, they are already infected! Their masks aren't protecting anyone, they are in fact amplifying the fear, broadcasting the infection! The best response would actually be to chill out, and ignore the doom. Or at least maintain a skeptical distance. That's what I would do, but then someone would accuse me of being irresponsible...

Look, what I am trying to say is this: Climate Change could be real, and could well be hype... but the extinction of the Greenland Vikings is a historical fact, and I find myself strangely haunted by their disappearance. Recently I thought to myself: imagine if the colonies had survived and the fjords of Greenland were now sprinkled with colorful, asymmetrical cafes and bulging nightclubs and bars; imagine if every young Greenlander today dreamed of being a poet or an anarchist or an artist or a rock musician? In other words, what if Greenland had developed into a New Iceland or a somewhat edgier, more tribal take on the Faroe Islands? Wouldn't that have been awesome, wouldn't that have been totally cool? Not politically correct to contemplate, but an interesting thought experiment nonetheless. I must confess though that Inuit Greenland has turned out pretty swinging in its own way, and the music scene is just as vibrant there as it is in Iceland, from what I hear. Nonetheless, I can't help myself from thinking: imagine if the Vikings had survived, imagine what Greenland would be like today? And I wonder: maybe the green days of Greenland are on their way back, after a long bitter winter? Spring is dawning in the Far North of the planet, and the Day of the Inuit is arrived. How I'd love to be part of it somehow. If I had any money, that is where I would be investing it!