This is a superb political cartoon. David Rowe is one of Australia's best political cartoonists and Fairfax should be credited with allowing his work to be in the public domain and not hidden behind behind the Australian Financial Review's pay wall.

The 2007-08 National Health Survey (NHS) measured the height, weight, hip and waist circumference of respondents aged 5 years or more and found that 61.4% of the Australian population are either overweight or obese. outliers. Victoria had the lowest incidence of obesity, at 17.0% of the population, with South Australia reporting the highest numbers at 19.6%.

Obesity has overtaken smoking as the leading cause of premature death and illness in Australia. In 2008, the costs associated with obesity in Australia were estimated to be more than $58 billion and it is only going to get worse.

Australia today is ranked as one of the fattest nations in the developed world. On average, obesity reduces life expectancy by six to seven years.

Thomas Demand is known for his large scale photographs that question the medium as a faithful record of reality in that he makes photographs of three-dimensional models that look like real images of rooms and other spaces.

A residency at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles where he discovered the archive of the Californian architect John Lautner (1911 – 1994). He photographed 12 architectural models he discovered in the Lautner archive:

The lines, planes, textures and colours Demand composes from Lautner's models recall modernist painting and sculpture, including Picasso’s reliefs and fragments of cubist bricolage, as well as mid-20th century abstract painting.

The cartoon below is Bil Leak's interpretation of Aboriginal protests on Australia Day in Canberra in News Ltd's The Australian. It is part of an article by Henry Ergas entitled Enforcing one rule of law for all.

Ergas argues that if conduct violates the law, we should expect those responsible to be held to account. The law ought to apply to the protesters at the Aboriginal tent embassy exactly as as it applies to everyone else, including the Cronulla rioters.

Leak's cartoon depicts The Left as populist, confused, ugly and angry. They--the ugly Australian--- look very much like the right wing anti-carbon legislation rioters and the truckies circling parliament house.

What is obscured by the cartoon is what the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra was about --a protest about the dispossession of indigenous people from their traditional land in settler Australia, the use of English law to legitimate that violence and the ongoing racism by white Australians towards aboriginal Australians.

My knowledge of Adelaide modernism is patchy, I regret to say.

According to the art historians Kathleen Sauerbier was one of the first artists to respond to the southern coastal area in the Fleurieu Peninsula in a Modernist style. Her landscapes, with their limited use of colour, fluid line-work and simplified forms, exemplify her influence on fellow Australian painter Horace Trenerry.

As I I haven't read Jane Hylton''s The painted coast: Views of the Fleurieu Peninsula south of Adelaide I cannot put Sauerbier's Willunga work into this South Australian regional (Normanville, Second Valley, Port Willunga, Aldinga, Maslins, Victor Harbor, Goolwa, the Coorong) landscape tradition.

Suzanne and I drove up to Willunga from Victor Harbor late this afternoon to attend the opening of an exhibition of recent paintings by the Dutkiewicz family: Wladyslaw Dutkiewicz, Ludwik Dutkiewicz and Adam Dutkiewicz. Recent meaning done in the last 20 years.

There was also the launch of the first issue of Australian Modern, a magazine about 1950s modernism in Oz. It was a glorious summer evening, people were going out to eat, and it was a fascinating exhibition.

I'm ashamed to admit that I just didn't know this Adelaide abstract modernist work at all--not even that of Wladyslaw Dutkiewicz, who was an expressionist, constructivist, abstract and semi-abstract painter and occasional sculptor who was also involved in theatrical design, directing and acting. He appears to have faded off the screen of conventional art history that constructs Adelaide modernism in terms of Dorrit Black, Dora Chapman, James Cant and Kathleen Sauerbier.

I've started a Tumblr blog solely for my digital photographs. After dipping my toes into digital photography 3 years ago and using it consistently, I've come to the conclusion that not only are the results of digital photography as good as 35mm film, but that the ever improving digital technology has given rise to a different style and type of photography.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, from a window in Oaks on Market, Melbourne, 2011

In the history of photography huge home-made wet glass plates led to store-bought dry plates which led to 8 x 10" sheet film which led to 4 x 5" sheet film which led to 2-1/4" roll film which led to 35mm which led to digital. Digital imaging is the technological winner these days. Today's digital SLRs replace 35mm, no big deal.

The latest works in David Hockey: A Bigger Picture were made in the last eight years in the East Yorkshire Wolds near Hockney's Bridlington home. It is Hockney reinventing himself as a full-blooded landscape artist who highlights the importance of seeing and of observing and studying change.

He paints big canvases --walling filling, eg., the Closer Grand Canyon painting of 1998 ---and in bright, often discordant and gaudy colours. Digital video stills, the simultaneous operation of nine cameras, and the iPhone and iPad are now his instruments of drawing.

A video of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band (Gary Lucas (guitar), Jeff Tepper (guitar), Rick Snyder (bass), Cliff Martinez (drums);) performing 'Ice Cream for Crow' from the album of the same name (1982). The clip was rejected by MTV USA as "too weird" upon release, now it is in the Permanent Film and Video Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC.

The video features some of Don Van Vliet's abstract abstract expressionist paintings. By 1985 Van Vliet's work was showing in the most prestigious galleries of Soho. Don Van Vliet died in december 2010 at 69 of multiple sclerosis.

Kodak's decline has culminated in it recently filing for Chapter 11 protection; a decline many say resulted from Eastman Kodak Co's failure to reinvent itself in the digital age. Looking back from our digital world we can see how Kodak was able to define the mass market photography as the Kodak moment:

Photographs came to represent something more than a portrait or a recordiong of family life. They became extensions of our minds; they replaced our memories. They remind their makers of a person, place, or event with special meaning or importance to their lives. The Kodak prints of the snapshots were generally kept with their negatives, in boxes and drawers to await a definitive culling that rarely came.

I've started to read Philip Jones' Images of the Interior: Seven Central Australian Photographers Jones had previously published The Policeman's Eye, The Frontier Photography of Paul Foelsche (2005) The seven photographers discussed by Philip Jones in his Images of the Interior are Francis J. Gillen, Captain Samuel Albert White, George Aiston, Ernest Eugene Kramer, Cecil John Hackett, William Delano Walker and Rex Battarbee.

None of the photographers presented by Philip Jones were professionals, they were there to do a job, be it policing the district, in the case of Aiston, or telegraph operator, as Gillen was for many years at Alice Springs and Charlotte Waters. There was also a medical scientist, an artist, a doctor and a missionary. Often these men had a fair amount of spare time and used it to collect and record information for the South Australian and other Museums or to publish their research or journals. Most of White’s bird specimens were sent to John Gould in England.

Gillen was a station master at the Alice Springs Telegraph Station from 1891 to 1899 and the local magistrate in Alice Springs. He mostly photographed aboriginal people using a large dry-plate tripod mounted camera between 1894 and 1897. He produced some 400 glass negatives, and some of this work appeared in Gillen and Baldwin Spencer's text Native Tribes in Central Australia.

The stop the piracy bills before the US (eg., the PROTECT IP Act in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, in the House) would do more harm than good to cybersecurity, the Internet economy, and online free expression.

SOPA aims to empower the Justice Department to go after websites that allegedly infringe on copyright, and doing it on the Internet’s domain name layer. Consequently, under these bills even general-purpose social-media sites such as Flickr with no bad intent could be tagged as theft sites "facilitating" infringement -- simply by providing the platforms for users' content. If passed the US government could do such things as shut down YouTube if it contained "pirated video"; or force Google to not link to sites that may allow one to download illegal content.

I missed the Full Spectrum show that was held late last year at the Adelaide College of the Arts, TafeSA late last year. It featured 3 photographic artists from South Australia: Gregory Ackland (Flickr stream), Joe Felber and Will Nolan. The catalogue is online.

These three form the core of the Photography Department at the Adelaide College of the Arts, whilst Ackland and Nolan are part of the Undercurrent collective, which consists of nine emerging photo-media practitioners currently based in, or originating from South Australia.

The collective says that it aims to contribute to the continuing development of critical and aesthetic debate concerning contemporary photo-media practice, by engaging with photo-media artists, curators, writers and other creative practitioners through ongoing exhibitions and photographic showcase contexts.

The 2009 Transient States exhibition at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery at the University of Western Australia in Perth was curated by Sally Quinn and it presented a range of creative photographic responses to the urban landscape of Perth. Quinn says that the work of the eleven photographers reflects a sustained meditation on place, memory, and collective and individual identity.

One of the photographers in the show was Kevin Ballantine who is on the staff of the School of Communications and Arts at the Edith Cowan University.

February 2012 is the 25th anniversary of Australia and Fremantle losing The America’s Cup, previously heralded as Australia’s greatest sporting triumph. Cup City is a series of black and white photographs picturing the terrain of the Royal Perth Yacht Club’s defense of the international yacht race.

Ed Douglas used to be a Senior Lecturer in Photography at the South Australian School of Art circa 1977 -1980 when it was a part of the CAE at the Underdale campus. He retired in 2001.

I recall seeing some work from the Gypsum Mine on Kangaroo Island in South Australia as part of the CSR Photography Project:

In 2007 he had month- long residency with Ken Orchard in Hill End, central western New South Wales where they explored with camera and brush the historic goldmining landscapes of Hill End and Ophir. These are both sites of national importance in the history of gold-mining and visual art from the 19th century.

Helen Ennis concludes the “Land and Landscape” chapter in her Photography and Australia thus:

And, finally, what of the vexed, interrelated matter of non-Aboriginal Australians’ sense of belonging? While the Australian historian Manning Clark speculated that European settlers were eternal outsiders who could never know ‘heart’s ease in a foreign land, because … there live foreign ancestral spirits’, it now seems plausible that non-Aboriginal Australians are developing their own form of attachment, not to land as such, but to place. Indeed, it has recently been argued that for contemporary non-Aboriginal Australians, belonging may have no connection with land at all. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why art photographs of the natural landscape have lost their currency and are now far outnumbered by photographs of urban and suburban environments - after all, it is ‘here’ that most Australians live and ‘there’ that the tourist industry beckons them to escape.”

Today most Australian's live in the city, but they also holiday in the bush and on the coast. Many have retired to the cost whilst some have become grey nomads exploring the Australian landscape for months at a time. Many of them would feel at home in their coastal places---as I do with respect to the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia.

In Statements Les Walkling writes about the dominant movements in contemporary art in the last couple of decades and then raises some questions about contemporary art practice now. He says:

I was born into a culture where modernism and formalism were tied to the universal claims implied in aesthetic judgements, where works of art were considered the embodiment of aesthetics, and presented as signs of social distinction and superior taste. Today we understand such claims as an abuse of Western power prevailing in the name of a universal humanity that glosses over local difference, contradiction and conflict. If the reaction of the 1980s was the embodiment of the anti-aesthetic, and the 1990s a return to representation, then the first decade of the 21st century has questioned our allegiance to the past and responsibility in the present.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, sand + rocks, Petrel Cove, Victor Harbor, 2011

Walking comments that his perspective is one of hindsight: what can we make of art practice in the first decade of the 21st century? His answer is that as contemporary artists we need to find ways to embed an ethical practice deep in our work.

I recently took my Schneider Symmar 210mm lens (circa 1970) that I use with the Cambo 8x10 to Charles Bridgwood in Adelaide to have both the fungus in the lens removed and a non-functional electronic shutter replaced by a working mechanical one.

Charles mentioned an ex-South Australian photographer working with an 8x10 in the south west corner of WA. It was John Austin, who works with a Sinar Norma monorail view camera to represent the swamps, forests, rivers and beaches of the local landscape:

There cannot be many Australian photographers working with an 8x10 in black and white and a chemical darkroom. Despite a rich tradition of fine black and white photography that is linked to Minor White and Edward Weston in the USA, you could probably count these traditionalists in Australia on one hand. The high digital end of the medium format is definitely taking over.