A short history of the world by Geoffrey Blainey. I bought this for my son, on the view that a good narrative history would provide a framework within which to fit the detailed study of short periods that’s typical of school history courses these days. It’s certainly a good read. Blainey’s geographical determinism provides an idiosyncratic flavor without being overwhelming.

I’m also reading Interest and Prices by Michael Woodford, which I got as an unsolicited gift from Princeton University Press. It’s the first attempt I’ve seen at a theory of monetary policy in which interest rates are the variable of interest and the money supply is excluded from consideration. On the face of things, this is much closer to the world we live in than the standard approach. I’m hoping this will help to explain the paradox (at least for anyone who thinks the quantity theory of money ought to work in the long run) of persistently high growth in most monetary aggregates combined with persistently low inflation.

I went to see the Namatjira exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery, having seen it previously in Canberra. In the light of recent discussion on the blog, I was struck by the fact that Namatjira was a close contemporary of Jackson Pollock and, like him, was killed by alcohol, though in a radically different cultural context.

Each in a sense, represents the end of a line. Whereas Pollock represented the last gasp of modernism in art, Namatjira can be seen as the last great representative of the European tradition of landscape painting. By contrast with Pollock’s programmatic formal innovations in drip paintings like Blue Poles, Namatjira’s innovations came from the interaction between traditional concerns (light, colour and shadow) and a previously unpainted landscape.

Also on show at the Gallery is art of the Cape York Peninsula, including both traditional cultural products and consciously created art works.