Dr Neville Buch (ABN 86703686642)
Extensively Experienced and Qualified Queensland Professional History of the Queensland Mind.
Business Office
18 Callendar Street, Sunnybank Hills 4109
AUSTRALIA
6 June 2025 (Queensland Day)
It is unique in the country: https://mappingbrisbanehistory.com.au/
But then many would appear to be small minded (attached).
What am I talking about?
- I am being justifiably impolite since in recent months I had occasionally had to go without food and I struggle to pay bills with no payments since the end of 2017 and minimum payments for my work in the last decade, even though I produced the MBH website and non-funded project project, along with my other publications on Brisbane and Queensland (CV attached). I have been patient over the last decade and kept my criticism to a minimum. Kierkegaard had Christian politeness but Nietzsche did not. I am now with Nietzsche and my patience has run out.
2. I am forcing a legitimate confrontation since the only response I have is mostly silence. Very few have the courage to lift themselves out of gossip and snobbery, and face me with some kind of response. It seems I am being pulled down in the choice we each make:
3. As I have said in “A prophet without honour in his hometown: Local History and Global Learning, Historical Mapping of Brisbane Thinkers and the Local Environment 1859-1959” (attached), in my reflection I have come to a few propositions:
A. There have been very few attempts at considering transmission in Brisbane – philosophic or socio-intellectual transmission, producing the cultural and social landscape;
B. The heritage markers in Brisbane tend to overlook a very long list of cultural producers; and
C. There are categorical confusions in past histories which ill-measure impact with conflated references to such terms as ‘culture’, ‘society’, and to individuals, communities, and institutions.
The propositions can encapsulated as the three challenges of the current academic literature and to activities of local and regional histories:
- Landscapes of Culture and Society;
- Cultural Production and Heritage;
- Concepts and Categories
I now turn to each:
- Denver Beanland declared “Brisbane – Australia’s New World City” in his book, so the comparison with London is not at all odd if we can see the capacity to scale-up our historical understanding of a city like Brisbane. The historical understanding required is the work of historical-social geography towards sociological conclusions.
2. The literary histories done have helped to show the importance of intellectual reading for the state. My work on the ‘What Queenslander Read’ Project has created databases of quality modern world informative literature which was actually read and understood in local communities.
3. However, it has had to be shelved due to the lack of funding. Nevertheless, some of the work has been published here. The work had included the high-end fiction of the times, but focuses on the intellectual shifts in philosophy, science, sociology, anthropology, psychology, etc., which formed the ever-changing modern worldview. These methods and theoretical approaches are already being taken up among Australian and international historians. It is important that Queensland does not again be left behind. And this leads to main point 4.
To explain how Queensland is being left behind, I refer to the HASS’s Event: “Digital Modernities: Why We Need to Think Historically About the Digital Age”:
We are living in an era of digital modernity that amounts to a recursion of earlier periods of colonialism, hyper-capitalism, and great power competition. This talk will explore the implications of this, defining and then framing digital modernity in the context of post-Enlightenment history and pluralistic critical theory. This is less of a stretch than it sounds. From its inception in the seventeenth century modernity was not a simplistic outgrowth or export from Western Europe, or consistently good or bad, just as contemporary digital technology is not a simplistic outgrowth of Silicon Valley. Modernity has always been a complex of ideas, politics, technology, and culture experienced by different people at different times, in different places, and in different ways. We can define digital modernity in a similar way, as a multiplicity of interlocking and sometimes opposed modernities. These geographically dispersed digital spaces range from tiny groups engaged in crime on the dark web to vast national and transnational milieux enabled by global digital platforms, not unlike the “swarms” referred to by Zygmunt Bauman. They spring into being in viral ways and contain the seeds of innumerable threads from the past and present, from the public sphere to colonialism. Accepting that we live in digital modernity presents us with important opportunities to effect social and political change. By rehabilitating our relationship to the past, we can learn to walk the fine line between revolution and reaction again.
I am in tune with this national and international way of thinking, but THE POTENIAL THINKING COMMUNITY is not. I, and I suspect many others, see THE POTENTIAL THINKING COMMUNITY as currently is, is simply a marketing aim of the governance, and as a result is caught in a narrow way of thinking which is dragging Queensland behind.
What The Thinking Person do with my criticism, and critical thinking (in the tradition of critical theory), is up to The Thinking Person. But be assured it is public knowledge, and the public demand answers. The Thinking Person can face up to the cognition or not: The Dynamic of Cognition and Humanism,
“May I not hope to be heard with candor? God deliver us all from prejudice and unkindness, and fill us with the love of truth and virtue.”
William Ellery Channing, Delivered at the Ordination of Rev. Jared Sparks in The First Independent Church of Baltimore on May 5, 1819.
REFERENCES AS INFERENCES
Buch, Neville (2022). Sartre on Humanism – Annotated. CRT No. 2, Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, February 15, 2022.
Buch, Neville (2024), Philosophically Ontology Logic Intersect Compatibility Education (POLICE), Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, March 4, 2024.
Buch, Neville (2025). There are Times When Absurdity is not the Camusian Absurdity But Sartrean (maybe also Beauvoirian), Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, January 28, 2025.
Buch, Neville (2025). Humanism, Free Thought, and Our Conflicted Times, Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, March 20, 2025.
Buch, Neville (2025). The History of Learning Humanism: What Most Humanists Miss in Cognition., Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, April 10, 2025.
Buch, Neville (2025). Healthy Cognition: Attitudes, Values, and Jungian Framing, Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, April 10, 2025.
Buch, Neville (2025). Compatibility: Consistent Intellectual Thought (academia.edu paper), Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, May 13, 2025.
Buch, Neville (2025). What I am to do, the Evidence is There in Large Quantities and Qualities? Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, June 3, 2025.
ATTACHMENTS
Historical Mapping of Brisbane Thinkers FINAL
FEATURED IMAGE: Neville Reasoning
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Neville Buch
Latest posts by Neville Buch (see all)
- A Eulogy for Jack - July 8, 2025
- Freedom in both The Domestic Home and The Open Road - July 7, 2025
- Australian Universities Afraid of Open Communication and Intelligent Conversation - June 27, 2025