“Thom Roberts is an artist and a country express train”. Commentary on “Community participation as identity and belonging: a case study of Arts Project Australia. “I am an artist”” (Anderson & Bigby, 2021)

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Notes

1 Thom was born Robert Smith, but changed his name to Thom Roberts about a decade ago. Whenever he visits the Art Gallery of New South Wales he will gleefully point out the paintings by Tom Roberts, an artist famous for his renditions of the Australian landscape and for founding the Heidelberg School in the late nineteenth century.

2 Psychiatrist and scientist Moreno de Luca Moreno-De-Luca (2020) recently wrote and recorded a song that pays homage to the radiant inner worlds of people on the autism spectrum, who often have an intense interest in weird and wonderful things from trains and outer space, to quantum physics and penguins. He writes: “I have seen firsthand the breathtaking results of many of those intense interests and how they can be simultaneously revitalizing and consuming” (p. 1592).