AS IF IN REPLY to this blog's April Fools Day contribution to working-from-home advice and St Valentine's Day questions about clerical companionship, Michael Koziol of the Sydney Morning Herald has written in favour of offices and workplaces:

I think we tend to undervalue the social experience of seeing our colleagues: the lift encounters, the desk-side chats, the coffee runs. I suppose if we happily discard those things now it will only go to show how little they really meant all along. But we'll miss them, I suspect. They're much better than staring at a screen.

He is right; workplaces are places where life happens and we interact with people we care about and share a society with. Routine really is an aid to identity, and a strong psychological buttress. He is also wrong; 'nice' workplaces in their very cosiness are artificial societies, created for the purposes of production. When profit slackens, the boss chooses amongst your colleagues, and they don't come back on Monday.

But this is an old, old argument. We're all of us standing on the shoulders of giants, the people who've researched and thought harder about the past of work, coercion, sociality, production, division of 'work' and 'life', and as I've linked to before, time-discipline and morality (PDF). Take it away E.P. Thompson:

The evidence is plentiful, and, by the method of contrast, it reminds us how far we have become habituated to different disciplines. Mature industrial societies of all varieties are marked by time-thrift and by a clear demarcation between "work" and "life". But, having taken the problem so far, we may be permitted to moralize a little, in the eighteenth-century manner, ourselves. The point at issue is not that of the "standard-of-living". If the theorists of growth wish us to say so, then we may agree that the older popular culture was in many ways otiose, intellectually vacant, devoid of quickening, and plain bloody poor. Without time- discipline we could not have the insistent energies of industrial man; and whether this discipline comes in the forms of Methodism, or of Stalinism, or of nationalism, it will come to the developing world. What needs to be said is not that one way of life is better than the other, but that this is a place of the most far-reaching conflict...

The italics are mine. What conditions of work are better obviously depend on the worker and the work. Some of us like going to the office and a clear distinction between the workplace and the home. Others resent the tyranny of the timesheet and the surveillance demands of our managers. Neither is wrong, the question is who gets to say. My own preference is for the abolition of timesheets, but then that would suit me; others rightly cherish their timesheets as proof against the 'clock off then unload the truck' habits of wage-thieving bosses.

As the first wave of the pandemic has rolled over and we await the second, it's obvious that the 'new normal' looks just like the older normal, a bit cleaner, a bit less fair. The optimism of April that 'flexibility' would become entrenched and workplaces bent to suit the worker is gone; we are back to the old normal world where 'flexibility' is a manager's word, ready in the HR phrasebook next to 'innovation', 'productivity', and the like, all synonyms for shifting numbers from 'wages costs' to 'profits'. Koziol concludes:

Let's resist the instinct of the technological evangelists to lock us up inside forever with nothing but the internet to bring us together. Returning to the office must be done safely but it should, at some stage, be done.

And here I agree. The conflict isn't over yet.

IT IS NO WONDER that zombies are such a fixture of the horror genre. To be reanimated after one's own death, both with and without the key elements of your identity, treated as a less-than-human shambling artefact and played either for revulsion or comedy---what could be more terrifying? If there is one constant in zombie stories, it's the fundamental indignity of the afterlife: their shambling, angry peacelessness. The zombies naturally want to eat or kill the living, and it's never really a surprise that they should want to. In the first reel of the film, it's always the present that calls upon the dead; a spell, perhaps, or a toxic gas, but the present is always being haunted by the past, and unable to understand its own culpability, without context, or deal with the consequences. If you aren't scared of your own identity becoming reanimated after your death, and used by selfish characters to further a plot-line not of your choosing, maybe you don't have enough imagination.

Elizabeth Farrelly, scab, wrote a bad opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, eulogising Jack Mundey. Mundey was a central figure in the heroic era of heritage conservation in New South Wales, a Communist union organiser who led the 'green bans' by which the Builders' Labourers Federation (BLF) protected both significant buildings and working-class housing. It shouldn't be a surprise for the spirit of such a respected figure to be called upon by a figure as grotesque and shameless as Farrelly, because a scab is fundamentally a shameless person, but somehow this is a new public low both for her and for our society. She, opinionist for the present, is calling upon the past, disinterring it, and making the legacy of a proud tradition jump and shuffle in rags. We are right to be revolted, and to pity the dead.

Every heritage professional knows there's a difficult line between preserving cultural significance for the public good, and the impulse to preserve a past for the sake of its legacy; such heritages end up stifling, reactionary, crowding out better futures, and mocking attempts to create a better world together. Elizabeth Farrelly, who in 2017 crossed a picket line during the Fairfax strike, is very clearly on the latter side of this question, and will always prefer an unthreatening traditional nostalgia; a Sydney in which police corruption could be laughed at and not feared, when larrikinism meant eastern suburbs houses bought cheap, where the heroin epidemic was chic rather than deadly. So why does Farrelly, no friend to trade unions or to the idea of rights at work, want to bring the BLF back? Why can't she leave the dead alone?

People like Mundey had a very simple and very effective theory. You couldn't have either a morally persuasive argument, or power, alone. If you want to create the world you want, you need industrial and political power---to save nice buildings, you need a disciplined workforce who'll refuse to do it. Without a moral goal, you're a cynic; without a way to get and keep power, you're just pissing in the wind. Farrelly, who's shown herself to be the enemy of ordinary people having power in a democratic society, is using the example of Mundey precisely to mock his legacy, and to squash hope and her sentence---reproduced in full for its horror---is a glib peak of cynicism:

But argue now for free political expression and anyone under 40 will look at you like you're barking. Criticise your employer? In public? Inconceivable. Insist that such expression is in fact a duty, not a right, you'd be labelled criminally insane.

This pliant self-censorship has consequences. If I had a citizen's statement from every respected professional who's said, over the years, "I agree with you but of course I must stay silent, keep my job", Sydney would be a different place. The world would be different.

When her own colleagues were fighting for their jobs, Farrelly refused to join the strike, and filed, across the picket line. When people she worked with were taking real risks in criticising their employer, she enthusiastically sided with the boss. She retains her comfortable once-a-week op-ed, because she proved her own subservience. It's the crassest kind of projection, of course, for a scab to condemn pliancy, but it's really something else for Farrelly, a disgraceful and ridiculous person, to even make reference to the proud legacy of the BLF. It's not accidental, it's a shameful deliberate act: Farrelly is reanimating the green bans era, zombie-like, to mock it and to make it shamble around, as if to prove its death, to say look at the past; it is dead, and if you try to dignify your own present or fight for a better world, I will betray you, and mock you. It's the classic call of the secure bunker-dweller who slams shut the door of the zombie fortress against other survivors: Fuck you, Jack, I've got mine.

No wonder we are revolted.

ALAN JONES HAS ANNOUNCED his planned retirement and with his exit from our politics, both NSW and Australia will be a little bit better, a little bit cleaner, a little bit less self-satisfiedly hateful. You will read members of Parliament, celebrities, other members of the press, eulogising his career, paying tribute to a public man, or most predictably of all, describing him as complicated or ambiguous. It's all garbage. The man was uncomplicatedly, straightforwardly, the worst and most toxic public figure of Australia's last half-decade. Our political and cultural life will be better for his absence.

Talkback radio is a technology of the 1920s and 1930s, developed in the USA but spread quickly worldwide, combining a radio transmitter and a telephone switchboard. That's it. It's extremely simple and by now, highly developed. It's the very careful simulation of an audience; obviously all the listeners of a show cannot be callers, the show takes the people who do call in to be representative, even constitutive, of the audience, and that's the show: it's an audience listening to itself by means of the host. At its most successful it's a two-way game, the host and callers engaging in a feedback loop. At its worst it's a nightmarishly cynical whipping-up of prejudices and hatred. Alan Jones' contribution to the medium was to widen that circle of attention and loathing to encompass the rest of the media, the Press Galleries of NSW and the Commonwealth, the focused will of political leaders, and the force of the State.

In 2005 Jones was central to the whipping-up of a race riot in Cronulla, but that disgusting drunken orgiastic beach punch-up was only the culmination, and emblem, of what the politics of NSW and Australia had been becoming for decades. The former Premier Bob Carr's innovation was, in the early 1990s, to use talkback as a central part of governing, in a process now familiar but then new: create a 'yarn', flatter a talkback host, have it become the story, then be seen to respond with a pre-prepared policy solution (what you wanted to do anyway). As talkback became part of the State governing, the rest of the Gallery were forced to integrate it into their reporting, and set the tone for the simulacra of the public that is democracy. In practice, Premiers and MPs and journalists, without genuine access to a public of their own, made the logical step of taking Jonesy's callers to be the public they served. But it's not a focus group, it's a feedback loop. When you put in an argument about road tolls, you get the M4 Cashback. When you put in race hatred, you get groups of young men out for blood.

Biographers are endlessly fascinated by their subjects' contradictions. Jones has many. A public figure who demands, and gets, shameless flattery, but is himself incredibly private in his life. A man of a certain generation who believes in etiquette, courtesy, and treating women with politeness, but who's capable of spitting the most hateful misogyny imaginable into his microphone when a powerful woman disagrees with him. A believer in law and order, the monarchy, and institutions, who was constantly in contempt of court. A well-read, cosmopolitan, urban aesthete who scorns 'elites'. A self-described friend of the battler, and fighter of corporate corruption, who was caught in 1999 taking cash bribes from banks for favourable comment. All true. All irrelevant: it's all just plain old hypocrisy, a sin of which we're all guilty.

He was a bad man who did bad things in a terrible career, making the world a far worse place, and that's all there is to it. Alan Jones' genius was to use a radio show to shape the whole cultural and political life of Sydney, and NSW, to alter the way the State and the country are governed and experienced as a democracy. It wasn't just him: Bob Carr and his beliefless successors across politics must be condemned, and the dust-nosed ghouls of Holt Street and the Daily Telegraph have to wear the contempt of posterity. We have no mass social movements any more, our political Parties are either shells run by LARPers acting out fantasies, or straightforward pyramid schemes, we live prosperous but desperate and atomised lives, and we are forced to imagine ourselves into a public.

Let's take Jonesy's retirement as a chance to shake our heads, look with horror on our mistakes, and say never again.

Morgan Jones, The Social Review: The Labour Campaign for Folk Horror

The key beats of folk horror are the sense of time and the sense of the land- the relationship between place and past. It is perhaps a stretch to call the ways in which the genre thinks about these things “anti-capitalist” – but only slightly. For the protagonists who fall foul of the weird and the old and the powerful and the land itself, their demise is often as a result of an attempt to own, or to exploit, or to regulate, or even just to comprehend the things that have been there for a long, long time. In folk horror, to monetise is to antagonise…

Hush-Kit, 12 ravishingly beautiful aircraft from the Art Deco era, and one from far later

Louis Bechereau’s racing masterpiece: this is the most important aircraft barely anybody ever talks about today, designed by arguably the most important aircraft designer of the Great War (who hardly anybody talks about today). A flying machine to prove that heartbreaking bloodbaths are not necessarily a requirement for advancing our sense of style or our design and engineering skills.

Chris Dillow, Technocrats and class

At impressionable ages we are brought up to believe that success comes from knowledge and intellect. We thus believe this even in contexts where it is wrong. We’d be better prepared for politics if teachers gave top marks not to the brightest students but to the school bullies.

THE AUSTRALIAN DEFENCE FORCE (ADF) is now supporting the States in their response to coronavirus isolation. This includes things like transporting people, doing contact tracing, and packing Foodbank lunches, but also helping the NSW Police with self-isolation directions. The National Communicable Disease Incidence of National Significance Plan (CD Plan) provides for Defence to 'Assist the national response to a communicable disease emergency by filling capability shortfalls within other government departments'.

This is not an accidental choice of words, and also refers to the application of new powers established by law in 2018, and trained with in exercises in 2019.

In October 2019, the ADF participated in Exercise Austral Shield, in which soldiers of the 2nd Division and 4th Brigade trained with the Victoria Police in joint searches and checkpoints, 'protecting' the Loy Yang coal mine in Victoria. The exercise was a test of a number of new powers under amendments to the Defence Act 1903, which, in 2018, expanded the options for 'calling out' the ADF in civil unrest. A number of commentators have long advocated a national disaster role for the ADF. 'Supporting civil order' was one the Prime Minister listed in an interview.

What does it mean for soldiers to have 'detention' powers? What would happen if someone resisted, or ran? Could the Army be called out against quarantine-breakers, border-crossers, or protesters—or post-bushfire looters? Could they, would they, shoot? The Second World War gives us one answer.

On the 7th February 1942 on a closed beach in Sydney (it may have been Bondi), a small group of partygoers, takeaway bottles of beer in hand, wanted a walk and a last drink on the sand. That night, one of the partygoers, Private Stanley Plumb, 25, was killed by a sentry, Private McGraw, 23, who was guarding the beach, barbed-wired against night landings.

Plumb and his companions, including his wife Nell, had been to the Trocadero (a popular dancing club), to a nightclub called the 'Mirrors Club', and had all been drinking. At about 3.30am on February 7, they went down to the beach with some bottles of beer. The servicemen were in uniform.

Plumb seemed 'worked up when the guard refused to let him on the beach', according to LAC Cahill, his friend (Sun, 27 Feb 1942, p3.) 'Put us off!' he said. Private McKeon, one of the other sentries, told the court that Plumb advanced on McGraw saying 'if I get close enough I'll kill you', while Simmons, another sentry, said that he said 'I'll get down the beach no matter what happens'. Holding a bayonet, Plumb said 'Go on—I'll stick you through, you choco —!'

Private McGraw, holding his rifle in the 'on guard' position gave one warning: 'Drop the bayonet or I shoot' (Sydney Morning Herald, 28 Feb 1942, p13). He fired the gun, and the bullet went through Plumb's stomach. Nell Plumb cradled her husband's head in her lap. He was taken to hospital, but died on 12 February.

When the police arrived, a member of the public told Sergeant Robinson and Detective Constable Barnes 'I demand the arrest of this man—he should be charged with murder' (Sun, 2 March 1942, p3). The Army officer in charge of the sentry post, however, ordered the police officers away, saying without jurisdiction, they could not take the sentries into custody, or take the rifle as an exhibit for investigation (Sydney Morning Herald, 9 February 1942, p7).

For the Army, there was no crime, and therefore no evidence. Indeed, for the Army, there would only have been a crime if McGraw hadn't fired, the military crime of disobeying orders. The Minister for the Army, Frank Forde, began discussing the question with his Department and with the NSW Police: just what, legally, had happened on the beach?

There was no question about Private McGraw's intent to kill. McGraw himself told the Coroner: 'I shot him. He was menacing me with a bayonet and I thought he was going to stab me' (SMH, 28 Feb 1942, p13). 'I dropped the rifle to my hip before I fired the shot... After warning him I called out, "I'll shoot you, fair dinkum, sport". I did not accidentally pull the trigger—I pulled it deliberately' (Sun, 2 March 1942, p3). It was neither an accident nor a mistake.

In the end, the Coroner blamed Private Plumb, the victim, who ought to have known that the sentry had orders, and would be expected to shoot. The Coroner's finding, 'justifiable homicide', is entered in the Australian War Memorial's honour roll, against Private Stanley Joseph Plumb, NX78659, 8 Infantry Training Battalion.

Where did the battlefield begin and civil life end? The NSW Police felt that a soldier was 'also a civilian', and that they should still be allowed to investigate crimes (The Sun, 9 Feb 1942, p3). The Army, on the other hand, felt that if sentries were to be charged for obeying orders, none of them would shoot, and then what would the point of sentries be? A barrister in The Sun said it was 'commonsense' that the police shouldn't go into the front line. But where was the front line?

The issues are not so simple even today. The ADF has already trained to assist Police with the kinds of checkpoints and searches now being established at State borders, and which may be established around COVID hotspots. In 2017, the Prime Minister announced the 'streamlining' of the Commonwealth powers to call out the ADF's special forces. Since 2013 the whole of Australia has been a non-zone for immigration by boat, to be protected in a designated military Operation [Sovereign Borders]. Which is the civil power and which the military? Where is the front line, is it nowhere or everywhere?

A legal background paper looked at the issues in 1997, and asked:

...is it a satisfactory state of affairs for soldiers to face the possibility of private actions and criminal charges arising from their obedience... [with] no way for the soldiers to assess the lawfulness or otherwise of their superior officer's commands?

In 2018, introducing the legislation which expanded the 'Call Out' provisions of the Defence Act, the Member for Canning, Andrew Hastie MP, a veteran, expressed the view that:

ADF units, when deployed in response or called out to a terrorist incident, are still operating under the Australian rule of law. No obligations are lifted for them to accord with what is expected of them in the ADF and within our judicial system.

In fact, as Private Plumb's death showed in 1942, it is not clear, and can never be. Soldiers are obliged to apply lethal violence, contrary to civil laws against assault and murder, but in accordance with lawful orders. It's an important distinction and it is just this distinction between civil space and the battlefield that terrorism, as well as disorder in natural disaster, tends to erase. We have no historical guide at all, legal or moral, to dealing with pandemic disorder in a complex modern society.

If and when the issue comes again to question, it will be in a situation like the one that Privates McGraw and Plumb found themselves before one killed the other: confused, noisy, emotional, with seconds (or less) for quite young people to make decisions. The rest of us, who have more time, and eighty years to look back, owe any future Private Plumbs more consideration than that.