IN THE MOST RECENT AUSTRALIAN Census, I registered myself as ethnically Australian, non-religious in outlook. Despite my stereotypically Irish name and culturally Catholic background they’re the most accurate descriptions of how I live my day-to-day life. This morning, though, I spent outside the office of my local Member of Parliament, there to take part in a battle of rent-a-crowds, and received a short sharp lesson in—for lack of a better phrase—the genealogy of my morals.

“Tolerance is Our Demise”. Marrickville’s Convoy of No Confidence, 1 September 2011. Image copyright Anthony Albanese MP.

I WILL NOT PESTER YOU with further niceties applicable to the difference between houses of correction, and work-houses, and poor-houses, if any there should be, which are not work-houses; between the different modes of treatment that may be due to what are looked upon as the inferior degrees of dishonesty, to idleness as yet untainted with dishonesty, and to blameless indigence. The law herself has scarcely eyes for these microscopic differences. I bow down, therefore, for the present at least, to the counsel of so many sages, and shrink from the crime of being ‘wiser than the law.’

That’s Jeremy Bentham, appealing to The Australian’s universal truth, that for every problem, no matter how simple or wicked, there exists a solution: thoroughgoing industrial relations reform.

Update: No food blogging until further notice. Principles to weigh up. Faith to keep…

AT THE HEART OF AUSTRALIAN multiculturalism lies a willingness on the part of migrants and migrant communities to self-organise. Yes, it’s true, there’s a lot more to it than the notorious three Fs—folkdancing, fashion and food—including a much larger discourse about the role of the State in endorsing, forbidding, legitimising and co-opting multiple linguistic, religious and cultural identities as aspects of the national habitus and the post-Bretton Woods political economy, but every Council has to have a Festival, and everybody needs lunch.

I SHARE MY LECTURES IN the Masters course I’m enrolled in with architects, civil engineers, a few property developers, and one or two landscape designers. I’m one of a very small minority, I find, who’ve ever spent any time down in the humanities or social science end of a university—and it’s something of a shock to jump over into the space of the other of The Two Cultures.¹

SCOFIELD TOUCHED MY ARM. “HERE we is,” he said.
We had come to a huge tenement building.
“Where are we?” I said.
“This is the place where most of us live,” he said. “Come on.”
So that was it, the meaning of the kerosene. I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe they had the nerve. All the windows seemed empty. They’d blacked it out themselves. I saw now only by flash or flame.
“Where will you live?” I said, looking up, up.
“You call this living?” Scofield said. “It’s the only way to get rid of it, man…”

—from Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, first published 1952

THE PREDOMINANCE OF ASSIMILATIONIST CONSTRUCTS… meant that questions about how Australian institutions had responded to an influx of people of non Anglo-Saxon origin simply did not come to the surface. There was no ‘decision’ to rule such questions out of order. They did not arise; they were not ‘confronted’…¹

That’s your favourite Australian domestic sociologist and mine, Jean Martin, describing non-decisionmaking in action—when something’s simply ruled out of public knowledge as a subject to have ideas about.

THE PEOPLE’S FLAG IS DEEPEST red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts blood dyed its every fold….

Jim Connell wrote the song, and gave it to the social democrats and labourists of the twentieth and twenty-first century. The British Labourists still sing it; even the Australians still know the words.

Norwegian kids can’t be that different to the young women and men I spent my twenties arguing with. Like A, I’ve been an earnest teenager in a youth wing of a moderate, labourist, reforming Party. For pleasant and unpleasant times, for all their enthusiasm and compromise and cynicism, they’re my people. And to read the news makes me sick to my heart.

It well recalls the triumphs past,
It gives the hope of peace at last;
The banner bright, the symbol plain,
Of human rights and human gain.

FORM IS TEMPORARY, CLASS IS permanent—or so, apocryphally, did Steve Waugh appropriate a cricketer’s hundred year-old cliché. The aphorism’s also served as a common student politician’s reasonably witty running joke, punning on the Marxist sense of class conflict, and it’s served as at least one conservative candidate’s election motto, that I know about.¹

ON THE WEEKEND OF JULY 9-10, the august sovereign body of the Australian Labor Party (New South Wales Branch), the State Conference, met at the Sydney Town Hall. It’s been a while between drinks, and we were all hoping, I think, for an uneventful two days out. If you’ve never been to one, you’ll have to imagine a cross between an undergraduate debate, a dissenting Protestant worship service, Modern Times, a crowd scene in an Altman movie and Thunderdome. But, you know, in a good way.

Open microphone, with Johno at the head of the queue

THIS MORNING I HAD MY upper front tooth surgically removed and replaced with a temporary bridge. In a couple of months, once the bone has solidified and the dentist is prepared to put it in, I’ll have that bridge replaced with an implant and another more permanent bridge. It’s all from being kicked in the face when I was 15, and apparently my upper jaw is now a bit of a dental curio. They tried to hide the excitement, but all of the other dentists in the surgery came around during the procedure to have a look down my throat to see what was going on—I’ve never seen so many eyes peering over white masks. Honestly, about halfway through I felt like the middle of a two-up school on ANZAC Day. “Hand me those forceps and more gauze. No more bets please. Come in, suction!”