Orange Juice & Ryvita

Food, politics, underemployment and the consumption of time and leisure

Category Australia

  • Joh

    AUSTRALIAN SOCIETY IN THE present moment fulfils all of Joh Bjelke-Petersen's promises to the future. Joh, Premier of Queensland 1968–1987 presided over a State with all the qualities Australia enjoys today: it was parochial, violent, hypocritical, complacent, as crooked as a broken finger, as racist as the day is long. Since he failed to become Prime Minister, we have no sense of how Joh would have treated the border, but we can infer his probable attitudes from today's current affairs, a strongman Fortress Australia that looks inward, punishing the vulnerable, wondering why anyone would want to leave.

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  • Cut and paste

    THAT THE AUSTRALIAN SYSTEMS for heritage and environmental protection are racist is just a statement of the obvious; the Pope is Catholic for the same reasons, and with the same irrevocable finality. They are designed not to protect, but to establish a framework of forms to permit, and there’s really nothing that can’t legally be done if someone is willing to put enough time into drawing up a fancy enough report.

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  • Chainsaws

    TREES ARE RARELY ASSESSED as significant cultural heritage in Australia; the bar is too high. When a project manager gets on the blower and asks ‘now listen, but is it heritage?’, a professional applies the standard frameworks of his or her calling, and decides—with a standardised process—either a yes/no significance answer, or a level of significance (from ‘little’ to ‘exceptional’). Human involvement in the thing or place is the most important: places where historical events happened, buildings made by specific people, artefacts of a known history. The reason trees rarely meet the ‘but is it heritage?’ test is because they’re ephemeral by nature, growing and reproducing themselves and dying by themselves, without people needing to be involved. ‘Cultural landscapes’, the fashion of the 2000s, remedy part of the question of individual trees by seeing the forests, but there’s generally no such thing as a ‘heritage tree’. You see the problem already.

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  • Cheap human beings

    THE FAIRFAX NEWSPAPERS HAVE long figured in this country as an expression of liberalism's two-facedness; as the cliché goes, able to entertain two opposed ideas at the same time, and put them both in a single edition. That they can be demonised by the political Right as the mouthpieces of the inner city élites and also by the political Left as unashamed barrackers for corporate and boss power, and that both can be right, is only credit to Fairfax/Nine's editors. Consider this pair (the italics are mine):

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  • Explosives

    THE MINING COMPANY RIO Tinto was recently responsible for the blasting of a set of highly significant caves in Juukan Gorge in the Hammersley Ranges. This was legal; Ministerial authority under Western Australian law gives consent to this kind of mining development, which can then not be held up in other courts. By contrast, Heritage Acts across the States protect non-Aboriginal cultural heritage more elaborately. In Sydney, the Sirius Building, whose redevelopment was, in a similar way, given direct consent by the Minister, was looked over by the Supreme Court, and saved from demolition. Plain racism explains a great deal of the distinction, but not everything.

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  • Interior, Cocktail Lounge, Menzies Hotel

    ONE OF MY FAVOURITE Australian photographers is Wolfgang Sievers, who fled Nazi Germany to make a commercial career photographing Australian factories, mines, refineries, office buildings, and construction sites. He was a modernist, who liked to remove all the people from his photographs and capture the places as the gigantic machines for abstract production that they, in a sense, were. If like me you like extremely geometric pictures of other people’s workplaces, you’ll like Sievers.

    Sometimes though there’s a photograph that goes against the grain of the rest of the otherwise spare and formal collection, in a glorious way, and even though formally posed, just captures a moment. The interior of the Cocktail Lounge, Menzies Hotel, 509 Bourke Street Melbourne is just such a picture.

    Waiter, two whiskey sours and a pink gin! Thanks mate!

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  • Designing a jail

    IN THE NEW INQUIRY, Monica Mohapatra writes about the uneasy appeal of design thinking to make better prisons. The piece is excellent. Read it.

    Design approaches to jail have recently become appealing to ruling classes because they garner a profit from aesthetic changes that are easily branded as prison reform. Underlying this facade of reform is the fact that architectural improvements serve to make jails more palatable for a future where jails will neighbor more communities...

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  • The years have made me bitter

    THE YEARS HAVE MADE me bitter, the gargle dims my brain
    'cause Dublin keeps on changing, and nothing seems the same
    The Pillar and the Met have gone, the Royal long since pulled down
    As the great unyielding concrete makes a city of my town.

    On the 23rd of March, last Saturday, NSW went to a State election and narrowly re-elected its government. The Coalition, unpopular for its performance but with a well-respected leader, faced a Labor Party with an unremarkable campaign and an unknown leader whose comments about Asian demographic change were reported in the last week, to catastrophic effect.

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  • Total House

    On Twitter, Trav (@Br_Tr) posted an art print of the Total House car park in Melbourne. It’s a really good looking piece of architectural art, and like all good art, it creates an emotional and intellectual response. Mine, of course, was fury.

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  • Moderation

    INSTEAD OF READING THIS article by Julia Baird on ‘trolling’, read this essay by Jason Wilson on industrial moderation.

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