This is ‘Foo’ or Kilroy, who is definitely more than 80 years old, and possibly dates to the First World War.
]]>This is ‘Foo’ or Kilroy, who is definitely more than 80 years old, and possibly dates to the First World War.
]]>There’s an aesthetic to houses that have this horrible, specific, light fixture. None show any of the signs of being a long-term owner-occupied house (like family-specific renovations, obvious signs of children, or the kind of post-war immigrant vernacular concreting that is disappearing, displaced by money, throughout the Inner West Rental Belt). They aren’t in post-2000 flats which have a different aesthetic of empty money—-there it’s hangover-punishing halogen downlights. These horrible bastards are the Mark of Cain of housing which has been left to the vagaries of returns-on-investment. They are the light that signifies fungible shelter, rented at a yield, maintenance carried out at a fixed rate and schedule whether needed or not.
]]>The Council had commissioned an independent heritage architect to make an assessment of the Churches of Christ building on Marrickville Road (PDF), which is unambiguous: the church is a significant item and meets the thresholds for listing. I agree.
It’s the right outcome in this instance. What is being proposed is a specific community housing proposal, led by the Churches of Christ itself. The Churches of Christ are the objects of the listing, the group most likely to find meaning in the significance of the place: it would have been a layered irony if that group, an evangelical Protestant denomination whose history explicitly rejects established Churches, had a building protected in spite of their wishes.
The Councillors seem to have split beyond lines of Party, with a ‘socialist’ Green, the Labor mayor, and a right-wing Liberal on the pro side, and other Labor and Green councillors on the anti. That reflects the unusual decision, but also the fact that the Councillors were being put in an impossible position, to decide on a listing—whether a place is significant or not—as a proxy for making a decision about whether a specific proposal should go ahead. That’s an event the Heritage Act and its framework are deliberately supposed to prevent occurring.
It is never supposed to happen that anyone has to make a decision about heritage on the basis of any one proposal. Conservation Management Plans, for instance, are forbidden from making specific recommendations for future use, something you’d think a Plan would cover. There is sense though: it’s to stop arguments about virtue or worth of a future project (or worse, its profit margin) from affecting the objective assessment of significance. ‘Write me a Conservation Plan to support my demolition’, every developer would otherwise say, and get. In heritage, a bright professional line is supposed to divide what is significant from what is not.
What does not exist in NSW (or the rest of Australia) is a means to override a heritage listing on social grounds, that is to say about a proposal, yes, it will affect heritage, but it’s worth it. That would be a dangerous power, but in practice the lack of that power has formed our urban places, and for the worse. For twenty or thirty years, as the real estate value of inner urban places have sky-rocketed, its owners have used the heritage system as leverage to prevent development that would be otherwise legal in the planning system, and increased the value of their own stake, at the expense of the future. The Heritage Conservation Area is the typical tool for this, a big broad brush to paint Heritageness, in deep green, cream, and Indian red, over one’s neighbours.
Anyone with eyes can see the effects. There’s a reason people see racism baked into a heritage system that protects suburban built architectural heritage even when its owners don’t want it, but fails to protect the natural and cultural heritage of traditional owners, when they do. I love Federation architecture, particularly its detailed brick and timberwork, and live in a [rented] late Victorian terrace, but can’t avoid the obvious relationship between the moral horror of Australia’s most chauvinist era (the fin de siècle into the 1920s) and our fierce protection of its architecture.
More generally, this failure of the heritage system is a product of Australian form-mindedness, an aspect of our culture which is rule-bound, officious, and obsessed with the appearance of fairness over its reality. We are incapable of having political arguments about worth or virtue in different possible futures, and have looked to ‘heritage’, over the past decades, to justify self-interest. Significance doesn’t simply exist as an inherent, independent quality of places, it’s a part of what we as a community decide to value and pass on, which is the entirety of the places we live in. What we have been doing is protecting the aesthetics of suburbs, with forms to fill out to stop medium density, in the hope that the cheap housing and freewheeling culture of the 1970s will come back—a politics of nostalgic fantasy.
The process was wrong, but the Council got it right. The decision wasn’t significant-or-not, it was between calling a place open for community housing, and to value the presence of new people, or protecting the building, and saying, in paraphrase of the well-known bogan slogan, ‘fuck off, we’re heritage’.
]]>You have to go a surprisingly long way to catch them all. It was mostly a pretext to run any gremlins out of the motorbike I have spent hours repairing back into rideable condition, and to ride in some stunningly beautiful parts of Sydney, but it seems to me a pointlessly satisfying navigation exercise—you can work it out as a problem of nodes like Euler did, by trial and error with google maps like I did, or any other way. Cross every ferry once, no u-turns or retracing your path. There’s a large, but finite, number of ways you can do it.
The vehicle ferries, for the record, are:
I did it in ~280km, taking a bit over 7.5 hours. Beware: some of the ferries run 24/7, while others have limited hours. There is some unpaved road north of the Hawkesbury River. None of the ferries have a toll; you do not need to pay the ferryman.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>Is the experience of university study changing, becoming a harsher, higher-pressure set of years? I'm certain it is. Tertiary study is a speeded-up and Fordised version of its past, particularly for students, even at universities where the administration hasn't turned two semesters into three. In this sense it's worth experiencing nostalgia for a passing institution, and particularly for the time-freedom that it used to represent. Just as lunchtime day-drinking is no longer part of Australian working or corporate life, and as universities are deliberately becoming workforce preparation colleges, so fewer students will ever remember sinking beer before afternoon tutorials. If it's a tragedy, then it's a piss-ant, typically Australian, high-whinge but low-stakes one.
Nostalgia is a fundamentally human impulse and a means of making sense of the passage of time, but it's no way to run a society, and it fools us. We mistake the stories we tell about the past for the past's actual presence in our lives, and the other potential futures that are now closed to us. David Lowenthal was onto this in the 1980s:
If recognizing the past's difference promoted its preservation, the act of preserving made that difference still more apparent. Venerated as a fount of communal identity, cherished as a precious and endangered resource, yesterday became less and less like today. Yet its relics and residues are increasingly stamped with today's lineaments. We may fancy an exotic past that contrasts with a humdrum or unhappy present, but we forge it with modern tools. The past is a foreign country whose features are shaped by today's predilections, its strangeness domesticated by our own preservation of its vestiges.1
There is an exotic past, and it is the weird memory of pleasantly unmanageable time, and underemployment that didn't mean anything. Manning Bar serves today for men and women of my class and generation as a common experience of that youthful spare time. But who cares, apart from those of us who enjoyed it? Public remembrance of schooners sunk on weekday afternoons on the balcony is a shibboleth of a mutual elitism, and it should point to the ever-concentrating domination of People Who Went To Sydney Uni In The Nineties in our cultural and political life. Nostalgia should sometimes be disgusting, and, to quote a hit from the era, we should sometimes look back in anger.
Contemporary memory of Manning Bar is a symptom of the kind of society where all our journalists and politicians and writers had the chance to meet in the same tutorials; where it's unheard of to join even the most junior grades of the public service without a degree or two; where two Miéville-city-and-the-city universities exist in parallel, one a stripped-back job-ticket stamper, the other a middle class marriage club; where a savage and ruthless ruling class hypocritically consoles itself for domination with a youthful-lefty self-image of having once seen The Whitlams at Manning.
Lowenthal, David. The Past Is A Foreign Country. CUP, Cambridge, 1985. p(xviii). ↩
Character is what makes a neighbourhood distinctive and is the identity of the place. It encompasses the way a place looks and feels. It is created by a combination of land, people, built environment, history, culture and tradition, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, and it looks at how they interact to create an area’s distinctive character.
The NSW Government is committed to ensuring strategic planning recognises and enhances the local character of an area, and that communities share what they value about their area to inform planning and decision making.
It’s really a concept from the late 1970s, and the ecological turn to preserving environments. Modernists in planning—the dominant strain from the early 20th century into the 1980s—would have seen the definition above as tautological, because of course, the way a place looks and feels is the way it looks and feels; but it’s the quality of people’s lives, and the ability of places to economically/physically support those lives, that mattered. In the pre-war, it was aesthetic and hygienic, in the inter-war, suburban and expansive, and in the post-war, an optimistic efficiency exercise in managing growth, and all the problems-you-want-to-have of a society with little unemployment, many babies, and lots of money. That places should be valued in planning wouldn’t have entered into the question, because planning was about making places better: if a place was valued as it was, then it wouldn’t need planning; and in any case, it was up to the experts to decide.
Of course some ideologies and ways of thinking have been fixated on ‘local character’ for a very much longer time, but they thought of places and cities less as locations to cherish as they were, than to fixate on, in irredentism. Where there is a Serb, there is Greater Serbia, as the slogan went, and the nationalists of the 19th and 20thC genuinely believed in using political (and military) power to enforce the local characters, deciding, for instance, whether they would be Roman or Cyrillic.
It is notable that the NSW law with which we make decisions about places, the NSW Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979 makes no mention of place-character, only ‘character’ as it relates to specific buildings, leaving the drafters of Local Environmental Plans (LEPs) to use the concept of ‘local character’ in Humpty-Dumpty style, no more and no less than what they want it to mean. In practice it isn’t preserved, so much as brought into being by ideology, by the preservation of specific things that people value, quite literally value in the cases of real property, and by forbidding alternative futures. This blog entry has been in part inspired by the relentless real estate ads in the letterbox of my [rented] house, listing the [colossal] sale prices of the locally-characterful local housing stock.
‘Local character’ is now the infinitely malleable definition to suit any possible argument about place, no matter how cynically self-serving. We’ve come to the understanding that conserving things that work and are communally valued about places is important—and it is—but we’ve also allowed, through elision of language, people to slip in their own pleading for self-interest and fuck-you-got-mine. Who likes ‘local character’ the best, but the local characters?
In Newtown, NSW, where my office is, there is a mural in the tradition of ‘Keep [location] Weird’, an individualist aesthetic pioneered by Austin, Texas, but now reproduced identically by bourgeois enclaves around the world, which has what I think is the mascot of discussions about local character. It is an anthropomorphic drum, forever beating its own head.
]]>...I will actively support the Constitution, Platform and Principles of the Australian Labor Party including the democratic socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange, to the extent necessary to eliminate exploitation and other antisocial features in these fields...
They're compromised words, and the paragraph shows not only tinkering and negotiation (especially in a big Conference stink in 1922), and a sense of the Party's leitmotif, grand decadent tragedy, but a real ambiguity about what any of those things are. In 2020 you could point to each of the four realms to be socialised and say—well that's just what Facebook does, isn't it?—Which would lead you nowhere useful. But a little more than a hundred years ago the Labor experiment took the words deadly seriously and launched on an earnest and odd project to rig a market in the people's favour, and established the State Bakery, Stanmore.
The State Bakery, with equivalents in other areas (trawlers, forestry) was the State Government buying or establishing enterprises to compete and set market terms for the other private operators, and bears more in common with the ABC or public childcare than it does with any concept of wartime rationing or Government Bread. Still, in today's terms the attempt seems brave, even odd.
In late 1913 or early 1914 the property was purchased by the NSW Government and became the State Bakery, with Joseph Boss remaining as manager. The purchase price was £8,200 and additions to plant and vehicles brought the price to nearly £12,000. (Argus, 2 March 1916, p. 6) The State Bakery was a successful venture and in the 1915-1916 financial year made a net profit of £3,172. It joined a growing collection of state enterprises, including the State Abattoir, State Brickworks, State Timber Depot and (in 1915) State Trawlers. Though some of these enterprises had begun under conservative governments, the first NSW Labor administration of James McGowen in 1911 had accelerated this trend. The Labor Party’s aim was probably not the nationalisation of industry, but the use of State enterprises to regulate the market and prevent profiteering. A staple like bread was an obvious candidate for this kind of intervention.
The building remains, has been converted into units, and is commemorated in Cultural Heritage form, with a fancy ye olde sign over the door.
]]>]]>...I will actively support the Constitution, Platform and Principles of the Australian Labor Party including the democratic socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange, to the extent necessary to eliminate exploitation and other antisocial features in these fields...