Category Australia

• Rissoles

  EVERY CULTURE HAS RECIPES where everyone gets to be an expert. They’re the ones where there’s no particular recipe, but you kind of know what to expect, and where the whole exercise in cooking becomes a self-reinforcing cliché. Clemenza’s meatballs in The Godfather are are the perfect example; the roly-poly gangster gives a cute little New York Italian lecture on criminal patriarchy, he sugars the chopped meat, then they go and kill some people. It’s culture, self-representation and wrapped in a fork-sized meat ball!

  Posted 20 September 2012 | Author Liam Hogan

• My Mum Doesn't Work For The Australian

  WHEN MURDOCH PAPERS ARE MENTIONED in class its always with an undertone of sarcasm. I don’t understand why. After all, my mum works for The Australian and she likes her job.

  Pity poor Max Maddison, first year journalism student, whipping boy of the week for everybody like me in Australia who disdains not just the Murdoch press institution but the entire sordid establishment of our media. If I have a hobbyhorse I like to ride, then at least I know there are many more like me: we are an angry, sarcastic cavalry of dissatisfaction.

  Posted 24 April 2012 | Author Liam Hogan

• French Onion Soup

  AS A WHITEY-AUSTRALIAN, I FEEL deep down the imperative, despite criticism and all sense of self-reflection, to carry on my ethnic burden to cook utterly climate-inappropriate meals. It’s a reflex that should be familiar to anyone who’s listened to Paul Kelly’s narrator, languishing in clink, fantasising about Christmas gravy. By the age of twenty, like it or not, every Anglo kid has at some point in her or his life, accepted the terrible demands of tradition despite the urgings of the weather and common-sense and the knowledge of inevitable gastric punishment and eaten pudding and custard in December. We accept this, as a small price of eternal national foreignness. It’s normal, and funny. We make jokes about the dissonance.

  The latest details from the Bureau of Meteorology list the temperature as 24.8°, with a 65% humidity, and I’m cooking French onion soup.

  Posted 16 March 2012 | Author Liam Hogan