Category Heritage

• Fedeterranea

  IN THE GLORY DAYS of blogging there was a grand blog, Marrickvillia, which coined some incredible phrases, including 'gut-n-smeg' (for the process by which an existing house with outdated fixtures is updated with new kitchens, bathrooms, and a new rental price). The greatest of these neologisms however was Fedeterranea:

  These homes are found in every street in Marrickville. They're mostly owned by people who came to Australia from Italy and Greece in the 1960s and 1970s. A mix of Federation and Mediterranean aesthetics, they are a striking hybrid of architectural styles. Columns, stone lions, statues, terracotta tiling, palm trees and/or clipped conifers, olive & citrus trees, variations on the "Marrickville aegean blue" paint, arches, brick cladding... have all been added to the facades of sedate early twentieth-century homes that feature (or featured once) tuckpointing, coloured window glass, tesselated tiling, agave plants & camellia hedges.

  Posted 12 May 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• Bird World

  WE MUST ASSUME BASED on his silence that Graeme Bird is dead, in an institution, or in any case is beyond authorship. This was a man whose incredibly prolific commenting and blog posting in the Australian internet and beyond, through the 2000s and early 2010s, makes his present absence from the internet inexplicable except by force.

  Posted 6 February 2025 | Author Liam Hogan

• Flats

  THE CITY OF SYDNEY Council proposes to nominate for State Heritage Register (SHR) listing a set of modern apartment blocks, including Ithaca Gardens in the Eastern Suburbs. Ithaca is a Harry Seidler apartment block and a landmark; the others are similar. All are covered already either by Heritage Conservation Areas or by some other form of protection. Listing on the State register would be an increase. I simply note that pthe language being used to oppose its inclusion in the SHR is almost exactly identical to that which might have been used in the 1970s in its favour. In the 1970s the heritage system in NSW was created as a response to excessively arbitrary Government power, threatening localism.

  Carroll, the Ithaca Gardens owners’ corporation chair, voiced residents’ “overwhelming opposition” to local or state heritage listing at a council committee meeting last week. “Ithaca Gardens is not a museum, a place of worship, an office tower or an individual residence – it is home to more than 60 people. Owners … love and respect the building,” he said. ... He said many of the apartments had been renovated internally to make them “more suitable for 21st-century living” and “to deny such rights to others would seem extremely unfair”.

  Posted 17 December 2024 | Author Liam Hogan

• Ground floor

  BUILDING DESIGN SHARES A lot of similarity to the spread of memes on the internet. A successful configuration that resonates with people’s experience of the world, or to the experiences of some group of them, will reproduce itself in self-similar ways. Designs that become popular are that way because they respond to specific needs and desires, and carry symbolic meaning, not because they are intrinsically good. Surviving designs, like memes, don’t last because people like them, they survive because they’ve outlasted other worse ones.

  Posted 9 October 2024 | Author Liam Hogan

• Foo

  I WORK IN NEWTOWN, in Sydney’s inner west. It’s a centre for graffiti and street art, which range from well-executed commissioned murals, to tags, to stickers; they’re artistic, political, commercial, pornographic, and everything in between. And occasionally they’re culturally significant:

  

  This is ‘Foo’ or Kilroy, who is definitely more than 80 years old, and possibly dates to the First World War.

  Posted 28 October 2022 | Author Liam Hogan

• Time Honoured Disguise And Borrowed Language

  THE TRADITION OF ALL dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.

  —-Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852

  The monument to Lenin that was installed in occupied Henichesk, Kherson Oblast, yesterday.
  The photo was published by local collaborator Hennadiy Maliukov.

  

  Posted 19 April 2022 | Author Liam Hogan

• Light fittings

  I CALL THIS UGLY object the ‘NATO Standard NSW Investment Property light fitting’, and once you start looking you’ll see the prick everywhere. It’s been in every house I’ve ever rented. I hate it and everything it represents.

  

  Posted 16 August 2021 | Author Liam Hogan

• Catallaxy

  CATALLAXY FILES, THE AUSTRALIAN right-wing blog that was central to the local mid-2000s early-2010s blogging culture, and Larvatus Prodeo’s counterpart across ideology, has closed. Its domain points to its own archive held by the Commonwealth.

  Posted 2 August 2021 | Author Liam Hogan

• 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.

  Posted 8 February 2021 | Author Liam Hogan

• Church

  THE INNER WEST COUNCIL has declined to list a church as locally significant on its ‘Schedule 5’ register of items of local heritage, a statutory instrument. It’s interesting for what it reveals about the objects and practices of Australian built heritage.

  Posted 16 November 2020 | Author Liam Hogan