Orange Juice & Ryvita

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

Author Liam Hogan

  • 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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  • Cardboard record player

    THE SIMPLE CARDTALK RECORD player was developed to play phonograph records without electricity.

    (In the spirit of the web log I am going to post more things that I read)

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  • Rain

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  • The Manual

    IN 1988 THE KLF published The Manual, or How To Have A Number One The Easy Way. Like the band’s music, it’s both instantly dated and completely timeless. It might be one of the most significant manifestoes of the 20thC or it might be a worthless cynical PR pamphlet. A fan has transcribed it into plaintext and hosted it.

    Money is a very strange concept. There will be points in the forthcoming months when you might not have the change in your pockets to get the bus into town at the same time as you are talking to people on the telephone in terms of tens of thousands of pounds. Some of the following might seem contradictory but in matters of money they often are. We spoke earlier of how being on the dole gives you a clearer vision of how society works. What it doesn’t do is give you a clear idea of how money works…

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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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  • Cuisine

    IN THE COLD WAR bestseller Gorky Park, the villain, at an upscale New York restaurant with the hero-detective, makes a short speech about the true tragedy of the Soviet Union’s 20th century: the destruction, by Communism, of Russian cuisine. Since it follows another villainous anecdote about the Siege of Leningrad, Martin Cruz-Smith is really leaning into sardonicism at that point. Aaron Timms’ Salt Fat Acid Defeat in N+1 is excellent and you should read it, and makes the same point more seriously (and angrily): that restaurant culture is shitty to exactly the extent our broader culture is, kitchens and food cultures change faster than we think, and that we can do better.

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  • Delivery

    MY OFFICE IS IN Newtown in Sydney, so I get to see the ingenuity and suffering of delivery riders on every variety of two-wheeled vehicle. It goes without saying that the work is among the worst paid, most dangerous, and most unpleasant, ways to make a living. What I’ve become interested in lately though is the sheer badness of the actual electric bikes, scooters, and motorbikes the riders use, because they’re bad in specific ways. Look closely and you’ll see cable ties holding them together, bald tyres, evidence of collisions, dropped bikes, wires exposed, just every variation of jerry-rigged cheap fix. They’re cheap bikes, flogged all day, and given exactly, and only, the amount of repair and maintenance needed to keep them running.

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  • 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.

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  • Courtiers

    WHEN HE WAS MINISTER for Immigration (1972—1974), ‘Al’ Grassby had one dedicated staffer to assist him in his portfolio duties, and that was a secretary-receptionist-typist. How things change. In the last few decades, and at an accelerating rate, the numbers of unelected ‘staffers’ attached to Ministers, as well as electorate staff, has massively increased in Australian Parliaments. We are now at the point where the working and social world of staffers form their own societies attached to State Governments and the Federal Government in Canberra, an opaque one, closed to outsiders, self-regarding and self-contained, but with enormous importance for its effects on the rest of us. And as was shown in Monday’s Four Corners episode, it behaves, when it thinks it thinks it can’t be seen, with genuinely disgusting misogyny and self-entitlement.

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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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