Category Sydney

• Character

  A GENEALOGY OF THE concept of ‘local character’, as it applies to places, would be like making a family tree for a usurping new monarch: energetic, but short. ‘Local character’ is everywhere in the language of talking about places and planning, though it’s only surprisingly recently that the terms have had meaning. The NSW Department of Planning describes the concept this way:

  Posted 3 February 2020 · Author Liam Hogan

• State Bakery

  ONCE, THE NSW GOVERNMENT tried to run a State Bakery. As readers may know, the Party card of the NSW Labor Party, to which every member signs a pledge, are partially as follows:

  ...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...

  Posted 23 January 2020 · Author Liam Hogan

• Old Sydney Town

  IN 1975, A THEME park called Old Sydney Town outside Gosford in NSW was opened in the spirit of authenticity, recreationism, and heritage, and drew heavily on the example of Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia in the United States, in the sense that it was to be a living museum. Its organisers drew on academic expertise to get the very most knowledge, and to mimic as closely as possible the evolution of immediately post-contact Sydney. Professors of history were consulted and appointed, professional conservationists involved for their built environment expertise, antiquarians set to providing antiques, and traditionalist tradesmen hired as masons, carpenters, thatchers, limeburners, wood turners, plasterers, blacksmiths, potters, leatherworkers, ad infinitum. Soldier-reenactors were fitted for shakos, crossbelts and red jackets, gunsmiths supplied replica Brown Besses.

  It goes without saying that there was no Aboriginal presence at Old Sydney Town.

  

  Posted 13 December 2019 · Author Liam Hogan

• Scab is always taunt

  BETTER PEOPLE THAN YOU or I have fought against shifting displacement. The Green Bans are the well-known heroic story of the beginning of built-environment heritage protection and the last hurrah of working class militancy in Australia. The Builders Labourers Federation (BLF), a union made up of low-skilled demolition and construction workers, made common cause with the interests of preservationists and aesthetes of cultural significance. From the unlikely teaming-up of singletted Communists and connoisseurs of Georgian buildings, NSW retains its Rocks, its Kelly’s Bush, its significant buildings and its Heritage Act 1977.

  Posted 3 July 2017 · Author Liam Hogan

• Rum

  MODERN DRINKERS RECOGNISE RUM as a spirit distilled from sugarcane (more often specifically, molasses). These days, unlike those of Australia’s original penal settlement, you can’t drink it in jail. Eddie Obeid, formerly New South Wales Minister, formerly member of the Legislative Council, formerly OAM, will have none for a period of at least three years, and up to five. That’s not likely to concern Eddie, who is reportedly not a big drinker, or indeed, anyone else. That Obeid has been sentenced is justice, no more or less. But how much does our current political culture owe to the rum days?

  Posted 16 December 2016 · Author Liam Hogan

• Stop the x save the y

  I CAN’T FEEL THE outrage. It’s true that Westconnex, the planned motorway to be constructed through and underneath Sydney’s inner west, is bad. It’s a model of combined woeful planning, culture war assumptions about transport, shocking public relations, and kleptonomics: a chuckleheaded set of map lines straight from love-in seminars between baked-in NSW Treasury headcases and cynical bagmen from the usual consultancies. It’s a highway project that would shame Robert Moses, who, when all was said, at least believed in the public good and not simply transport efficiency. It has been and will be a crappy project from the get-go to the eventual ribbon-cutting ceremony, and it should justify every vociferous demonstration, tree ribbon, and lie-in. Yet I can’t quite gather the strength to be infuriated. What is worth saving?

  Posted 21 November 2016 · Author Liam Hogan

• Light Rail

  “HE WOULDN’T KNOW A TRAM was up him unless the driver rang the bell” was one of the old-fashioned stock phrases for stupidity a co-worker of mine once liked to use. He wasn’t from Melbourne: he was merely old enough to remember a Sydney where tram tracks ran down the centres of major roads. Whenever I wind up talking or thinking about trams and light rail in the context of urbanism I think of that phrase—-because trams, more than being vehicles in a streetspace, are much more important as tokens of human urban imagination.

  Posted 6 March 2012 · Author Liam Hogan

• Quesadillas Inauténticas

  INAUTHENTIC IS HOW I roll. It’s a slogan and a helpful cliché but every now and then it’s a literal description of the dinners I make.

  

  Posted 23 January 2012 · Author Liam Hogan

• Indian Home Diner Butter Chicken

  

  RESPONDING TO PERSISTENT HECKLING, THE Right’s Michelle Rowland, speaking for the amendment, said the most popular last name in her electorate was “Singh” and that for many, the uranium issue was a reason for Indians not to vote Labor. The inner city contingent that favoured the ban was out of touch, she said.
  “Just because you order the butter chicken from Indian Home Diner in Glebe Point Road doesn’t make you an expert.”

  If you didn’t have the privilege of attending the most recent National Conference of the Australian Labor Party as I did, you can take away (ahem) from this quip everything you can possibly need to know about the event.

  Posted 6 December 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• Stick Figure White Silhouettes

  NOWADAYS I SEE THE WHITE chalk silhouettes of 1980s Palm Sundays on the back windows of the middle-class people movers whose drivers want to boast about their happy families. I’ve been meaning to photograph someone’s back windscreen to illustrate the point, but I can never quite get there fast enough with my phone camera. Perhaps it’s just as well I see them so relatively rarely, considering the associations. If you’re over the age of about 25, once you’ve seen it, you can’t un-see it.

  Posted 14 October 2011 · Author Liam Hogan