Category Sydney

• Lorikeet

  SPRING IN SYDNEY IS BOTTLEBRUSH season. Every LGA with the good taste to plant callistemon around the footpaths fills up with red trees and birds, as do the backyards of people with both bottlebrushes and flowering gums.

  

  Lorikeets are lovely birds. They’re a consolation for those foot-puncturing razor sharp gumnuts that drop for the rest of the year.

  Posted 7 October 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• Mt White Paddlepop

  IF YOU WANT TO HAVE a discussion about automobility, the way we live in our urban environment, the nature of the State and sustainability, I recommend not trying to do it on a platform like twitter, where big pointy-headed words like that tend to chew up your character limit. You end up trying to make your points like builders shouting at each other into crackly CB radios, in separate noisy corridors, in a building being demolished. This—old fashioned, finite but relatively unconstrained—blog entry arises from just such an exercise in ill communication.

  

  Posted 7 September 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• Forty Thousand Dollars

  THANKS TO ARTIST DENIS BEAUBOIS, we know what $20,000 in clean hundreds looks like. But it’s thanks to a crime story like this one, involving a drug trafficker, a real estate agent, and $40,000 in dirty notes, that we’ve had a bit more about Sydney’s political economy illustrated.

  Posted 4 September 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• Marrickville Meatball Roll

  IN THE MOST RECENT AUSTRALIAN Census, I registered myself as ethnically Australian, non-religious in outlook. Despite my stereotypically Irish name and culturally Catholic background they’re the most accurate descriptions of how I live my day-to-day life. This morning, though, I spent outside the office of my local Member of Parliament, there to take part in a battle of rent-a-crowds, and received a short sharp lesson in—for lack of a better phrase—the genealogy of my morals.

  “Tolerance is Our Demise”. Marrickville’s Convoy of No Confidence, 1 September 2011. Image copyright Anthony Albanese MP.

  Posted 1 September 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• Concordia Club Pork Knuckle

  AT THE HEART OF AUSTRALIAN multiculturalism lies a willingness on the part of migrants and migrant communities to self-organise. Yes, it’s true, there’s a lot more to it than the notorious three Fs—folkdancing, fashion and food—including a much larger discourse about the role of the State in endorsing, forbidding, legitimising and co-opting multiple linguistic, religious and cultural identities as aspects of the national habitus and the post-Bretton Woods political economy, but every Council has to have a Festival, and everybody needs lunch.

  Posted 21 August 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• University Bar Beer and Chips

  FORM IS TEMPORARY, CLASS IS permanent—or so, apocryphally, did Steve Waugh appropriate a cricketer’s hundred year-old cliché. The aphorism’s also served as a common student politician’s reasonably witty running joke, punning on the Marxist sense of class conflict, and it’s served as at least one conservative candidate’s election motto, that I know about.¹

  

  Posted 21 July 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• The Best And Worst Of Sussex Street

  THE HEADQUARTERS OF THE AUSTRALIAN Labor Party, NSW Branch, stand at 377 Sussex St, above a bland marble and carpet lobby and, at the time of writing, no outward signage. Unions NSW—which used to go by the nineteenth-century name of “Labor Council”—occupies the back part of the building and parades its workerist murals, its flags, badges and colours, with all the ceremony they deserve, but the political wing goes incognito.

  Posted 20 May 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• Quick Post: Inner Western Public Art

  YOU BUY OR RENT A HOUSE in a suburb of Sydney’s inner west, and you move to a vibrant, diverse, community, with a sense of a common aesthetic. You recycle your plastics, and compost your kitchen scraps. Your children go to public schools—the good ones, mind, not the ones with disciplinary problems—and on the weekends they hang around the local cafes, independent cinemas and parks, not large commercialised shopping centres. You disapprove of mandatory detention of refugees, Australian participation in American wars in the Middle East, and the old Part 3A of the Planning Act. You look down on the Western suburbs where it’s all McMansions and four wheel drives, the North Shore where there’s no vitality, and the Shire most of all where they spend their public holidays organising race riot barbecues. You vote Labor in the lower house, Green in the upper, and if you vote Liberal, you have the good taste to keep your mouth shut about it. Everyone’s happy!

  Then, you make the mistake of painting your wall in a Federation beige in accordance with the Council’s notes about the surrounding heritage environment. Did you submit your application to paint over that derivative bit of graffiti piece of important public art with the local insufferable hipsters community of street artists? Apparently not.

  Slogan: THIS WALL USED TO HAVE ART ON IT, NOW IT HAS COCKS. Mallett St, Camperdown, Sydney.

  As Lenin might have said of the infantile disorder of anarchism, scratch a public artist, find a parochial art snob who likes drawing cock.

  Posted 5 May 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• Amatriciana Rovinata

  I’ve been thinking, it’s all the fried crap you’ve been eating.
  Now. Show me how you can ruin a pasta dish and do it in style.

  When a witch tells you your diet isn’t up to scratch, man, you’d better listen. I listened. At least I think I was listening, but at some point I blinked and found myself mentally wandering down Norton Street for a short black and a couple of almond biscotti, taking in the fumes. Sorry about that.

  Posted 28 April 2011 · Author Liam Hogan

• Appointment In Parramatta Road: El-Jannah Chicken

  PORT JACKSON, SYDNEY’S NATURAL HARBOUR, appears in all of the tourist brochures and Lonely Planet guides as the centre of the city, and its spiritual heart: but they are all wrong. The harbour has a rather good-looking Bridge (though the Gladesville Bridge, the Cinderella stepsister arch of the city, is always overlooked). It’s got a freaky egg-shaped warehouse for elitist affairs. I admit, the ferries are good fun, but what’s left? A Navy base or two, the Casino, a few bits of National Park, and the rest is pure pleasure garden for fund-manager multimillionnaires and shiny stockbrokers gorging on derivatives.

  Posted 14 April 2011 · Author Liam Hogan