Author Liam Hogan

• Red Risotto

  THE PREDOMINANCE OF ASSIMILATIONIST CONSTRUCTS… meant that questions about how Australian institutions had responded to an influx of people of non Anglo-Saxon origin simply did not come to the surface. There was no ‘decision’ to rule such questions out of order. They did not arise; they were not ‘confronted’…¹

  That’s your favourite Australian domestic sociologist and mine, Jean Martin, describing non-decisionmaking in action—when something’s simply ruled out of public knowledge as a subject to have ideas about.

  Posted 7 August 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• This Song Shall Be Our Parting Hymn

  THE PEOPLE’S FLAG IS DEEPEST red,
  It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
  And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
  Their hearts blood dyed its every fold….

  Jim Connell wrote the song, and gave it to the social democrats and labourists of the twentieth and twenty-first century. The British Labourists still sing it; even the Australians still know the words.

  Norwegian kids can’t be that different to the young women and men I spent my twenties arguing with. Like A, I’ve been an earnest teenager in a youth wing of a moderate, labourist, reforming Party. For pleasant and unpleasant times, for all their enthusiasm and compromise and cynicism, they’re my people. And to read the news makes me sick to my heart.

  It well recalls the triumphs past,
  It gives the hope of peace at last;
  The banner bright, the symbol plain,
  Of human rights and human gain.

  Posted 24 July 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• 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 | » Read more

• The Conference Chinese Meal

  ON THE WEEKEND OF JULY 9-10, the august sovereign body of the Australian Labor Party (New South Wales Branch), the State Conference, met at the Sydney Town Hall. It’s been a while between drinks, and we were all hoping, I think, for an uneventful two days out. If you’ve never been to one, you’ll have to imagine a cross between an undergraduate debate, a dissenting Protestant worship service, Modern Times, a crowd scene in an Altman movie and Thunderdome. But, you know, in a good way.

  Open microphone, with Johno at the head of the queue

  Posted 12 July 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Tortilla Española

  THIS MORNING I HAD MY upper front tooth surgically removed and replaced with a temporary bridge. In a couple of months, once the bone has solidified and the dentist is prepared to put it in, I’ll have that bridge replaced with an implant and another more permanent bridge. It’s all from being kicked in the face when I was 15, and apparently my upper jaw is now a bit of a dental curio. They tried to hide the excitement, but all of the other dentists in the surgery came around during the procedure to have a look down my throat to see what was going on—I’ve never seen so many eyes peering over white masks. Honestly, about halfway through I felt like the middle of a two-up school on ANZAC Day. “Hand me those forceps and more gauze. No more bets please. Come in, suction!”

  Posted 6 July 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Cold Framin'

  LISTEN TO ANOTHER PARABLE. THERE was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watch-tower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country…
  —Matthew 21:33

  If you’ve skimmed the Gospel, you know the story. After making sound property and infrastructure investments, a vineyard’s owner’s slaves and sons go to collect the dues, but meet gruesome ends. The landowner, as you’d expect in a story told by the Son of Man, “[puts] those wretches to a miserable death”.

  The moral, of course, is if you’re a tenant with a garden, don’t stop paying rent no matter what the dispute, put all communications in writing, have the number for the CTTT handy, and read your Residential Tenancy Agreement.

  Posted 27 June 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Very Quick Post: Libyan DIY photos

  My favourite TV show when I was ten was the A-Team. You know the plot: someone attractive needs saving from drug lords, Communists or an African dictator, BA Baracus refuses to fly, the A-Team scrounge together very improvised weapons, there’s a car chase or action scene and George Peppard smokes a cigar wearing leather gloves. Wholesome entertainment.

  I already have an office chair, a hoodie, some old sneakers and paint-spattered jeans. Now all I need is an FAL and I can be light anti-aircraft defence.

  (The full series is terrifying and amazing in about equal measure, and reminds you that despite smartarse beret-wearing Westerners there’s kind of a war still going on).

  Posted 18 June 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Live Animal Exports

  AUSTRALIA IS SUSPENDING ALL LIVE animal exports to Indonesia. This is remarkable not because it’s a good thing, which it is, but because it’s an example of a political effect with significant policy and financial implications being forced by an outsider-body to the political process. I’ve seen estimates printed of the value of the trade between $300 million and $1 billion yearly, and it’s been cut indefinitely—with, presumably, entailing loss of jobs—after a Four Corners programme. How often do you get to see that happen?

  Posted 8 June 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Quick Post: Bombs And Cupcakes

  I’VE BEEN READING A BIT of old Len Deighton recently. For the uninitiated, Harry Palmer is a very modern spy, a working-class London version of Bond, who alternates work for WOOC(P), a super-secret British spying outfit, with cooking and fine dining. They’re great novels, and they exist at this moment just at the point where datedness caramelises seamlessly into fascinating curio (well, except for Deighton’s/Palmer’s sexual politics, which deserve a nameless shallow grave somewhere off an unsealed road in the back country of the early 1960s).

  The appeal of the novels was in the liberal use of bureaucrat-ese, acronyms and procedural detail to suggest insider knowledge of a sophisticated gourmet Cold War. Apparently, however, Deighton wrote forty years too early. MI6 are crawling the web for bombs and cupcakes:

  …the choice of “The Best Cupcakes in America” as the text debris source is just too perfect: a simultaneous comment on the terrifying vapidity of online culture (the only thing missing is a cat or some Rick Astley lyrics) and the infantilising, self-indulgent, and individualistic overtones of the cupcake trend. Even if it isn’t a joke, it’s a pretty good joke.

  Posted 7 June 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Quick Post: Rapture

  YOU’VE ALREADY SEEN AND HEARD Deborah Harry commit history’s worst rap crime. Whoop, whoop, that’s the sound of the police…

  Posted 21 May 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more