Orange Juice & Ryvita

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

Category Sydney

  • 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”.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • Rain

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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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  • Six Vehicle Ferries

    ‘THE SEVEN BRIDGES OF Königsberg’, as well-educated readers of this blog will know, is a famously unsolveable problem in mathematics and the basis of graph theory. It’s not possible to design a walk over the seven bridges (as they were in the 18thC) in such a way as to cross each one only once. It’s lucky I’d never heard of the problem before I spent a wonderful Saturday making a round trip of the six vehicle ferries of Greater Sydney, challenging myself to see if I could cross them all without ever retracing my path. Four ferries cross the Hawkesbury River, one crosses Berowra Creek, and the other crosses the Parramatta River.

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  • Zombies

    IT IS NO WONDER that zombies are such a fixture of the horror genre. To be reanimated after one's own death, both with and without the key elements of your identity, treated as a less-than-human shambling artefact and played either for revulsion or comedy---what could be more terrifying? If there is one constant in zombie stories, it's the fundamental indignity of the afterlife: their shambling, angry peacelessness. The zombies naturally want to eat or kill the living, and it's never really a surprise that they should want to. In the first reel of the film, it's always the present that calls upon the dead; a spell, perhaps, or a toxic gas, but the present is always being haunted by the past, and unable to understand its own culpability, without context, or deal with the consequences. If you aren't scared of your own identity becoming reanimated after your death, and used by selfish characters to further a plot-line not of your choosing, maybe you don't have enough imagination.

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  • What kind of grubs

    ALAN JONES HAS ANNOUNCED his planned retirement and with his exit from our politics, both NSW and Australia will be a little bit better, a little bit cleaner, a little bit less self-satisfiedly hateful. You will read members of Parliament, celebrities, other members of the press, eulogising his career, paying tribute to a public man, or most predictably of all, describing him as complicated or ambiguous. It's all garbage. The man was uncomplicatedly, straightforwardly, the worst and most toxic public figure of Australia's last half-decade. Our political and cultural life will be better for his absence.

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  • Manning Bar

    SYDNEY UNIVERSITY'S MANNING BAR is to close to day trade. Sic transit gloria mundi, I spent a great deal of time there in my own early adulthood, drinking, and arguing about politics and history, and drinking some more, and watching the votes of student elections come in. When I began a PhD I used it as an office, because nobody would give me a desk, and it was usually quieter and calmer than the library. The kind of fruitless, restive underemployment being there represented turned out to be something of a motif in my adulthood. It was a formative place for me, though nobody can claim anything I or anyone did there has made the world a better place. Quite the opposite, when I'm honest with myself.

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