history

 

Between dodging viruses and pondering fascism and climate disasters, I have been re-reading a truly uplifting book which I hadn't visited for many years. It's the masterpiece of the French historian Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, first published in 1940. I have a 2-volume paperback of the English translation, which I bought as a student for the terrifying price of 3 dollars and 60 cents.

 

It's social history or historical sociology, whichever you like. Bloch set himself the austere task of anatomizing a whole society, tracing the basic relationships that made it a distinct social formation. But it is also full-blooded history, concerned with the conditions that brought this society into being, its attitudes, its divisions, its conflicts, its laws; with how it survived in western Europe for five hundred years or so, and how it changed.

 

It looks like any other drab line of shops on a dreary corner in Dullsville. See? So what’s the reason for our focus on this windswept Belmore street corner on such an unseasonably brisk evening? I thought you’d never ask. The Corner Grill Cafe has failed. The grill is dormant, the shakes are neither shaken […]

Remember when Michael Jordan went from dominating basketball to embarrassing baseball? Today’s subject is a little bit like that, only without the Bugs Bunny team-up to make it palatable (I asked, he’s a busy rabbit). Still sports-related, mind you. https://youtu.be/iWURvRHDlJU?t=3m59s WHOA! Are you into top gear yet? Back in 1994, the clamorous Tony D’Allura was […]

There’s a lot to say about a place like Con’s, pictured here in the midst of a small row of anonymous shops on a street you’ve never heard of, in a suburb cherished by few. It’s not Con’s anymore – it hasn’t been for many years – but that’s the identity that stuck. Run by […]

Right, where were we? Back in the 80s, a bunch of pissed blokes ran some boats aground in Sydney Harbour, much to the consternation of the locals. Hooning around the Tasman in a tub’s nothing new, but this particular incident was deemed momentous enough that the city named a suburb after it. Ever been to […]

Don’t sit down – no long or in-depth story this time. Just a gentle reminder of the sort of shape a past life can sometimes take. For those who fled South Vietnam to escape the rule of the Vietnamese People’s Army, today’s Ho Chi Minh City will always be Saigon. No, it’s not a name […]

It seemed like a match made in heaven: a Mickey D’s right outside upper George Street’s Metropolitan Hotel. A greasy fast food basin would have been – and for many years, was – the perfect catchment area for empty stomachs hoping to dilute the copious amounts of alcohol they were about to ingest over the […]

We spend our lives mourning our childhoods. Our values and expectations are shaped throughout our younger years, sometimes subconsciously. Once we learn that, say, an ice cream dropped on the hot sand during a day at the beach won’t be replaced, the ice cream becomes a little part of us, a part we can’t get […]

It doesn't matter whether you're burying people or educating them - if you're doing it in an old Pizza Hut, prepare for scrutiny.