This Must Be The Place Podcast

The "Living in the Music City: If you've got a spare half a million" event was held at the Toff in Town in Melbourne as part of the 2019 Festival of Urbanism. It was co-sponsored by Monash Urban Planning and Design, along with the Henry Halloran Trust, and the University of Sydney, and by the City of Melbourne as part of their Music Plan 2018-2021. The Festival aims to raise the debate about urban health, and other key topics.

“Living in the Music City” combined a panel discussion of policy and research issues around live music in cities, followed by a performance of songs. Both sections examined the past and future of Melbourne’s live music venues in the context of the city’s housing pressures.

The name for the Music City event comes from a research project several Monash University academics are involved in, “Interrogating the music city: cultural economy & popular music in Melbourne”. The subtitle – “If you’ve got a spare half a million” - is a reference to the Courtney Barnett 2016 song ‘Depreston’.

This episode is the recording of the second half - the musician part. The musicians are:

Frank Jones (https://www.frankjones.com.au)

Sarah Taylor (of Taylor Project www.taylorproject.com.au)

Brett Lee / Pirritu (@pirritumusic, Instagram: @pirritumusic, YouTube: https://youtu.be/7w7kXZV1Pgg)

Liz Taylor (senior lecturer in urban planning and design at Monash University, also playing violin on some songs here).

Songs:

My Brown Yarra (by Frank Jones, performed with others)

Ngurrampaa (by/performed by Brett Lee / Pirritu)

Buddy could you spare a dime (Sarah Taylor, cover of Yip Harburg song)

Greenacres Lane (by/performed by Frank Jones)

Secret Shape (by/performed by Brett Lee / Pirritu)

Slow Tram Comin' (by/performed by Sarah Taylor)

For Barry Dickins (by/performed by Frank Jones)

Time I Spoke (by/performed by Brett Lee / Pirritu)

Detroit (by/performed by Sarah Taylor)

Pine Cone (by/performed by Brett Lee / Pirritu)

Suburban Rendezvous (by/performed by Frank Jones)

DePreston (by Courtney Barnett, performed by all).

“Living in the Music City: If You’ve got a Spare Half A Million” will be held at Melbourne’s Toff in Town on September 2nd as part of the 2019 Festival of Urbanism. The idea of the event is to look at how live music and the night-time economy are shaped by the cost and availability of housing. The first half of the title, the Music City, derives from a three-year research project “Interrogating the music city: cultural economy & popular music in Melbourne”. The second half of the title – “If you’ve got a spare half a million” - is a reference to the Courtney Barnett 2016 song ‘Depreston’. The song’s lyrics refer not only to the spatial dynamics of the cost of housing in Melbourne, but to migration and change in the city generally.

The event will look at housing and music through a combination of academic panel discussion, and live song performances. It includes both panel discussion and music partly because it’s more fun, and partly because it’s always strange to talk about music without including music, as in a 1979 quote best attributable to comedian Martin Mull, that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” (but – why not?), or an older quote, from a 1918 New Republic article, that “writing about music is as illogical as singing about economics”. There might be a bit of the latter, “singing about economics”, because both now and in 1918, singing about economics does happen, and you don’t have to look far for songs with words like “money”, “dollar” or “rent” in them.

For this episode I’ve looked back over 2 years of This Must Be The Place podcasts to find some episodes where we’ve talked about aspects of live music and its relationships to place. The episode comprises 7 relevant clips from previous episodes – these are compiled here kind of as re-runs. Or a nicer wording might be that they’re ‘curated’ selections, a ‘best of’ or ‘hits out’ collection, of This Must Be The Place talking music and place.

Including:

• Interview with Seamus O’Hanlon, Author of “City Life – the new urban Australia”

• Musicians, memoirs and maps: a bookish Curtin-side chat with Sarah Taylor and Sam Whiting

• Revisiting “Melbourne on Foot” (1980 book): St Kilda walking tour with Prof Graham Davison (also Richmond walking tour)

• Dogs in Space to Olives in Toolleen: Small bands, small farms with Charles (‘Chuck’ Meo) and Ceilidh

• Visit to Clunes Booktown Festival: Incl. David’s Talk on “Dig: Australian Rock & Pop Music, 1960-85”

• Lachlan from the Ocean Party on why hotel hell is actually pretty swell

Register for the Festival of Urbanism events here: http://www.festivalofurbanism.com/2019/2019/9/2/living-in-themusiccity-if-youve-got-a-spare-half-a-million

In this episode of This Must Be the Place Liz and Laura are joined by Monash Urban Planning and Design students Lachlan Burke, Sylvia Tong and Will McIntyre to share perspectives on whether and how urban planning can work across borders. They first talk about MAPS (Monash Association of Planning Students); how they gravitated to studying urban planning (from biology, environmental engineering, development studies and philosophy); and the upcoming MAPS 2019 Festival of Urbanism Commuter Race including how a MELWAY (the iconic street directory) will help with navigating it.

Lachlan and Will then reflect on lessons learned across their planning studies and the international development projects they’ve been involved in, from Midigami (Sri Lanka) to Mongolia. Lachlan discusses two aid projects he’s been part of in Sri Lanka, including post-tsunami housing reconstruction in Midigami - the subject of a presentation by Sri Lankan researcher Dr. Rangajeewa Ratnayake at this year’s Festival of Urbanism. Will shares insights from a lifetime of exposure to cross-cultural and interdisciplinary development projects, including those that formed his father’s work for the Asian Development Bank. It was while working on green infrastructure projects in Mongolia that Will first became interested in the broader scale and context of urban planning -“I realised you need to know how the city works in order to be able to implement anything”.

The episode reflects on the challenge of development projects maintaining long-lasting outcomes. For example, new elevated housing built outside of tsunami buffer zones suffer longer-term from water pressure issues. Wells dug without adequate hydrological analysis (or evaluation) suffer from repeated contamination and collapse. Across the examples run questions of accountability and evaluation, and the need for greater community ownership (versus issues of donor fatigue). And the borders of communication and translation, broadly understood – how to bridge planning words and knowledge across languages and cultures, and across disciplinary boundaries.

“There are different ways of doing things that we’ve never considered, and you’ve never considered, but let’s work together to discover those”.

Mentioned in this episode:

• TED video about public spaces that was Sylvia’s motivation to study Urban Planning: https://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_burden_how_public_spaces_make_cities_work/transcript?language=en

• Engineers Without Borders and human-centred design: https://www.ewb.org.au/blog/implementing-a-human-centered-approach

• Planning Institute of Australia members and academic subscribers can access this paper by Ian Woodcock documenting a local example of interdisciplinary and human-centred planning for railway station design: Woodcock, I. (2015) The design speculation and action research assemblage: ‘transit for all’ and the transformation of Melbourne's passenger rail system, Australian Planner 53(1), 15-27, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07293682.2015.1135818

• Festival of Urbanism- Donor-driven Tsunami Housing in Sri Lanka: Resident Outcomes and Experiences: http://www.festivalofurbanism.com/2019/2019/9/2/donor-driven-tsunami-housing-in-sri-lanka-resident-outcomes-and-experiences

• Festival of Urbanism- Quick MAPS: Monash Association of Planning Students Commuter Race: http://www.festivalofurbanism.com/2019/2019/7/29/quick-maps-monash-association-of-planning-students-commuter-race . Anyone can register to take part in the Quick MAPS race to 3 landmark pubs in Melbourne’s CBD ,with only a MELWAY (or other non-phone map) for navigation. Saturday 7 September.

• If you sign up for the MAPS Festival of Urbanism Race you can get 25% off the Melway 2020 edition! Liz’s life circa early 2000s was confined largely to page 29.

This episode of This Must Be The Place is a bit different – normally I talk to people, but in this episode I (meaning Liz Taylor, Monash University) actually just read out an essay I wrote recently about my experience of living in a building with combustible cladding. Also about reading Kafka (and Graeber) and…well that’s the basic premise. I’ve called it Trial by Cladding.

“I recently finished reading Franz Kafka’s 1925 novel “The Trial”: the unsettling, absurd story of a young middle-class man suddenly caught up in a farce of bureaucracy. The protagonist Joseph K spends a year fighting charges which are never named, but of which he is presumed guilty. He is increasingly consumed by obscure court proceedings which, officious lawyers assure him, are very serious, but that he need not dare try to understand. Disbelief ebbs into resignation. Weekends disappear with worry, and inconvenient appointments see him start to slip up at his job at the bank. The fact he doesn’t know what he is accused of, or whether or not he did something wrong, becomes irrelevant even to himself. “My innocence doesn’t make the matter any simpler”, K reflects: “I have to fight against countless subtleties in which the Court is likely to lose itself. And in the end, out of nothing at all, an enormous fabric of guilt will be conjured up”. I started reading “The Trial” after my apartment building’s last Owners Corporation meeting, because I wanted to directly understand the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’, and its applicability to our situation with combustible cladding. Like most people I knew Kafka was shorthand for absurd situations - famously “Metamorphosis” begins with the character waking up as a giant insect. From its popular usage I understood ‘Kafkaesque’ to mean a comically complicated process – which the situation with combustible cladding certainly already was. But I think “The Trial” had also once been mentioned to me in passing by a Croatian colleague who described her suspicion of cheerful government descriptions of policies. To her, having grown up in communist Yugoslavia, these inevitably signalled something cruelly incompetent going on in the background. Like in “The Trial”, she said. In the confusing boredom of an Owners Corporation meeting concerned with the strange details of the urgent need for us to remove chunks of our building, I was drawn to finally reading “The Trial”. At the least, I thought it might provide a lighter perspective on our situation. Like tens of thousands of others in Victoria, I own and live in an apartment in a building containing combustible cladding - similar materials to what fuelled the 2017 fire at London’s Grenfell Towers, in which 72 people died. In the wake of the Grenfell fire and of a 2014 fire at the LaCrosse Building in Melbourne’s Docklands, Victoria’s Cladding Taskforce determined that the presence of combustible cladding, including aluminium composite panels, on high rise buildings is unsafe and non-compliant. Perhaps surprisingly, the onus for rectifying non-compliant cladding in Victoria has been placed with apartment owners. Not with the builders, developers and other professionals who specified and used the materials and sold the apartments; not with the insurance agencies fond of advertising how awful it would be if a random problem were to happen to your house and ‘won’t you be glad you had insurance’ when it does; nor the local and state government regulators (and private building surveyors who replaced council building inspectors from the 1990s) who signed off on the buildings. Instead, owners who bought purportedly compliant apartments are compelled to fix an urgent problem created by government and industry, and facing bills of typically $40,000 to $60,000 per apartment to do so. In most cases they are poorly equipped to navigate the financial and broader costs. But as Joseph K reflects, “innocence doesn’t make the matter any simpler”…[more in episode]

In this episode of This Must Be The Place Elizabeth chats with Professor Carolyn Whitzman, on the eve of Carolyn winding up her 16 years at the University of Melbourne. Carolyn will now be heading back to Canada, specifically to Ottowa (“like a Canadian Adelaide”). In the episode she explains how being an academic was her second career, after working as an activist and ‘femocrat’ on violence prevention programs in Toronto. While her early contacts with Melbourne were as part of a campaign against an Olympic bid (“Bread not Circuses”), after completing her PhD and morphing into ‘pracademic’, Carolyn eventually moved to Melbourne to take up an academic position. Here she reflects on some of the themes in her research, teaching and projects in that time - which have been broad ranging but which have tended to centre on ideas of rights, marginality, and inclusivity. This episode focuses more on Carolyn’s work on affordable housing: on reasserting housing as a basic need or right, versus its role in wealth creation and inequality. She discusses working with housing developers and with their perceptions of how to adapt different models of affordable housing provision to the local context. There have been some projects and innovations that have cut through – for example a recent Launch Housing project of modular housing on a road allowance, and developments using airspace above parking lots. There is a slowly expanding understanding of what “good intensification” might mean. The challenge, Carolyn suggests, is how to scale affordable housing up – this an area where Canada offers some precedents, for example in Vancouver’s not for profit alliances, and the federal-level Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Carolyn hopes that her move to (and third career reinvention in) Ottawa, as it expands both its light rail system and its affordable housing sector, might mean “getting a little bit closer to the ideal of what an equitable and inclusive city would be like”. But there’s also much to take back from Melbourne, perhaps more so its public spaces and design culture, than its often-absurd transport and housing inequalities. Carolyn suggests that Melbourne doesn’t necessarily meet (and indeed sometimes is losing), “the preconditions for a decent life” but says that “I’d love everyone to be able to benefit from this beautiful city”. As well as being about rights to the city for diverse groups, more broadly the episode is about the challenges of change, and the fear that goes along with it. Also discussed: community participation, matching growth with planning and infrastructure, trust in government (lack thereof), cat fud and the far side, parking (versus football ovals = clash of titans?), Vancouver (Canada-lite), the idealism and motivation of students (versus the realities of exploitation and politicians that usually awaits them), public transport, Point Cook, federal government roles, planning schools, expertise, and generalisations about national anxieties.

Note/apology: the episode is recorded in Carlton’s Kathleen Symes Library and Community Centre and has a fair bit of community background noise in it.

An episode about a faceless man, and irrigation history. In April 1905, a man’s mutilated body was found in a bag in an irrigation channel in Girgarre East, northern Victoria. The channel was not far from where hundreds of men were constructing the Waranga Basin– a formative irrigation project storing water from the Goulburn River for distribution through channels that parceled up land for orchards, dairy farms and new towns. The body in the channel had been disemboweled, its head cut off, its legs missing, and its face sliced off in an apparent attempt to avoid identification. The find was dubbed The Tatura Tragedy, for the nearby irrigation town, and while investigators took weeks to identify the body, they quickly speculated on a connection to workers at the Waranga camp. This “rowdy township” housed “the usual navy class, neither better nor worse, prone to quarrel or to be hilarious and enjoy themselves on pay nights”, who “come and go without any notice being taken of them”. They typically travelled in pairs laboring, shearing or rabbiting.

The Tatura Tragedy 1905 story was selected at random from the National Library of Australia’s Trove archive of digitized historical newspapers by Digital Death Trip, a custom bot coded by Sarah. The code uses Trove’s API to randomly select a Victorian town, then a random so-called Tragedy from it, then compile a case file. In the pilot run, DDT picked 2 stories from irrigation towns in Victoria, including The Tatura Tragedy. In this episode, Elizabeth has dug up more about the incident, its place and time.

One theme is the nature of work, particularly itinerant work for men. When the victim, William Skinner (!) was finally identified, and killer James Edwards apprehended, speculation proved correct: the pair were workers and had been travelling together. A police description said Edwards was “fond of using the expression, ‘there’s no crawfish about me’, a shearer, a gambler, and two-up player; frequents country racecourses, drinks heavy when able, talks fighting, quiet when sober”. Edwards said he tramped the rivers of Victoria his whole life “like a book to me”, doing “any kind of work that comes my way”.

Another theme is irrigation (which is interesting, at least in “Chinatown”). The Waranga wall is a 7km long, 12m high barrier built over a decade with horses, shovels and picks. It was Australia’s first major dam. Visiting Waranga Shores caravan park, maybe site of the workers’ camp, the basin looks like the sea but also like a flooded field. It’s popular for boating. Beneath the water lie remains of old grazing stations; and of the longer history of indigenous Taungurung people. Massive early 20th century irrigation and Closer Settlement projects were stages in the displacement embodied in settler colonialism: through which land, waterways, and rights to them, were carved out anew. Waranga still feeds Victoria’s irrigation system and its politics of water rights, environment, and the economic viability of farming and small towns.

We also drove back roads of Girgarre East, searching for where Skinner’s body was dropped. Near where we narrowed it down to, someone had strung up bodies of dead hares, foxes and kangaroos along a barbed wire fence – including a fox’s decapitated decaying head. Very “In the Pines”. Edwards was found guilty of manslaughter: the defense argued the victim, Skinner, a comparatively privileged man, was bad-tempered and the killing was provoked. Edwards blamed drinking and working: “I’ve worked hard, lived hard, drunk hard and fought hard; but hard work has brought hard drink…”. Public fascination waned as Edwards seemed ‘ordinary’ back-blocks brawler. Today, there are rumors of unknown bodies from the camp buried in the Waranga wall. There are also tales of giant 2m waves coursing across the otherwise glassy surface of the basin, spooking workers and anglers. Like 70s song the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, “the lake, it is said, never gives up her dead”.

In this ‘mini’ (read: no guests) episode of This Must Be the Place Elizabeth visits the Murray River town of Koondrook, once the terminus of the Koondrook-Kerang private tramway. This country tram venture was started by the Shire of Swan Hill 1887, making use of private finance but also of Victorian funding from the “Tramways in Country Districts Act 1886”. While we might reasonably assume that the intention of this latter scheme was to subsidise tramways in middling regional cities, the Koondrook-Kerang venture instead built a 22km long tramway through the countryside to meet the state railway in Kerang. This was a kind of ‘feeder tram’ to connect goods and people to the public railway through to Melbourne. Railway construction in Victoria was at its peak at this period via the so-called “Octopus Acts”.

The Kerang-Koondrook tramway ran privately until the 1950s, when it was taken over (or surrendered to?) Victoria Railways. It then continued as a publicly run passenger service and later as transport for school children, until either 1976 or 1981 (reports vary). The 1970s were a peak time for closing down train lines in Victoria and especially those in country areas - reflecting declining fortunes in some places but also improvements in roads.

In this mini-installment Elizabeth reports from the quiet centre of Koondrook where there’s an old tram station (train enthusiasts can confirm the actual difference between a tram and a train, because this one looks a lot like an old train station); plus the old reserve for the tramway and some bits of track. Apparently down through the irrigated countryside there’s some more remnants near former tram stops at Yeoburn, Hinksons, Teal Point and Gannawarra. The remnants of the tramway are heritage listed.

Elizabeth speculates on what the story means for the historically intermingled declines of small towns and of railways; what we might learn from history in terms of local and private initiatives today; and for how we price and assess transport projects. Also discussed (with herself) are the current local politics of dairy farms, water allocations, sawmills, and the legacy of gaming machine tourism (which was a big thing for border towns up until the 1990s). Plus there’s a visit to the local swimming pool (Koondrook still has a community-run pool).

If Elizabeth were a real journalist she’d find some people who used to catch the country tram to school etc. and interview them – next time. There may well be a next time as Koondrook is very nice to visit – big trees, river, sculptures, walks, old trams, a nice pub, pool. You can’t get the tram there but you can, if so inclined, like Elizabeth, get the Vline bus (it’s the Barmah bus – not to be confused with the Barham bus even though they leave around the same time and let’s be honest they sound the same).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerang%E2%80%93Koondrook_Tramway

http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/pictoria/gid/slv-pic-aab45791

http://www.victorianplaces.com.au/koondrook

In this episode of This Must Be The Place Elizabeth speaks with Associate Professor Seamus O’Hanlon of Monash University, about his new book, “City Life: the new urban Australia”. To quote the official blurb: “Remember when our cities and inner-cities weren’t dominated by high-rise apartments? This book documents the changes that have come with the globalisation of the Australian city since the 1970s. It tells the story of the major economic, social, cultural and demographic changes that have come with opening up of Australia in those years, with a particular focus on the two biggest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, which have been transformed. But throughout it also looks at how these changes have played out in the smaller capitals and regional centres. How does one of the most urbanised, multicultural countries in the world see itself? This book challenges received ideas about Australia and how it presents itself to the world, and how in turn many Australians perceive and understand themselves. Rather than rehashing old stereotypes about mateship, the Bush or Anzac, this book places the globalised city and its residents at the heart of new understandings of twenty-first century Australia.”

In the podcast, Elizabeth and Seamus discuss deindustrialization; post-industrialization; the field of global histories (tracing the flow of commodities etc – kind of like those ‘salt’, ‘cod’ and other single-item books Elizabeth reads so often); gentrification; successes and failures of deregulation; the rise of the international student industry; tennis and live music and other things governments are desperate to lay claim to; and more. How have the changes wrought by globalization played out in specific Australian places, who wins and who loses, and what are the divisions that remain? What opportunities have been lost? What can a historian’s view offer to urban planners today? Are high-rise student/investor apartments running the risk of becoming the new Fordist factories past? Was Adelaide really a go-ahead city in the early 1970s? Does looking at urban history bring out your inner libertarian? Why don’t Irish people like seat belts?

“For all its faults, the post industrial economy can be more inclusive than the old industrial economy. But I think decisions were made – political not economic - to basically say we’re going to write off whole generations and regions, and I think that’s wrong”.

“City Life – the new urban Australia” is available through New South Publishing. Unlike Elizabeth’s book you can buy it at normal book shops and it has nice pictures. http://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/city-life/

Here’s a review of it by Brendan Gleeson:

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/living-in-australia-review-two-books-on-issues-with-urban-and-rural-life-20181011-h16hp4.html

Perspectives on Japanese cities from an 8-year old Australian, Juliette. This episode of This Must Be The Place is a kind of follow-up to the late-2017 episode, “Three travelling planners discuss their initial impressions of Japanese cities”, in which Elizabeth, Helen and Nicole did a round-up of their impressions – as planners and geographers, but largely uninformed by research – of Japanese cities in comparison to Australia.

Here we hear impressions of Japan from a slightly different perspective – courtesy of Juliette, who is 8 years old and one of Elizabeth’s nieces, and who recently spent about 2 weeks on holiday in Japan. The episode was recorded at a dinner party in Jan’s backyard (so there’s a bit of plate clanking, and chattering, and some other guests including Nyoko from Japan sometimes chiming in). Juliette discusses:

• Toilets - “aim for nicer toilets, that’s my main tip for Australia”;

• Streets – with crowds of people, but “there wasn’t that many cars, and people were just walking in the middle of the road”;

• Children walking to school (in single file, parentless, and on Saturdays);

• Riding bikes, without helmets;

• Traffic - “they drove considerably noticeably slower than they do here, and they weren’t eager to run the people on the bikes over” (a bit of link to the recent TMBTP episode on ‘roads, rights and rage’);

• The uncomfortable dynamics of cat, owl, and other animal cafes (at one “there were 5 cats lined up at the window just looking out”);

• Trains (bullet, rapid, and local) - “and there was one running pretty much every 5 minutes”;

• Food – wasabi octopus, kit kats, vending machines, milk tea;

• Making sense of the world via dire warning cartoons; and

• (Perhaps a bit too much for a planning podcast) things about Harry Potter, porcupines, and video games.

There are also musings on the dynamics of public space in different countries. The day after returning to Australia, there was “a man doing graffiti in the telephone booth”, and Sarah (Juliette’s mother’s) bike got stolen. Juliette reflects on how unexpected things like this rarely happened to them as tourists in Japan, which has some pros and cons. “My overall conclusion is there’s some things which I would definitely miss about Japan” (for example “I miss everyone actually being polite to you”), “but then there’s some things which you just have none of in Japan, like crazy guys, or graffiti artists”. Also preferred (in a way) about Australia is “you never know what’s going to happen – like you never know when someone’s going to steal your bike”.

After the tape stopped rolling we also discussed excessive plastic wrapping – some of which Juliette was reluctant to unwrap as it was like a toy in itself. Also after the recording stopped a guy called Dave arrived, who lived in Japan as an English teacher for 7 years. In another unplanned segue to the “roads, rights and rage” episode Dave described how a few weeks after he got back to Australia he heard someone yelling at him on his bike. Having been in Japan for so long he thought “oh they must be trying to help me, I must have dropped something”, then heard more indistinct shouting, but finally the clear word “dickhead”.

Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, and on the rise of Anti-Semitism in Europe, recounts a joke popular after the first World War: “an anti-Semite claimed that the Jews had caused the war; the reply was: Yes, the Jews and the bicyclists. Why the bicyclists? Asks the one. Why the Jews? Asks the other”. To Arendt the joke illustrates how scapegoating is understood: if bicyclists seem self-evidently harmless, this incongruity shows deep-seated rationaliation of bigotry against Jewish people. (The book goes on to examine identity, rights, and nation states - or it seems to, Elizabeth has only read 50 of 700-ish pages). In the context of nowadays Australia, the bicycle ‘joke’ resonates less and seems even less funny. Actually it’s hard to believe it was ever funny, but most jokes go flat with time. Cycling issues are divisive both on Australia’s roads and its internet forums. In this episode Elizabeth speaks with two researchers interested, in effect, in questions of “why the bicyclists?”: why are Australians so angry about cycling?

Tom Andrews is a PhD student in law at the University of Melbourne writing on the history of criminal procedures. Dr Peter Chambers is a senior lecturer in criminology, global crime and boarder security at RMIT University. They have a shared interest in conflicts between cars and vulnerable road users and recently published an article in the Conversation, “Rising cyclist death toll is mainly due to drivers, so change the road laws and culture”, examining statistics on deaths on Australian roads: 1,222 in 2017-18, with 1,100 due to driver inattention. They are critical of responses focused on high-tech sensors and separated infrastructure: arguing these disavow statistics on causes of cyclist deaths and ‘bake in’ infrastructure for paying less attention. Debates downplay real people and causes of injuries, in favour of anecdotes and hypotheticals – “once saw an X”, “what if a Y”.

This contrasts with how other sectors –eg. aviation- respond to risk. It also poses questions. Tom recounts a literally frothing-at-the-mouth encounter with rage about cyclists-“there’s nothing about that level of anger that is easy to explain”–and how a comment moderator told him “in Australian media if you publish a piece on violence against women, or about cycling, there will be a rush of aggressive comments”. The episode discusses how ‘third rail’ cycling issues tap into questions of culture, history, and jurisprudence (how people discuss and understand rules).

In criminal law, a separate set of offences for driving was introduced because of reluctance of juries to convict drivers of manslaughter. In civil law, prior to Victoria’s no-fault personal injury insurance, when injury occurred as a result of cars people had to go through the (stressful, costly) general legal system for compensation. Registration in large part pays for TAC insurance, proportionate to risks of injury from different motor vehicles. How does this relate to frequent calls for cyclists to be registered? Is a bike an unregistered vehicle? Peter semi-facetiously suggests arguments for cyclists to be registered are less interested in specific implications for rights and responsibilities than “cyclists should be registered…and then put in camps”.

It’s a rambling chat touching many third rails – helmets (“in Australia it’s easier to imagine touching someone’s car as a form of assault to the person, than it is to imagine trusting people to make informed decisions about risk and headwear”), liability (strict versus presumed), parking, property, rights to public space, colonialism and land appropriation, gender, f-bombs, ‘boulie tacks’. And Big Lebowski quotes (“at least it’s an ethos”).

http://theconversation.com/rising-cyclist-death-toll-is-mainly-due-to-drivers-so-change-the-road-laws-and-culture-102567

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jo11SqLmuGc