Substacking

Although I will continue to update this website from time to time, I've just launched a Substack that will increasingly become the focus of my operations. I'll be posting a new piece of writing to Substack once a week. At first it will all be free, but in the course of time I'll be putting some articles behind a paywall. Check out the site here. If it takes your fancy, please hit the "subscribe" button to get a free weekly article delivered to your Inbox ... and please spread the word. 

Dog Acts

Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, May 17, 2025

Earlier this year, when Donald Trump imposed a blanket 25% tariff on aluminium and steel imports, an Australian government minister described the move as “a dog act.”

One knew what he meant, and it was hard to disagree with his sentiments. Trump’s initiative was morally and economically unforgivable. It deserved to be condemned in the strongest possible terms.

But why drag dogs into it? I’ve known many dogs over the years. Almost without exception they’ve been fine and faithful animals. I’ve never known a dog that would dream of imposing a 25% tariff on the aluminium and steel exports of an old trading buddy.

It’s people, not dogs, who do such things. So let’s stop smearing the canine community every time a human being does something that only a human being would be stupid and wicked enough to do. I say it’s time the phrase “dog act” was retired. I think we should take it for a long drive into the country and throw it unceremoniously off the back of the ute.

In 2018, the Oxford University Press announced that “dog act will be considered for inclusion in the next edition of the Australian National Dictionary.” Usage of the phrase, the Press noted, has “clearly increased in recent years.”

They weren’t kidding. The phrase is everywhere. Here are a few things I’ve recently seen described online as “dog acts”. A man kicking an unconscious man in the head during a pub brawl. A married man taking out a secret subscription to a porn site. A guy asking his mate to pay back an outstanding loan, right after the mate won $10,000 on a poker machine.

Try as I might, I can’t see the link between any of these so-called “dog acts” and the behaviour patterns of the average dog.

So why do we insist on using the phrase? Partly because it’s an Australian tradition. In Aussie slang, “dog” has long been an all-purpose synonym for a coward, traitor, or general no-goodnik.

In criminal parlance, a “dog” is a police informant. For cops, on the other hand, a “dog” is an internal affairs officer who seems unduly obsessed with enforcing the finer points of the law.

In the 1860s, the unusually depraved bushranger Daniel Morgan earned himself the nickname “Mad Dog Morgan”, thereby stigmatising an entire generation of dogs living with rabies.

Gough Whitlam, on the day of his dismissal by the Governor-General, used a posh variant of the dog trope when he called Malcolm Fraser “Kerr’s cur.”

But it isn’t just an Australian thing. Dogs have been getting the rough end of the verbal pineapple for centuries. In Othello, the gullible Roderigo is manipulated and finally murdered by the villainous Iago. Roderigo’s dying words are, “O damned Iago! O inhuman dog!”

It’s a curious line, because the brand of villainy Iago practices – villainy without motive, villainy for the sake of villainy – is a distinctively human thing. No other member of the animal kingdom does it.

It’s true that cats will toy with their prey in a way that strikes us as deliberately cruel. But cats don’t know any better, because they’ve never evolved a sense of empathy. For a predator like the cat, a sense of empathy would be counterproductive.

Dogs, on the other hand, have a strong moral sense, evolved over millennia of interaction with humans. Charles Darwin, who was a great dog lover, observed that dogs can and do feel remorse. They can behave every bit as decently as human beings do – sometimes a lot more decently.

“Everyone has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection, who licked the hand of the operator,” Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man. “This man, unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to the last hour of his life.”

Something weird is going on, when we use the phrase “dog act” to condemn a misdeed that only a human being would be shitty enough to think of perpetrating – something like vivisecting a conscious pooch, for instance. We don’t just impugn a blameless animal, when we lazily use this cliché. We impugn the noblest animal of them all.

Consider all this from the dog’s point of view. First we domesticate them against their will. Then we breed and train them to perform feats of astonishing selflessness. If you get lost in the snow, a dog will bring you a miniature cask of brandy. If somebody murders you, a dog will cheerfully follow the scent of your killer.

The dog’s reward? When a human being does something that no dog would do in a million years, we call it a “dog act.”

Why do we do it? Do we want to reassure ourselves that even at our worst, we’re still somehow better than the best animal there is?

Well, we’re not. “Man,” as Mark Twain once said, “is the only animal that blushes – or needs to.”

The Gentle Art of Plagiary

Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, May 10, 2025

 
Until last week I didn’t know Nagi Maehashi could get mad. I’ve been a fan of Nagi’s vibrant and affable cookery for years. Yes, I’m obliged to declare that she writes recipes for this masthead. But I found her stuff delicious long before she started doing that.
 
To judge from the photos in her cookbooks, Dinner and Tonight, Nagi is never unhappy. She’s always smiling at a minimum, if not beaming. She has a dog called Dozer who always seems to be smiling too.
 
Last week, however, Nagi’s world was sullied by an unprecedented whiff of beef. On her website, RecipeTin Eats, Nagi levelled a serious charge against another celebrity chef, Brooke Bellamy, author of the cookbook Bake with Brooki. According to Nagi, two recipes in that book – one for caramel slice and one for baklava – were stolen from RecipeTin Eats.
 
“Profiting from plagiarised recipes is unethical,” Nagi wrote, “and it’s a slap in the face to every author who puts in the hard work to create original content.”
 
For her part, Bellamy denies plagiarising either recipe. But to “prevent further aggravation,” she has promised to remove them both from future editions of her book.
 
More allegations of plagiarism have followed, including a claim that Brooki purloined her recipe for Portuguese tarts from the late Bill Granger. You sense this affair isn’t yet done. For the moment I suggest we call it “Pastrygate”, reserving the option to go with “Sticky Dategate” if Brooki is ever accused of plagiarising a pudding.
 
The word plagiarist comes from the Latin plagiarius, meaning kidnapper. When we call someone a plagiarist, we’re not just accusing them of theft. We’re saying they’ve made off with someone else’s cherished offspring.  
 
Shakespeare himself was accused of plagiarism, when his career was just taking off. In a scurrilous pamphlet published in 1592, the poet Robert Greene called the young Bard an “upstart crow, beautified with our feathers.”
 
If Greene meant that Shakespeare made a habit of swiping phrases from other poets, he was wrong. The greatest phrasemaker in the history of English hardly needed to pilfer his language from the likes of Greene.
 
Shakespeare did, however, routinely lift the plots of his plays from earlier sources. But that was standard practice in the Elizabethan theatre. In those days there were no intellectual property laws. Needing to mount new productions at a breakneck pace, playwrights were constantly recycling old plots.
 
Hamlet was a retread of an earlier play, which had been staged more than ten years before the appearance of Shakespeare’s masterpiece. The older play was a revenge potboiler which scholars call the Ur-Hamlet. The text of this work is lost to history, and nobody knows for sure who wrote it. Some say its author was Thomas Kyd. Others think it was written by the young Shakespeare himself.
 
“The boundary between influence and plagiarism will always be vague,” Martin Amis wrote in 1980, after an American novelist named Jacob Epstein was caught with his fingers in the till. Epstein’s debut novel, Wild Oats, was riddled with phrases that had been flagrantly looted from Amis’s 1973 book The Rachel Papers.
 
“Epstein wasn’t influenced by The Rachel Papers,” Amis wrote. “He had it flattened out beside his typewriter.”
 
In the 1960s, the comedian Peter Cook was similarly incensed when his Cambridge contemporary David Frost became rich and famous – way more rich and famous than Cook – by filching Cook’s material. At Cambridge the pair had been friends. Cook had once saved Frost’s life in a swimming pool.
 
But when Frost started using Cook’s stuff without permission, Cook called him “the bubonic plagiarist”, and said his biggest regret in life was that he’d saved Frost from drowning.
 
In the 1990s, the great American comedian Bill Hicks delivered a comeback for the ages, after the less great but more famous Denis Leary was accused of copying Hicks’s signature routines.
 
“I have a scoop for you,” Hicks said, when a reporter asked him about the suspicious similarities between his stuff and Leary’s. “I stole his act. I camouflaged it with punchlines, and to really throw people off, I did it before he did.”
 
All artists, good and bad, are influenced by the work of their forerunners. Good artists absorb the work of their mentors, then try to outdo them. The critic Harold Bloom coined a phrase for this process. He called it “the anxiety of influence.” True artists don’t want their stuff to be exactly the same as the stuff that influenced them. They want it to be better.
 
For songwriters, a different kind of anxiety prevails. When the muse drops a ready-made tune on them out of nowhere, how can they be sure they haven’t unconsciously swiped it from someone else?
 
Paul McCartney came up with the melody of Yesterday in a dream. The tune was so perfect that McCartney feared he must have heard it somewhere before. For weeks he went around playing it to everyone he knew, asking them if they recognised it.
 
George Harrison should have taken similar precautions before recording his song My Sweet Lord. Only after it became a monster hit did people notice that Harrison’s tune was a palpable ripoff of The Chiffons’ 1963 song He’s So Fine.
 
The publishers of He’s So Fine sued, and Harrison had to fork over a large chunk of his royalties. The judge ruled that Harrison had plagiarised the song unconsciously, not deliberately. But a subconscious ripoff is still a ripoff. Harrison stopped writing songs for a while afterwards, fearing that his unconscious would play the same trick on him again.
 
As for conscious plagiarists, you wonder how they sleep at night. If the immorality of their actions doesn’t bother them, aren’t they at least terrified of being caught? Or do they, at some level, want to get busted?
 
“The psychology of plagiarism is fascinatingly perverse,” Martin Amis observed, at the time of the Wild Oats scandal. “It risks, or invites, a deep shame and there must be something of the death wish in it.”
 
In London in the 1890s, the painter James Whistler managed to convince himself that every other wit in town, including Oscar Wilde, was stealing his bon mots. “I wish I had said that,” Wilde said to Whistler once, after Whistler got off a pretty good zinger at a party. To which Whistler replied, “You will, Oscar, you will.”

The Case of Michael Jackson

On the back of acclaimed and lucrative runs in New York and London, the Michael Jackson musical MJ opened in Sydney last weekend. The Broadway production has won four Tony Awards. The London show has been hailed as the most spectacular in the West End. By the end of the Sydney premiere, the whole audience was on its feet, electrified by a heady succession of superbly choreographed, show-stopping reinventions of Jackson’s greatest hits.   
 
Produced by the Jackson estate, MJ is a hard show for any respecter of fact to enjoy without qualm. Visually and sonically, it’s unbelievably good. Unfortunately, it’s unbelievable in another sense too. It has a truth problem. Spitting in the face of historical reality, it portrays Jackson as a virtual saint: a selfless, put-upon victim, persecuted by a world obsessed with nasty gossip.
 
Billed as a celebration of Jackson’s “unparalleled artistry”, MJ also ends up celebrating the man himself, defiantly, audaciously, unashamedly. But surely we all agree by now that Jackson is not a man to be celebrated? It’s one thing to believe his music can still be enjoyed despite the wealth of credible evidence that he was a serial child molester. It’s quite another to pretend the evidence doesn’t exist.
 
MJ, however, does precisely that. It dodges the issue of Jackson’s alleged criminality by setting itself in 1992, which just happens to be the year before the first public charge of child abuse was levied against him. MJ doesn’t so much rewrite history as pretend that history stopped happening in 1992. It behaves as if the alarm bells about Jackson can be unrung, and we can all return to a prelapsarian time when the worst you could say about him was that he was a weirdo with a pet chimp.
 
On the face of it, it seems bizarre that MJ is happening at all, given the zero-tolerance attitude that America’s cultural watchdogs have taken, in recent years, towards the moral shortcomings of their entertainers. Celebrity misbehaviour – ranging from the monstrously criminal to the not even illegal, and from the solidly demonstrated to the far from proven – has been cracked down on all over the place.
 
So what’s going on with the MJ musical? Nobody, at this point in history, would dare to stage an all-singing, all-dancing tribute to the artistry of Rolf Harris or Bill Cosby.
 
What makes Jackson’s case so different from theirs? Have we decided that his extreme talent is a wildcard, which obliges us to suspend our otherwise fanatical moral vigilance? Or do we think the case against him hasn’t yet been made?
 
There was a time when it was just about possible to think it hadn’t been, if you squinted at the facts from a lenient enough angle. The evidence of Jackson’s alleged crimes came out piecemeal, by way of several cases spread over several decades.
 
In 1993, he was accused of molesting a 13-year-old boy named Jordy Chandler. Unfortunately, Chandler’s father muddied the waters of that case from the start, by pursuing his complaint against Jackson in a very American way. Instead of going straight to the police, he invited Jackson to pay him US $20 million to keep the allegation quiet.
 
Jackson refused to pay, and sued Chandler for extortion. Chandler counter-sued, now seeking $30 million. Simultaneously, police launched a criminal investigation of Jackson. His Neverland Ranch was raided. Child erotica was seized. Jackson’s genitals were photographed for evidentiary purposes.
 
Then Jackson himself further muddied the waters – or perhaps clarified them – by settling Chandler’s civil suit for US $23 million. The criminal investigation collapsed shortly afterwards.
 
Jackson and his lawyers stressed, of course, that his payment of this gargantuan sum did not suggest, in any way, shape or form, that he was guilty. He just wanted to spare himself the tiresome hassle of a trial. “I wanted to go on with my life,” he explained.
 
Regrettably, the life he wanted to go on with would continue to revolve around his creepy habit of inviting young male fans around for sleepovers. One of these boys was 13-year-old Gavin Arvizo, who was recovering from cancer when Jackson befriended him.
 
In 2005, Jackson was charged with molesting Arvizo. This time the case went to trial. Several former sleepover buddies of Jackson, including the actor Macaulay Culkin, swore on the stand that Jackson had never touched them inappropriately. Persuaded by such testimony, the jury found Jackson not guilty.
 
When Jackson died in 2009, his personal reputation wasn’t exactly spotless. But his defenders could still claim, correctly, that he’d never been convicted of anything in a court of law.
 
The fantasy of Jackson’s innocence finally came crashing down in 2019, with the release of the documentary Leaving Neverland. That damning four-hour film was built around excruciatingly detailed interviews with two fresh Jackson accusers: the Australian-born choreographer Wade Robson, who charged that Jackson had repeatedly raped and assaulted him over an eight-year period in the 1990s, starting when Robson was 7; and the former child-actor James Safechuck, who claimed to have been similarly abused by Jackson between the ages of 10 and 14.
 
To say that Robson and Safechuck’s stories had the ring of truth would be an understatement. In the wake of Leaving Neverland, a stunned, nauseated, and near-universal consensus seemed to set in. The King of Pop had been a very, very bad man.
 
For a while, everyone seemed determined to do something about this. “We’ll never listen to Michael Jackson the same way again,” declared CNN, a week after the documentary went to air. Radio programmers in Australia, and around the world, announced they would no longer be playing Jackson’s songs.
 
That righteous backlash didn’t last long. A New Zealand radio station that stopped playing Jackson’s songs in March 2019, when the documentary came out, was already playing them again by November, citing “positive listener survey results.” In 2023, online consumption of Jackson’s music grew by 38%. For better or worse, the public has spoken. Jackson’s music is just too good to throw away.
 
Does this mean people have chosen to forget or ignore the weight of the evidence against him? Or have we decided, in this case at least, that it’s possible to like a song without necessarily endorsing the morals of its creator?
 
It’s hard to tell, because a culture, like a jury, doesn’t have to explain or justify its verdicts. It just decides things and moves on, voting with its feet and wallets.
 
Maybe the best we can do, in Jackson’s case, is try to articulate and understand our own responses. Speaking for myself, I have no doubt that Jackson was a reprehensible person. But I feel no attendant moral obligation to stop enjoying his music.
 
I have younger friends who take a harder line. For them, Jackson’s music is now as unacceptable as the man himself. I understand their view, but I can’t share it. How do I justify my position, if indeed it needs to be justified?
 
One answer is that I couldn’t excise Jackson’s music from my life even if I tried. If you grew up in the 1980s, as I did, Jackson’s songs were the sonic wallpaper of your youth. They were everywhere. When the “Thriller” video debuted on prime-time TV in 1983, everyone you knew stayed up to watch it. We all practiced moonwalking in front of our bedroom mirrors, even if our floors had carpet on them.
 
When a musician’s work saturates an era the way Jackson’s did, it’s redundant to ask if we can separate the art from the artist. Of course we can. Jackson’s songs became public property the moment they were released. They became everybody’s. They embedded themselves deep in the weave of millions of individual lives.
 
Moreover, Jackson’s music was pure pop. It never pretended to offer you any access to the contents of the man’s mind. If he’d been an earnest singer-songwriter like Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell, I don’t doubt that I would now find his work repugnant. It would all feel like a giant betrayal and lie.
 
But Jackson’s music never claimed to be in the truth business in the first place. He didn’t even write half the songs he’s famous for, and the ones he did write told you nothing about his inner life except that he liked to dance. Nobody ever seriously believed that he was the hardened street tough depicted in “Beat It” and “Bad”. Those songs were exercises in sheer fantasy; they weren’t implicated in anything Jackson got up to in real life. And I don’t think we implicate ourselves by continuing to listen to them.
 
Leaving Neverland ended with a sequence in which Wade Robson burned his Jackson records and memorabilia. You could see why such a catharsis felt necessary for Robson. But the film was too nuanced to demand that its viewers should immolate their own memories of Jackson. It merely asked us to accept the facts, and reckon with the thorny paradox Jackson presents. He was one of the most lavishly gifted entertainers of the 20^th century. He was also – as one participant in the documentary mildly put it – “not a good guy.”
 
MJ the musical tries hard to make us forget the second part of that paradox. Reportedly, the Jackson estate is working on a biopic that will go even further, and actively contend that the charges against him are bogus. This kind of creeping denialism must be resisted.
 
In another respect, the appearance of MJ is heartening. It suggests that cancellation, that other form of crude denialism, has had its day. The moral authority of the cancelling craze – if it ever had any – collapsed for good when Jackson slipped through the cancellers’ net. Less beloved artists have been banished from the culture on the strength of evidence far less compelling. Jackson escaped cancellation not because the case against him lacked merit, but because he was too big to fail.
 
And now MJ is happening, in plain sight. You can either go to it or not go. The choice is yours: it hasn’t already been made for you by an online mob.
 
This is surely a welcome development. The questions that Jackson’s case confronts us with are too important to be outsourced to strangers. They’re questions for the individual conscience. For most of us, the question of his guilt is settled. The trickier question is whether we gain anything by sweeping his artistic achievements into the dustbin of history.
 
Those achievements were indeed glorious, as MJ scintillatingly reminds us. But MJ himself was a far from glorious person. I see why some people wish the facts didn’t say that, but they do. The case of Michael Jackson offers clinching proof that the excellence of a work of art implies nothing – nothing at all – about the moral excellence of its creator.