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.

Five Books

Interview with Five Books

I recently spoke to Charlie Siskel from the Five Books website about my favourite five books on the subject of conspiracy theory. The interview is here. 

The Podcast

To mark the 60th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, I'm releasing a longform podcast this year, entitled Ghosts of Dallas, that will tell the epic story of Kennedy conspiracism. 

Why is it that more than half the American population has always believed there was a conspiracy behind Kennedy's death? Who were the pioneers who made JFK denialism into an industry? How did six decades of myth-making about Kennedy's murder set the scene for the conspiratorial presidency of Donald J. Trump? And why did Jack Ruby bring his favourite sausage dog along on the morning he shot Lee Harvey Oswald?

Episodes 1-19 are available now wherever you get your podcasts.

  

Live Albums

Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, March 8, 2025

I’m not sure what the best live album ever made is, but I do know roughly when it came out. At least thirty years ago, before the internet murdered the live album as an art form. These days, YouTube is awash with fan-shot video of every show an artist plays. The mystique of the live recording – the scarcity value of it – is gone.
 
In the old days, your favourite artist issued a live album once or twice a decade if you were lucky. Only when bands were in peak form did the tapes roll. Dud numbers were weeded out. Each live album was a carefully curated work of art.
 
A highlight of those classic live albums was the chat between songs. Generally this patter was far less rehearsed than the music. But you heard it over and over, as often as you played the record. The rhythm of those one-off quips and asides stuck in your head as stubbornly as the songs did.
 
Neil Diamond’s Hot August Night, that unavoidable live album of the 1970s, was frequently on my parents’ stereo when I was little. Just before playing “Solitary Man,” Neil said something that really used to freak me out. He said, “Tree people out there, God bless you, I’m singing for you too.”
 
Tree people? I didn’t like the sound of that. I pictured a sinister race of mutant Diamond fans, half-human, half-arborous, like the terrifying tree puppets on H.R. Pufnstuf.
 
Only when I was old enough to read the liner notes did I get Neil’s reference. He had recorded the album at L.A.’s Greek Theatre – an outdoor venue ringed by pine trees. In the carefree 1970s, people would climb the trees and eavesdrop on concerts for free.
 
Sometimes live albums contained mysteries the liner notes didn’t solve. On Queen’s 1979 album Live Killers, Freddie Mercury introduced the song “Death on Two Legs” by saying, “This is about a —” Whatever he said next was censored by three long, evenly spaced bleeps.
 
What on earth had Mercury said? To find out, you had to wait for the advent of the internet. What he said was, “This is about a real motherfucker of a gentleman.”
 
Speaking of the m-f word, the Detroit band MC5 unsuccessfully tried to use it on their 1969 album Kick Out the Jams. Introducing the title track, the group’s frontman, Rob Tyner, yelled to the crowd, “Now it’s time to kick out the jams, motherfuckers!”
 
That’s what he originally said, anyway. The band’s record label didn’t want radio stations boycotting the song, so it removed the expletive and spliced in some audio of Tyner yelling the words “brothers and sisters” instead.
 
Thanks to the efforts of potty-mouthed pioneers like Tyner and Mercury, swearing on live albums was commonplace by 1981, when Cold Chisel released Swingshift. During a lull in the closing number, “Goodbye (Astrid Goodbye)”, Jimmy Barnes delivered a quintessentially Australian piece of stage patter.
 
“I bet you’ve all hated Billy on saxophone, David on harmonica … fuckin’ classic.”
 
Sometimes, on live albums, the repartee was supplied by the audience rather than the performer. On her 1974 record Miles of Aisles, Joni Mitchell paused between songs to tune her guitar, whereupon some dude in the crowd very audibly shouted, “Joni, you have more class than Mick Jagger, Richard Nixon and Gomer Pyle combined!”
 
History doesn’t record who this wag was. But every time you play the album there he is, delivering his dated zinger yet again, prompting Joni to utter a charmingly spontaneous giggle.
 
There’s another famous audience contribution on the Rolling Stones’ Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! (1970). Right before “Sympathy for the Devil,” a female fan can be heard vainly requesting the song “Paint it Black.” “Paint it Black,” she plaintively cries. “Paint it Black, you devil!”
 
No matter how many million times she issued this plea, on how many million turntables, the song that came next was always “Sympathy for the Devil.” Weirdly, the Stones re-used her interjection on another live album two decades later, mixing it into the crowd noise on Flashpoint (1991). This time the song that came next was “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
 
Like old photographs, the patter on those live records preserves obscure little moments of history that would otherwise have slipped into oblivion. On the Grateful Dead’s 1981 album Reckoning, while playing “Ripple”, Jerry Garcia briefly stops singing to utter the cryptic remark, “That’s Otis”.
 
Why? Because the band’s guitarist Bob Weir had a dog named Otis, who had chosen this moment to wander across the stage.  
 
At the end of the Allman Brothers Band’s 1971 Fillmore Concerts, Duane Allman rejects the audience’s calls for a second encore by saying, “It’s six o’clock y’all!”
 
Why? Because the theatre had been temporarily evacuated before the show, owing to a bomb threat. The Brothers had gone on late … and had jammed until dawn.  
 
My favourite practitioner of stage chat is the guitarist Leo Kottke. On one of his concert videos, Kottke outlined his philosophy of patter.
 
“I’ve learned that it’s necessary by this time in the set to speak,” he says, after playing a few numbers, “because there’s a kind of tension and then a hostility that develops if there’s just complete silence. The hole I dig for myself by not saying anything is much deeper than the one I’m digging right now, so I go ahead and begin to speak, wondering at least as much as you what the hell it is I’m gonna say.”
 
That’s good patter. It isn’t just patter, it’s meta-patter. It’s patter about patter. And Kottke’s analysis is spot on. A live show without intersong chat is like a steak without salt.
 
“I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we’ve passed the audition,” quipped John Lennon on a London rooftop, after the Beatles’ final public performance. Left on the end of the Let it Be album by its producer Phil Spector, Lennon’s gag sounded like an epitaph on the Beatles’ career. If he’d known his throwaway line would attain sonic immortality, Lennon surely would have phrased it more grammatically. 

Book Blurbs

Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, February 6, 2025

Strolling through Dymocks with a friend recently, I spied a book with a rapturous blurb from The Australian on its cover. “A stunning piece of work,” it said.

 “I wrote that,” I told my friend, wiping away a little tear of pride. I didn’t mean that I wrote the book. I meant that I wrote the blurb. More precisely, I meant that I had, many years ago, written the book review from which the blurb had been culled.  
 
On the back of the same book were longer blurbs from other people. Unlike me, the authors of these blurbs were identified by name, because unlike me these people were famous. Not famous for knowing anything about books, mind you, but famous for other things.
 
How far should we trust these celebrity book blurbs? Quite often they emanate from close personal friends of the author, who want to remain close personal friends of the author. Sometimes they come from people who are authors themselves, which doesn’t mean much unless their own books are any good. Frequently they’re not.
 
Blurbs weren’t always so easy to come by. Shakespeare himself struggled to get a decent blurb during his lifetime. Indeed, his collected plays weren’t even published until seven years after his death, when the First Folio appeared.
 
Looking for a suitably impressive endorsement, the Folio’s editors approached Ben Jonson, the most respected poet-playwright of the time. Privately, Jonson had a few reservations about Shakespeare.
 
Even so, he coughed up a pretty good blurb, in the form of a dedicatory poem. In it he hailed Shakespeare as the “star of poets” and “wonder of our stage.” But he couldn’t resist throwing in a little dig at the Bard’s relative lack of education. “Thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,” Jonson observed.
 
Now there was a blurb you could trust – not just because Jonson leavened it with some words of dispraise, but because Shakespeare was dead when he wrote it. Plainly, Jonson wasn’t just blurbing Shakespeare in the hope that Shakespeare would one day blurb him.
 
Writers can do crazy things in quest of a blurb. When Norman Mailer finished his third novel, The Deer Park, he sent a copy to his hero Ernest Hemingway, hoping the great man would favour him with a blurb for use in the print ads.
 
Being far too macho to ask nicely, Mailer made his pitch to Hemingway in almost insanely aggressive terms. “If you do not answer,” he wrote, “or if you answer with the kind of crap you use to answer unprofessional writers, sycophants, brown-nosers, etc, then f— you, and I will never attempt to communicate with you again.”
 
Papa did not provide the blurb.
 
Blurbs can be a delicate matter in the book world. They can make or break a literary friendship. When Vladimir Nabokov was struggling to make his name in America in the 1940s, he would have killed for a blurb from his friend Edmund Wilson, who happened to be the nation’s most influential literary critic.
 
But Wilson seemed curiously reluctant to endorse Nabokov’s work in print. When their friendship imploded years later, the two giants denounced each other in a series of delightfully snide public letters. In one of these, Nabokov very elegantly made it clear that he was still simmering about Wilson’s failure to blurb him.
 
“During my first decade in America,” Nabokov wrote, Wilson “was most kind to me in various matters, not necessarily pertaining to his profession. I have always been grateful to him for the tact he showed in refraining from reviewing any of my novels.”
 
Closer to our own day, Christoper Hitchens and Gore Vidal got into a nasty public spat about a blurb. When Hitchens published his book Unacknowledged Legislation in 2000, a generous endorsement from Vidal appeared on the cover.
 
“I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an heir, a dauphin or delfino,” Vidal wrote. “I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.”
 
When the two men fell out a few years later, Vidal took the extraordinary step of trying to retract his blurb. Speaking to a reporter, he claimed to find it baffling that Hitchens had been going around identifying himself as Vidal’s heir.  
 
Hitchens wasn’t about to let that pass. In a fiery magazine article, he pointed out that Vidal had offered him the blurb voluntarily – and that he still had the correspondence to prove it. Anyway, he added, he had “stopped making use of” Vidal’s endorsement some time ago, having privately concluded that the man was losing his marbles.
 
When my own second novel came out in 2017, it featured a glowing front-cover endorsement from Clive James. It was a blurb for the ages. He didn’t quite use the word “genius”, but it was heavily implied.
 
Equipped with a killer blurb from Clive, I thought I had it made in the shade. Then certain grim realities of the book business began to impress themselves on me. If people were going to see the blurb, they first had to enter a bookshop and browse the shelves. What percentage of book-buyers still do that?
 
Then I found, to my horror, that in certain bookstores my book was being shelved spine-out instead of face-out. Other books, with blurbs from people like Lee Child, were on full-frontal display. To access my blurb, people didn’t just have to approach the right shelf. They had to be so intrigued by my book’s spine that they would feel compelled to expose its cover manually.  
 
Speaking of Clive James, he delivered the best crack about book blurbs that I’ve ever heard. When a prominent Australian author blurbed a second-rate book as “unputdownable,” Clive was sceptical. Perhaps the reason the prominent author couldn’t put the book down, Clive said, was that it was so full of hot air it kept springing back up again.
 
 

Penn & Teller

Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, 29 January, 2025

“Do you believe in magic?” the Lovin’ Spoonful asked in 1965.

That’s a pretty broad question. Let’s refine it a little, so it can be answered with a simple yes or no. Do you believe in magic as a form of entertainment?
 
To that question my answer is an enormous yes. At its best, magic is a thrilling blend of creative ingenuity and consummate technical skill. There’s no show I’d rather go to than a good magic show.
 
Some people, who otherwise strike me as quite intelligent and decent, tell me they’re not into magic. A friend of mine was recently heard to remark that magic “just isn’t my thing.”
 
I find this attitude baffling. How can magic not be your thing? Magic is magic, for crying out loud. It’s a byword for delight. If you think you don’t like it, maybe it’s because you’ve never seen a first-rate magician perform.
 
Consider Penn & Teller, the superlative American magicians who are currently touring Australia. I’ve been lucky enough to see these brilliant men play the Sydney Opera House twice now – first in the winter of 2022, when Australia was still staggering out of its Covid hibernation, and again in January this year.
 
I would say, without the slightest hesitation, that those two shows were the most exhilarating and mind-expanding nights I’ve ever spent in a theatre. Penn & Teller are supreme masters of their craft, to say the least. But I would go further. I’d say they are creative artists of the highest order.
 
In the 2022 show, Teller performed his masterpiece, a show-stopping routine called “Shadows.” If you’ve never had the privilege of seeing this sublime creation unfold in a theatre, you can watch Teller perform it on YouTube.  
 
But that is a poor substitute for seeing it live. When Teller executed the trick’s final move at the Opera House, the effect was literally breathtaking. You heard the sound of 1,500 people all gasping at once.
 
When I recall that moment now, I find myself getting a little choked up. The climax of that trick was no less moving than a great line of poetry, or a soaring phrase of music.  
 
In Penn & Teller’s current show there’s a mind-bending number called “Entropy”, which is less a trick than a happening, a genuinely weird incursion into the laws of space and time. It’s a radically original piece of art, as intellectually frisky and audacious as a Stoppard play. Watching it unfold, you feel the world being taken apart and remade in front of your eyes.
 
Great magic renovates your brain, as all true art does. It takes your mind on a wild ride. It expands your sense of what human beings can do when they put their minds to it.
 
In the 2022 show, Penn did a hair-raising routine with a nail gun. It looked phenomenally dangerous. But he was at pains to reassure the audience – which contained many children – that he would never be so crass as to endanger his life on stage. There was a secret to what he was doing up there. He wanted us to know that, even if he wasn’t about to tell us what the secret was.
 
Penn & Teller do things on stage that seem to defy rational explanation. But just because you can’t see the rational explanation doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Like all honest magicians, Penn & Teller don’t claim to possess psychic or supernatural powers. Far from it. These are tricks, Penn repeatedly stresses on stage. Their outcome is carefully controlled. No other result is possible.
 
The best magicians don’t just entertain us. They educate us. They’re rationalist warriors, who immunise us against metaphysical charlatans by demonstrating that the physical world is far more rich and strange than we previously thought.
 
There’s a long tradition of this in magic. In the 1920s, Harry Houdini denounced the spiritualist mediums who were taking the post-war world by storm. These people were just jumped-up magicians, Houdini said. Their work was “a fraud from start to finish.” In the 1970s, the Amazing Randi waged a similar campaign of demystification against the purported psychic Uri Geller.
 
At the bottom of most magic tricks lies some relatively simple physical mechanism: a sleight of hand, a moment of misdirection. The beauty of great magic – and I use the word beauty in its fullest sense – lies in the artistry with which these mechanisms are concealed.
 
Robert Hughes, the Australian art critic, once explained the simple philosophy underlying his appreciation of art. “I love the spectacle of skill,” he wrote.
 
That’s what great magic delivers, in a strikingly pure form: the spectacle of skill. If you ever get a chance to see a master magician perform, take it. You won’t regret it. If you do, you may need to check your pulse.

The Great Australian BBQ

Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, January 16, 2025

It’s funny how the implications of a word can change over time. Take the word barbecue. When I was young, the word connoted a lot of things: heat, flies, cricket, eskies full of canned drink. But one thing it certainly didn’t connote was mouth-watering food.
 
Things have changed. Some of the most delicious food I’ve eaten this summer was cooked on a barbecue. I’m talking about cumin-rubbed lamb rump charred over coals. I’m talking about premium swordfish steaks paid for by somebody other than me, seared to perfection on a gas grill. These days, when you hear the word barbecue, you ready yourself for next-level food – food that’s a cut above what you generally cook indoors.
 
When I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s, things were the other way around. The food at barbecues was rudimentary, and way less enticing than the average home-cooked meal. Two forms of protein dominated the hotplate: sausages and steak. When I say “steak”, I’m not talking about something that would seriously be called a steak today. I’m talking about the kind of leathery, jerky-like slivers of so-called steak that you used to get with a motel breakfast.
 
As for the snags, they were invariably made of beef. Where I lived, there was no such thing as a non-beef sausage. Moreover, there was no such thing as a thin sausage. When I was young, the thin snag was not yet even a thing. When they first came in, they were called “breakfast sausages”. People said they would never catch on.
 
When I try to recall the flavour of a 1970s barbecue, I find that the dominant note was carbon. Everything tasted burnt. There were several reasons for this. For one thing, the barbecuing was invariably done by the men. Most of these blokes didn’t handle the cooking duties at home. Some of them barely knew how to open a box of cereal. But for some reason it was considered mandatory to hand them the tongs when a cook took place outdoors. Their signature move was to flip the meat incessantly whether it needed flipping or not, until every visible part of it was black.
 
In fairness to the dads, barbecuing technology in those days was deeply primitive. The default barbie setup was a thin steel plate over an open fire. The plates were knee-high, so that the barbie had to be tended in a crouch. Naked flames reared up around the hotplate and lashed the meat, sometimes setting it on fire. Neil Perry himself would have struggled to deliver a quality steak under those conditions.
 
All this was perfectly legal, because fire restrictions in those days were hilariously laid-back. Today’s fire-hazard signs start at Moderate and run through Extreme up to Catastrophic. In the old days, Extreme was the highest setting. Moderate was in the middle. Over on the left was a setting that said – believe it or not – Nil.
 
When the sign said Nil, it was open season for open fires. The kids collected the wood, then the parents activated the inferno, sometimes with the aid of an accelerant. Essentially, the old-school barbecue was a smallish bushfire with a thin metal plate on top of it.
 
I’m not sure what grade of steel those old barbie plates were made of, but I do recall that they tended to warp and buckle after repeated exposure to flame. The hotplate in our backyard had a big hump up the back of it. If you put a snag up there, it would roll off into the ashes with the foil-wrapped potatoes. It would then be hosed off and returned to the grill.
 
There may not have been a Catastrophic setting on the hazard signs, but those raging barbie fires certainly had catastrophic effects on meat. The sausages suffered rampant mince leakage at either end, so they wound up looking like dumbbells.
 
The steaks resembled bark chips, in terms of both looks and chewability. If you tried to penetrate them with a plastic knife and fork, the cutlery would explode. If you tried to eat them in a sandwich, the whole steak came away in your teeth, and you were left holding two slices of humid bread. If you wanted your steak to be in any sense moist, you had to reach for the Red Baron sauce.
 
The salads were better, because they were prepared by the women, who knew that food should taste of something other than charcoal and ketchup. In the salad space, there was room for vibrancy and innovation. I still remember the barbecue where I clapped eyes on my first tabouleh.
 
In retrospect, that was an auspicious day. In Australia’s cities, post-war immigration had been enriching our cuisine since the 1950s. That tabouleh was the first sign I ever saw that the multicultural food revolution had finally reached the barbecues of suburbia.  
 
By the mid 1980s, local butchers were getting in on the act. It was a game-changer for barbecues when some unsung genius of butchery invented the pepper steak. The pepper crust made the steak taste of something, and provided a vital layer of insulation between the meat and the infernal surface of the grill.
 
Meanwhile, the sausage scene was transformed by the introduction of the flavoured snag: tomato and onion, lamb and rosemary.
 
When Paul Hogan did his tourism ads in 1984, urging Americans to come over and throw a shrimp on the barbie, he seemed to be suggesting that the barbecuing of crustaceans was a long-standing Aussie tradition. It certainly wasn’t where I came from. Maybe I was going to the wrong barbecues. Maybe we lived too far from the coast.
 
At any rate, the first white meat I ever saw cooked on a barbie was some honey-soy chicken. It didn’t stay white for long, but it tasted sensational. The age of marination had arrived. Even today, with the vast array of rubs and seasonings on the market, the honey-soy combination can still hold its own.
 
Don’t get me wrong. When I was young, the great Australian barbecue was already great in many ways. It just took a while for the food to become one of them.

Celebrity Spotting

Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, January 4, 2025

Who is the most famous celebrity you have ever encountered in the wild? I’ll tell you mine. About ten years ago, I was walking up the main street of Bangalow in northern NSW. A man and woman were walking towards me. They looked like a regular middle-aged couple, although the man was talking in an American accent.

 
As we drew level with each other, I glanced at the guy with the accent … and found myself looking at a startlingly familiar face. It was Paul Giamatti, star of more great movies than you can shake a stick at.
 
Giamatti must have registered my look of amazement, for he gave me a smile and a little nod, as if to say, “Yes, I am who you think I am, but let’s not make a big deal of it.”
 
I responded with a tactful nod of my own, intended to convey my deep respect for the man and his body of work. A guy like Giamatti must get gawped at by strangers about a thousand times a day. I wanted to be one of the cool ones who let him continue on his way, without bothering him for a chat or selfie.
 
You get a great natural high when you see a celebrity in real life. We tend to feel that famous people live in a different world from the rest of us – a better and more glamorous world. When you bump into one of them on the street, you realise that you live in that glamorous world too. For a fleeting moment you understand that life is more magical, and fuller of possibility, than you generally give it credit for. You want to spread the news to everyone you know.
 
The trouble with encountering a star like Giamatti, however, is that when you say to people, “Guess who I just saw down the street? Paul Giamatti!” they’re quite likely to burst your bubble by replying, “Who’s Paul Giamatti?” Everybody knows the man’s face, but not everybody knows his name.
 
To maximise the effect of my Giamatti anecdote, I started showing people a stock picture of him on my phone as the story reached its climax. Unfortunately, this created a fresh problem. People recognised his face all right, but they seriously doubted that I had seen him down the street. Maybe I’d only seen someone who looked like him.
 
I found this response annoying. Obviously, I already knew that seeing Paul Giamatti down the street was a freakishly unlikely occurrence. That’s why I was telling the story in the first place.
 
I no longer live in northern NSW. At this time of year I wish I still did, because summer is peak celebrity-spotting season up there. The place is rife with famous people. Some of them live there. Others descend on the beaches for the holidays.
 
Once, in Byron Bay Woolworths, I saw Delvene Delaney buying some cold meat. In Bangalow itself I saw a super-tanned James Reyne eating a sandwich on a bench. I once narrowly missed seeing Elle Macpherson in the IGA. A friend told me he’d just seen her in there. But by the time I got there she was gone.
 
I once had to use the town’s only ATM to conduct an unreasonably lengthy transaction. I hoped that nobody was waiting behind me. When I was finally done, I found that somebody was. It was Kerry O’Brien, wearing an ancient T-shirt and a pair of cargo shorts. How long had he been waiting there? He looked a bit ticked off, but maybe he always does.
 
The first celebrity I ever saw in the flesh was Jon English. I was about ten years old, and my mother and I were waiting for a cab at Canberra airport. The monumentally tall English came out to the kerb, with a couple of heavy bags slung over his shoulder. He peered up and down the road, looking in vain for his ride. He uttered a single word: “Shit.”
 
On the basis of that encounter, I formed the impression that Jon English was an unusually foul-mouthed individual. It took me many years to appreciate that it’s quite normal for adults to say “shit” in an airport pickup situation.
 
Canberra isn’t a great place for spotting celebrities, by the way. When I lived there I saw only two kinds of celebrities: members of the Canberra Raiders football team, and politicians.
 
The best Canberran celebrity encounter I know of happened to my brother, not me. We were driving through the nondescript suburb of Campbell when my brother found himself in urgent need of a toilet.
 
We pulled into the local Shell, and my brother made a beeline for the can. It was one of those old-school servo toilets: a fibro structure tucked around the side of the main building, housing a single unisex cubicle.
 
After a strangely long interval my brother returned, laughing uncontrollably. It transpired that the toilet, when he’d got there, was already solidly engaged. Whoever was in there was in there for the long haul. My brother bounced from foot to foot outside the door, cursing the unseen occupant of the lav. Finally he heard a muffled flush. The door opened … and out walked the nattily dressed figure of Al Grassby.
 
You can’t pick and choose which celebrities you encounter, or where and when you will encounter them. The magic of the celebrity encounter lies in its unpredictability. All you can do, to maximise your chances of seeing famous people, is go to places where they are known to congregate. They rarely pay house calls.
 
In fact, I know of only one time in history when this has happened. Again I can’t claim this story as my own. It happened to a kid I went to school with. Both of us lived in the obscure Blue Mountains village of Faulconbridge. The chances of seeing a celebrity in our neighbourhood were about as close to zero as you can get.
 
One Saturday morning, however, somebody knocked on my friend’s front door. My friend opened it. Standing on the doorstep was Doc Neeson, lead singer of The Angels. “My name is Doc,” he said. “Have you seen my dog?”
 
When my friend told us this story he was met with yodels of disbelief. As if Doc Neeson had knocked on his door! Soon, however, it emerged that we owed him an apology. Surreal as it sounded, Neeson had indeed moved into our neighbourhood, along with his partner and at least one dog.  
 
And why not? Celebrities have to live somewhere. They have to go to the shops, and the toilet, and put out the garbage, and catch planes and trains.  
 
I’m 95% sure that I once saw Ian Moss standing on Strathfield station holding a guitar case. Once on an intercity train, I sat down next to a guy with a white beard who was dozing in the window seat. On inspection, he proved to be David Stratton.
 
Showing admirable restraint, I didn’t wake him up to initiate a conversation. I waited for him to wake up naturally. Sadly, he was still asleep when the train arrived at my station. I still regret this, because I had the perfect ice-breaker. If anyone would have loved my Paul Giamatti story, it would have been David Stratton.