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.”