This will hurt me...

Don't fence me in. Waverley Flora Park, Bellerive. December 2012. Wordless Wednesday.

Barbed wire. Mayfair Plaza Car Park, Sandy Bay. August 2012. Wordless Wednesday.

Just what, exactly, are you trying to tell me? St Johns Park, New Town. February 2011. Historically speaking, barbed wire is a reasonably recent invention. Emerging in the 1860s, it is all about inexpensively securing property. At its most straightforward, barbed wire fencing requires only posts, wire, and some kind of fixing device. Even better, any bugger can assemble it! It’s also awfully useful for cleaning your teeth. 50-50 , by Langston Hughes I’m all alone in this world, she said, Ain’t got nobody to share my bed, Ain’t got nobody to hold my hand— The truth of the matter’s I ain’t got no man. Big Boy opened his mouth and said, Trouble with you is You ain’t got no head! If you had a head and used your mind You could have me with you All the time. She answered, Babe, what must I do? He said, Share your bed— And your money, too.

Barbed wire seems to be a theme around the Battery Point area. It seems that once the middle classes decided to slum it, and they managed to shift the riff raff out, they are hell bent on keeping them out for good. Here is Shed Number Two on a grey old day. Personally, I think that razor wire would be far more effective...

Yes, it is the barbed wire that can be found on the fire escape at my work site again! Yes, there is barbed wire on the fire escape, such is the genius of our dominant classes here in Tasmania. Featured here is one of the very many cruel means that concentrated power utilise to stifle the revolutionary intent of proletariat . Of course, I have either a) had a small victory in securing the shift to a four day working week; or b) been duped into a further - and unknowing - web of Repressive Tolerance . Either way, I now have Fridays off! To escape the drudgery of a further neo-Marxist critique of Australian non-government service delivery, I have turned to noted scholar (his book on Marx and human nature is well worth the effort), and proficient blogger Norm Geras, and his meme of En-title-meant . The concept is a simple one: answer the questions using only the titles of books you've read this year and without repeating one. Describe yourself: If This is a Man , Primo Levi How do yo...

You may not think it, but the history of barbed wire is one of the most interesting that I have ever read about. Lucien B. Smith of Kent, Ohio got a US patent in the in 1867, and was the first wire technology capable of restraining cattle. This made intensive animal husbandry practical on a much larger scale. Barbed wire also emerged to have another quite useful feature: that of fortification in a military sense. Thus, the emergence of barbed wire was an integral part of explaining the kind of trench warfare in the First World War. Of course, this is not simply the straightforward notion that barbed wire "gets in the way" - which it does - but wire was not placed either solely used to impede or stop the passage of soldiers. The most common strategic use was to channel them into narrow passages in which small arms, particularly machine guns, and indirect fire could be used with greater effect as they attempted to pass. Thus you can generate the sort of result that saw the Brit...

I am continuing my ‘urban grit’ theme today, with another image of the out-of-control wild streets of Hobart. Yes, today we have a photograph of barbed wire. For reasons obviously beyond my feeble comprehension, there is a bundle of haphazardly arranged barbed wire on the side of the fire escape to keep reprobates off of the roof of this building. The logic behind this placement intrigues me. You see, the barbed wire only extends perhaps 1.5 metres across the ledge adjacent to the roof top, but the fire escape itself extends at least 2.5 metres, but more likely 3. This would allow enough space for all but the most corpulent of miscreants to freely access the roof and commit all sorts of heinous acts with the pigeons nestled on top. This oversight leads me to think that I can safely rule out roof access as the reason behind the inexplicable placement of the barbed wire. However, the wire does not sit in front of anything but a bare brick ledge. It protects no skylight, vent, power box o...