The Herald column that turns 40 this week served with a cease and desist over its name

As The Sydney Morning Herald’s Short Black column celebrates its 40th anniversary this week, an early birthday present landed in the form of a trademark infringement cease and desist over the use of the column’s name.

“It has come to our attention that [The Sydney Morning Herald] is writing a weekly news column … titled Short Black,” the legal note said. Yes, the same Short Black that Sydneysiders have been reading on Tuesdays for four decades, as the column – under its various writers – chronicled Sydney’s food and lifestyle explosion.

Short Black was born in 1984, in an age of print not podcasts, the latter a specialty of the law firm’s client, who we’ve decided not to name, although you won’t need a 10-part investigative podcast to guess.

Businesses using the Short Black moniker have popped up over the years, we’ve been flattered, and why complain about the use of a generic coffee term? But it turns out as Short Black was loosening its belt and poised to head into its 30s, the name was being trademarked elsewhere in July 2013.

“We chose the name because it worked for both purposes: coffee and short stories,” says Herald columnist Jenna Price, who founded the Short Black column. The cappuccino (pictured) ruled over a colourful ’80s Sydney, and it was Short Black that provided the moniker for writers keen to chart the rise of the food and lifestyle scene.

“I’d only been editing Good Living (now Good Food) for a hot minute, but this was my only solution to how we might manage the waterfall of information about food, wine, travel and fashion without writing more words than the story actually merited,” Price explains.

Before this, Short Black’s first iteration could be found in pages of the university newspaper Price edited with her then-boyfriend-now-husband John Kavanagh (along with some inspiration from Melbourne designer Rus Littleson) where they aimed to capture some of “the airy look of The New Yorker”.

“It was written by a bunch of us, whoever had 10 minutes to rustle up a story.”

Journalist Jenna Price

Those first Short Black instalments in the Herald make for prized time-capsule reading. Billing itself as “a touch of tattle”, Short Black documented speculation about a Melbourne restaurateur opening in Sydney (little has changed), and a service offering freshly shot and plucked pheasant delivered to your door. A restaurant diner spotted licking his plate received a couple of disapproving column inches, while fashionistas jumped on the craze for convict print shirts.

Male strippers were the rage for women, a male-only barber shop in the city described itself as “a haven of anti-feminine bliss” and when readers weren’t digesting news about recipes from Soviet cookbooks, the age-old obsession with prices was evident. The $1 added to the bill for rice at one establishment wasn’t well-received, but $28 for six dozen oysters and $12 for a three-course set menu at Kinselas under chef Tony Bilson’s watch? Fetch me a hot tub time machine.

“It was written by a bunch of us, whoever had 10 minutes to rustle up a story,” Price says. “That included tip-offs from venerable food critics Leo Schofield and David Dale and by our celebrity food editor Elise Pascoe.”

“We’d never write these days that there’s no such thing as a good Australian chef. Nor would we complain about a $15 bill unless it was for a cup or two of coffee. But we still want to know about bargains, facts, gossip and restaurant rumours.”

So happy 40th birthday to the column with the short name and long history. “Short Black persists,” Price says. Let’s hope sanity over its name does as well.