Dear Friends,
I've always used "hang, hung, hung" myself, but someone mentioned "hang" and its vagaries in a (private) message to me, so I checked my OED... According to it, it's the *hanged* (regular) past tense version that's "arachaic" (ie, older)...
When I think about the verb "to hang" in the context of Australian English, I'm fairly confident that here we reserve the past form of "hanged" on the most part for the form of execution: he was hanged by the neck etc. Despite the fact that the last hanging in Australia was Ronald Ryan in 1967, there is still a lot of talk about the subject.
Otherwise, we mainly use "hung" - for washing, paintings, Christmas stockings, and yes, even being "well hung". One would never say a bloke was "well hanged" :)
David in Ballarat
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