Overland literary journal

musings on black history month

Our wanderings scar this great, green globe like keloid geography. For centuries we’ve criss-crossed this cobalt blue: backward and forward, north to south, circling for landing space. Our sea voyages scar the ocean’s memory like needle tracks, ruptured flesh. Here she sunk the bodies of desperate slaves, dragged to her murky sea bed by the muffled rattling of their ankle chains. Here sailed the Amistad, gently rocked to revolution, the ocean’s tears shining as she gently pushed the mutinied ship homeward. See here a mass black grave where a banana boat upturned on way to the new world, the too-few life boats on board assigned to first class white passengers. We have left a thousand homes: involuntarily, reluctantly, and now as eagerly and easily as if the up-and-run of it all were pure addiction.

Some nights I dream I’m ancient Africa, stretched out wide and deep centre-globe, cradling a people. On my lower left shoulder in southern Togo, with their mahogany faces caked with thick white clay-paint, the Anlo-Ewe people stamp thanks to the sky God Mawu-Lisa. The blood of young goats sinks warm and iron-filled into the sandy earth of villages of my decolletage. Some nights I dream I am Africa, and the Songhay people are conjuring spirit Hauka which dance light-footed across the black earth ridges of my startled nipple, trapped inside the bucking bodies of taken tribes people. Village messengers, djembes slung across backs, gently drum their cryings up and down my ribcage, rocking me back to sleep. I dream I am ancient Africa and my history has no beginning. I dream I am forever, remembering more than centuries.

Written by Maxine Clarke on 27-02-2009, No comments

well famous

There's a discussion of the Overland-Meanjin soccer match (a clash at which Overland won a clear moral victory) in that glossy mag that comes with the Fairfax papers. Key moments: Meanjin's Sophie Cunningham on shoes and Vulgar's Ian Syson on 'inner-city knobs'. Plus there's a passing mention of my fashion sense.

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 27-02-2009, 5 user comments

a further descent into barbarism

I've started experimenting with an Overland Twitter account. Somehow, this really depresses me. OK, I like blogs, despite the TL;DR factor. Even though Facebook seems inherently inane, I can see that it's useful, especially for events and so on. But the very idea of Twitter, embodied in its basic question 'What are you doing?',  seems less about overcoming alienation than enthusiastically embracing it, with most of the tweets reading like dialogue from Beckett. What are you doing? Nothing. What are you doing? Sitting in a garbage bin waiting to die.

So why sign up? Basically, if you want to promote something like a literary magazine in the twenty-first century, you embrace any opportunity for publicity that offers itself, whether you like it or not. Hence the 'You kids get off my lawn!' grumpiness about this post. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 27-02-2009, 8 user comments

War-gaming the counter-revolution

... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 25-02-2009, 5 user comments

National Young Writers’ Festival

Below is the call for submissions of this year's National Young Writers' Festival:

It's ridiculously easy to get involved. Should you do it? YES, because it will be completely fun. I'm associate director for the festival this year, and I can tell you that, as well as your classic panels, readings, Festival Club parties, and general "we're not the ones who have to rebuild Newcastle next week" nutbaggin', on our agenda is: - Programming for conflict! i.e. if a panel looks exciting, it will be. No tears (in the audience).

- "New generation" publishing stuff. Ampersand, Torpedo, Stop Drop n Roll, Brow contributors - that means you.

- Two of the directors are from Brisbane and their backgrounds are in theatre. The other one's a comics maker from Tasmania. If you've been to lots of NYWFs and think you'll just be seeing the same (basic) program as ever - you won't. If you're not from Melbourne, not super-traditionally a writer, hell, not necessarily under 30 - odds are, there's more room for you than ever. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 25-02-2009, 2 user comments

Poetry prize presentation

After the Australian Poetry Centre's monthly salon on 22 March, Overland poetry editor Keri Glastonbury announces the winning poems from the $3000 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets, sponsored by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation. There's a now downloadable flyer for the event available here.

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 25-02-2009, 2 user comments

Whaledreamers

cross-posted at walking and falling

I had the misfortune of seeing Whaledreamers on Friday, part of the Sydney Travelling Film Festival that made its way through Alice Springs. We are a hardened audience for the sort of vacuous worship that filmmaker Kim Kindersley profuses for the Mirning people. In the whitefellas-talking-about-blackfellas stakes, we are territorial and deeply wary, but always up for a challenge. So it was with horror that I realised I was watching a film about a British ex-actor's spiritual quest to become an Aboriginal dolphin.

This man is sadly obsessed by his own journey. Every moment is infected with a terrible seriousness, as though the Southern Right Whale has a patent on profundity (perfectly good ancestral myths about stink bugs have proven less popular). His pat explanations of "the dreamtime" and the Stolen Generations will only please the ignorant who wish to remain so. The structure is hopeless, the delivery wretched. Even the nice underwater shots of whales swimming soon exasperate. In a studenty montage towards the end Kindersley suggests that gazing into the mystical eyeballs of charismatic megafauna will save us from George Bush. If only someone could save us from the plague of earnest hippies that crawl over Indigenous cultures like lice. ... read more

Written by Jennifer Mills on 23-02-2009, 2 user comments

Saturday night Ernest Ranglin

Just because.

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 21-02-2009, 5 user comments

CAL-Meanjin lecture

Overland readers might be interested in the event series hosted by Meanjin.

Meanjin is pleased to announce the first of the CAL/Meanjin lectures, to be held at the Perth Writers’ Festival (February 28 – March 2). The CAL/Meanjin lecture series, will be held at major writers’ festivals throughout 2009 and 2010. As Australia’s foremost literary journal, Meanjin

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 20-02-2009, 7 user comments

fairytale: an audio poem

Click here to listen

Written by Maxine Clarke on 20-02-2009, 2 user comments

why is there no ABC newspaper?

In response to the ongoing collapse of the newspaper industry in the US – and the signs that something similar will soon take place here – the case for a public-funded newspaper seems at least as strong as that for a public TV or radio broadcaster. Here's the current state of play in America.

Even before the recession hit, the newspaper industry was facing a mortal threat from the rise of the Internet, falling circulation and advertising revenue, and a long-term decline in readership, as the habit of buying a daily paper dwindled from one generation to the next. The recession has intensified these difficulties, plunging newspapers into a tailspin from which some may not recover and others will emerge only as a shadow of their former selves. The devastation is already substantial. At the Los Angeles Times, the cumulative effect of cutbacks has been to reduce its newsroom by one-half--and that was before its parent company, Tribune, declared bankruptcy. Another company weighed down by debt, the McClatchy chain, which includes The Sacramento Bee, The Miami Herald, and twenty-eight other dailies, has laid off one-quarter of its workforce in the past year; according to one executive, the editorial downsizing is under 20 percent but is now cutting "close to the bone." And highly leveraged media companies are not the only ones that are retrenching. At the largest daily in New Jersey, The Star-Ledger, 45 percent of the editorial staff took buyouts in October when the owner, Advance Publications, threatened to sell the paper if its targets for cuts were not met. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 20-02-2009, 2 user comments