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State of play

It would be an understatement to say that whole new worlds have opened up to me as a result of parenthood, but nothing brought this home more than discovering the toy section of a department store.

Our $1 friendYou would think as a mother of a toddler, or perhaps even, as general citizen of the capitalist consumption world, that this would have been known to me sooner, but I only recently stumbled upon this kooky collection due to the increasing numbers of friends who are reproducing and the pressure I feel to buy something new for them, as opposed to sourcing everything from the op shop, as I have done for The Boy to date. ... read more

Written by Michele Freeman on 14-04-2010, 2 user comments

Don’t tell anyone they’re here to help

The National Retail Association (NRA) is having another cry. This time, it’s in response to the Fair Work Ombudsman’s announcement that it will be writing to 50 000 retailers across Australia to make sure they are complying with new workplace laws. It will then look at the employment records of 1500 staff, selected at random, to make sure they’re on track.

The NRA has been complaining since before time began about how difficult the new workplace laws are to understand and how hard it is going to be for their employers to cope. The transitional provisions that are aimed at moving employers and employees from the old system to the new are complicated enough for large business, let alone for mum and dad operations. Even figuring out what award applies to which staff member can be confusing. ... read more

Written by Isy Burns on 13-04-2010, 3 user comments

Overland extract: Margaret Simons on text in the electronic world

In Overland 198, Margaret Simons looks at the possibilities for text and reading in the digital age, and reminds us that reading does not begin and end with the novel:

Like most seasons, this summer has been a time of books in my household, a place that, for the holiday period, has spanned the generations. Knowing I was going to write this piece, I have been watching the members of my extended family read.

My grandson turned two last week. Books aimed at his age group are full of things to touch and things to do: glitter, fur and holes, caterpillars that eat and penguins to be counted. ‘Reading’, if that is what he is doing, is an activity he shares. A few months ago, he was not sufficiently adept to turn a page by himself. Now he is discovering the rewards of doing so, since each new page has a picture of a duck, a car or a baby and he gets a thrill from saying the correct word or having me say it for him.

... read more

Written by Editorial team on 13-04-2010, No comments

Water

I worry a lot lately about water.

It's a categorical fact that Australia is the driest inhabited continent on the planet. It's well known. We have a lot of droughts, and we have a lot of long droughts. We're affected by the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and we're affected by the lesser known Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation. New Guinea casts a rain-shadow over northern Australia. We have huge deserts that dry all the water out of any air that passes over them. Australia is just a bloody dry place.

So it's a pity that we're so ridiculously bad at conserving water.

Australia is the driest continent in the world, but per capita, Australians are among the top ten water users in the world. I consider this to be one of those crazy statistics that Australia comes up with once in a while just to mess with me; the last good one I heard was that Australia, the least forested country in the world, is also the biggest exporter of woodchips. Anyway. Most of the water that is used in Australia is used for agriculture; if my university lecturers are to be believed, the break-up of water use in Australia is about as follows: ten percent residential, twenty percent industrial, seventy percent agricultural. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 13-04-2010, 2 user comments

What is Community Unionism?

You may be a member of a union. But have you ever been approached by some other union – approached as a member of the community – and invited to join a campaign or activity broader than wages and conditions? For example, have you been encouraged to attend meetings about the closure of local services, protecting the environment, supporting peace efforts or advocating for human rights – with unions actively involved?

The idea of Community Unionism involves creative and effective links between active unionists, progressive activists and community members.

Community unionism could be in the form of collaborations based on links between unions and community organisations or with groups of people with shared interests, e.g. feminists or environmentalists, or in specific geographic areas or neighbourhoods. ... read more

Written by Sharon Callaghan on 12-04-2010, 4 user comments

The land is in our heart and in our minds

The drive from Mpartnwe/Alice Springs to Tennant Creek is a good reminder of what it means to be living in the Territory. It’s long, pretty much straight, littered with blown-out tires and beautiful landscapes and you pass through some roadside stops that highlight the good, the bad and the absurd of the NT. This past Good Friday I took the drive up the road with a couple of friends to attend a rally against the nomination of Muckaty Station, located 120km north of Tennant Creek, as the Federal Government’s site for a radioactive waste dump.

Along the way we passed through Aileron, where there were truckloads of horses turning off the highway for the Aileron Easter rodeo.

Written by Scott Foyster on 12-04-2010, 3 user comments

The inconvenience of unhappiness

When Freud said he could only ever be expected to return someone to the normal state of unhappiness, no-one, it seems, was paying much attention. I know the average person doesn’t read Freud, but whether preferring to avoid this sort of news or be in outright denial, people these days – often at considerable expense – will do anything to avoid the slightest psychological discomfort.

As the world shifts – albeit slowly – towards a more peaceable state (yes, this seems difficult to swallow, but research from groups such as Vision of Humanity provide information to that very effect) the pendulum for psychological problems seems to be swinging in the opposite direction. The question is, why? Why, when life is easier for so many more of us, certainly in the West, are all sorts of inner discomforts and turmoil on the rise? And where are these difficulties coming from, outside forces or inner ones? ... read more

Written by SJ Finn on 9-04-2010, 49 user comments

The rules of engagement

Much of the outrage around the 2007 helicopter attack in Iraq recorded in video revealed by Wikileaks has centred on whether or not the Apache crew committed a war crime. That’s, however, the wrong frame to understand what took place. What’s most significant about the killings is not the extent that they differ from standard operating procedures but the extent to which they reveal them. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 9-04-2010, 6 user comments

Overland extract: Mungo MacCallum on Rudd and the boat people

In Overland 198, Mungo MacCallum examines Labor's policies towards refugees:

The first duty of any government is the defence of its citizenry, and that is why border protection is vital to Australia.

It is easy to argue that the boat people are few in number, desperate and helpless, simple seekers of shelter; they pose no threat. But those who exhibit this misplaced compassion tend to forget one very elementary fact about Australia: it is girt by sea.

We are an island, with a mainland coastline some 36 000 km in length, and if you add in the offshore islands that nearly doubles to 60 000 km. Global warming and the consequent rise in sea levels may reduce this quite a bit, but we will remain horribly vulnerable, and only the most severe policies of deterrence can keep us from the hordes who see us, rightly, as the most desirable destination on earth. Pauline Hanson is absolutely right: we are in imminent danger of being swamped, being overrun, losing the Australian way of life forever. Only ceaseless and indeed ruthless vigilance can keep us safe.

Now the bleeding hearts, the latte sippers, the chardonnay quaffers in their elite little ivory towers scoff at the very suggestion. Nonsense, they lisp, it could never happen. But it could; in fact, it did.

... read more

Written by Editorial team on 8-04-2010, 5 user comments

Review – The Best Australian Poems 2009 | Black Inc.

Best of Australian Poems 2009Reading The Best Australian Poems 2009 has proven to be a challenge for this shunned poet. Not only for my belief that somebody in this country needs to initiate a Best Un-Australian Poems annual collection, but also because at least 60 of the 108 poems are about rain, or the sea, or other large bodies of water in motion, and the most overwhelming impact the whole book had on me was the constant need to urinate. Black Inc. should really have titled this year’s book Wateriest Australian Poems. ... read more

Written by Tara Mokhtari on 8-04-2010, 40 user comments

Meanland extract – You are not reading enough

Reading anxiety (different to the semiotic anxiety of reading that involves wresting with signs, decoding and privilege) has me in its ice-cold clutches of late. I find that I am breaking out in feelings of inadequacy and time-negligence while I play Words with friends on my iPhone or spend a day experimenting in the kitchen or enjoying a film marathon or, occasionally, drinking at the pub.

I am wracked with guilt every time I indulge in such cavalier activities while there is so much reading material passing me by, online and in print.

I have recently discovered the joys of Google Reader (a whole other blog post) and now start my mornings with feeds from news sites like the Age, ABC news, SBS news, newmatilda... ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 8-04-2010, 2 user comments

Sex not so sexy in The Slap

James Frey says:

fictional characters – homo fictus – are not identical to flesh-and-blood human beings – homo sapiens. One reason for this is that readers wish to read about the exceptional rather than the mundane. Readers demand that homo fictus be more handsome or ugly, ruthless or noble, vengeful or giving, brave or cowardly, and so on, than real people, are. Homo fictus has hotter passions and colder anger; he travels more, fights more, loves more, changes more, has more sex. Lots more sex. (Frey, J 1988)

While protagonists in The Slap don’t love more or change very much at all, it’s fair to say they are having much more sex than us ordinary mortals – if they’re not getting it off, they’re fantasising about getting it off. Yet, rather than learn or understand more about the protagonists by seeing them in their most intimate and sometimes most vulnerable moments, the men in particular, seem devoid of feeling other than that which occurs in their nether regions. ... read more

Written by Trish Bolton on 7-04-2010, 26 user comments

A language of dissent

‘Courage’, says Tony Judt in a brilliant and far-reaching interview in the late-March issue of the London Review of Books, ‘is always missing in politicians….[for them] it isn’t a useful attribute.’

Courage is what we get, or need to have when it becomes difficult to say something that could be truthfully said or done, but where the saying or doing may well cost you something. When a politician, or anyone else for that matter, speaks of the ‘tough decisions’, you can be sure that he or she is taking the easy option; the option that has been carefully calculated will lead to a greater popularity, and, at worst, will cost nothing. Often, in the recent past at least, the ‘tough decision’ politically means hammering the already marginalised and dispossessed. In other words, the politician who takes the supposedly tough decision is often the person who wants to be praised for oppressing the weak and protecting the powerful. The tough decision is very often the self-serving decision. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 7-04-2010, 16 user comments

What we can learn about Tony Abbott from Degrassi Junior High

Tony Abbott

This week the Sydney Morning Herald ran a feature on marketing strategies and then two days later there was a story on Tony Abbott's Ironman endeavours. How are these related and what does it have to do with Degrassi? Read on, intrepid Overlanders.

It's a widely recognised fact that each generation is more media and marketing savvy than the last. For example: if my great uncle Ernie sees an ad for hair-regrowth treatment, featuring a guy in a lab coat pointing to a graphic showing arrows shooting off a scalp at odd angles, he's likely to think 'That chap's a scientist, he knows his stuff!' ... read more

Written by Claire Zorn on 6-04-2010, 13 user comments

This is what the war looks like

Wikileaks has just released this footage from a US Apache helicopter killing a group of civilians in Baghdad in 2007. The clip shows the crew strafing the men from the air and then returning to kill the occupants of a van attempting to collect the wounded. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 6-04-2010, 30 user comments