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Shafting Kevin – not such a great day for feminists

The ascendancy of Julia Gillard to the office of PM has feminists going gaga.

‘OMG! A female PM’, has been the uncritical response I've been hearing of Julia Gillard’s slaying of Kevin Rudd from feminists everywhere.

We’ve all heard reports of women rushing to screens to watch Julia’s first speech, feminist workplaces ringing with tears and cheers, and inboxes running hot with images of Julia emblazoned with the words: ‘Yes she can.’ And yes, she did.

At last, a woman in the top job. But although I hate to be a party-pooper, is this popping of champagne corks a little too early? Do we really want to celebrate a woman who has behaved in a way feminists have been complaining about for a century or more, or are we just as happy to say ‘game on’ and play dirty with the big boys? ... read more

Written by Trish Bolton on 30-06-2010, 109 user comments

A matter of opinion –
language and political influence

In a state of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell

“A voters survival kit” Australian Liberal Party 2010Kevin Rudd is definitely not the man you want on the megaphone during an emergency and probably not even the best person to place the order at the drive through. As a communicator, Rudd suffers from a lethal mix of ailments: terminal prolixity, rampant hyperbole, a preference for technocratese, prone to outbreaks of neologismitis and an occasional resort to the colloquial that owes an unacknowledged debt to Bazza McKenzie. Don Watson could devote an entire chapter to Rudd in his next book and cruel wits have already compared him to a thinking person’s GW Bush. That so many in the electorate, including myself, did not detect this flaw in Kevin 07 says a great deal about how badly we wanted Howard gone. Nevertheless, one of the principal reasons Rudd is now in the sin bin was his failure to sustain a coherent conversation with the electorate, especially during times when significant policy developments needed to be explained. The other critical factor in his demise was his now widely acknowledged autocratic leadership style and his failure to consult his own party on key decisions. ... read more

Written by Boris Kelly on 30-06-2010, 7 user comments

On art, music and thoughts in between

RANDAL: I’m not going to miss what is probably going to be the social event of the season.
DANTE: You hate people.
RANDAL: But I love gatherings. Isn’t it ironic?
– Clerks

I enjoyed a sweet taste of alternative artistic expression on two recent occasions which made me feel better about the way things are going in the art world, and maybe even in the world more generally. It would seem that a commitment to free creative expression is still running strong outside the mainstream entertainment industry. I can therefore forget all about the stuff that doesn’t matter, and instead focus my attention on seeking out things of aesthetic value that might also tell me a bit about the inherent strangeness of the world, as did an odd juxtaposition the other day when I was sitting on the front porch with some searing Japanese psychedelic rock from the 1970s on the headphones while a neighbour sullenly wheeled his recycling bin towards the kerb – a somewhat random, yet interesting coming together of the exotic and the mundane. ... read more

Written by Dan Bigna on 29-06-2010, 2 user comments

This so-called lucky country

On the Ross River Highway, before you get to Emily Gap, there is a small blue sign. Written across this sign in white letters is the word Amoonguna. Less than 15 kilometres from Alice Springs, it is the closest Aboriginal Community to Central Australia’s service capital, yet in the rounds of ministerial visits it is often ignored. Amoonguna


Established on 1 October 1960, when ‘the Bungalow’ at the Telegraph station was officially closed, Amoonguna is home to people from the Arrente, Walpiri, and many other nations. It has a school, a sports field, a health service, an arts centre and a small shop. Until the Shire took over, the community had a bus that would do shopping runs into town for $2 each way. That bus now sits there, one of the community assets seized by the MacDonnell Shire. ... read more

Written by Scott Foyster on 29-06-2010, 7 user comments

On copyright and Australian cinema

The Meanland essay in Overland 199 is written by author, SPUNC President and Wet Ink fiction editor, Emmett Stinson. ‘The pirate code’ delves into the underbelly of copyright during the digital revolution – and comes to some surprising conclusions:

Right now publishers are abuzz with discussions of ‘book futures’ and the digital revolution, but there is still an almost complete uncertainty surrounding even the most basic issues. What, if any, devices will become standard for electronic reading? How will books be distributed? What formats will be used? A recent stand-off over pricing resulted in all of Pan Macmillan’s e-book titles being temporarily unavailable on Amazon’s website, demonstrating that the industry can’t even agree on what digital books should cost.

... read more

Written by Editorial team on 29-06-2010, 1 user comment

Homebirthing may soon disappear

When a friend told me that two of her children had been homebirthed and she was thinking of having her third in a hospital, it was the answer that a friend of hers gave which made me sit up and take note. ‘What makes you think going to hospital will make the birth any easier?’ the woman had replied.

At the time, I was pregnant too – hence the conversation – and contemplating my choices for my own ensuing act of birthing. My problem, I thought, was that if I went to hospital the professionals around me – ones I most likely had never met – would, by their mere presence, cause me to hand over all decision-making to them.

I’m going back a few years, mind you, when hippies were considered worth listening to and wonderful books about thriving American communes existed, books full of stories of homebirths. Most importantly I began to understand that each birth is different and if I wanted to get some idea about how the birth of my child would proceed, I should ask my mother about her birthing experiences. ... read more

Written by SJ Finn on 28-06-2010, 20 user comments

Gillard’s priorities: education and refugees

The media’s focus on personality over policy – and in that shrinking proportion of the time in which policy is discussed, the endless speculation on how events will be perceived, and how ‘narratives’ will ‘play out’, rather than the actual impact of policies on people – makes for a lack of serious analysis that results in an intellectual impoverishment of the public sphere. As Jeff Sparrow predicted on this blog, the elevation of Julia Gillard has been greeted with a rush of ink and pixels attempting to define her character, rather than analysing her record, to gauge the kind of policies we might expect.

My usual response to this topic would be to discuss the ways in which, as the demands of capital and the relentless ideology of corporate media hem in the scope of democratically elected politicians to differ substantially from each other, personality and identity become the surrogates for real political debate. Celebrating Australia’s first woman prime minister is fine, but let’s not delude ourselves about how much difference it makes. For myself, growing up in the UK under a Thatcher government erased any illusions I may have had – as the anonymous writers of the The Coming Insurrection put it, ‘patriarchy survives by attributing to women all the worst attributes of men’. In the 2008 Democratic primaries in the US, Clinton’s tough talk of ‘obliterating’ Iran was an attempt to deflect sexist stereotypes and prove that she had – as her loyal follower James Carville put it – the ‘testicular fortitude’ to be an effective commander-in-chief. ... read more

Written by Joshua Mostafa on 28-06-2010, 9 user comments

The personal is political

Quarterly Essay 38The post below is a slightly different version of a piece currently on the ABC Drum site.
Basically, I was writing something for Drum on the personalisation of politics when news of the spill broke out, and so I hastily tried to illustrate the argument in terms of the Rudd-Gillard contest. Because of the spill coverage, the article didn’t run the next day, and I went back to it once details of Gillard’s ascension were a little clearer. This morning, I was about to send the amended version when I saw that the previous version had already been published

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 25-06-2010, 13 user comments

‘Politics is all about people’

That line from David Marr’s article in the SMH this morning struck poignantly home, following a brief discussion about Rudd with a colleague. This colleague used to work for the Goss Government, all those years ago, and had many interactions with Rudd back then – and always dreaded those interactions.

Rudd would demand things, and often demand that they be delivered to him with impossible haste. Contrast this to other people in the Goss government, this colleague suggested, who for the most part asked politely for things. Sure, politics is not about being polite or kind, but is there perhaps a lesson here? As Marr suggests, Rudd was not much of a ‘people person’. For him it was work, work, work. And then some more work. One could assume people were just tools to facilitate the completion of that work. Perhaps this is why he won few friends among the people he worked with. And perhaps this is why the events of the past few days transpired the way they did. ... read more

Written by Matthew Sini on 25-06-2010, 4 user comments

Why I’m not a union member

I believe fundamentally in the importance of the unions. But I’m not a union member.

In my first week as a fifteen year old check-out chick, I signed up as a member of the SDA. As a casual working the registers at Christmas time, it was only because of the the union presence in the store that we worked fair and reasonable hours.

I joined the MEAA at twenty-one when I worked in a gallery. They were wonderfully flexible around adjusting my membership payments when my paycheques were on the small side, and they were sensitive to the implications of their actions in a very small arts industry.

When I finished my degree, I started work in a non-union workplace. After nine months of working under an employer greenfields agreement, a dose of workplace bullying, and an unpursued case of constructive dismissal, I escaped to the protective bosom of the public service. ... read more

Written by Isy Burns on 25-06-2010, 8 user comments

Freeganism 101

I first heard of freegans in Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel 40 Days of Rain. In the novel, they’re primarily people who live on the streets, both before and after a major climatic event that destroys much of the infrastructure in Washington DC. The main character, Frank, half joins their ranks when he loses his home; he becomes involved in the culture and begins living out doors. The romanticism probably began there, for me.

But the pragmatism stuck. A freegan is a person who doesn’t believe in buying things, usually for political reasons. The example in the novel is primarily food, in that the freegans live off food scavenged from the back of supermarkets and restaurants, and it’s extraordinarily sensible. It’s estimated that one-fifth of food purchased for use in the home in Australia is thrown out, not because it’s bad food, but because it’s unneeded. The percentages for restaurants and other eateries are far higher: bakeries, for reasons of hygiene and legality, only donate part of their produce to charities at the end of the day, while throwing out the rest; fast food restaurants throw out food that has been sitting for more than fifteen minutes; and grocers throw out fruit that’s mildly blemished and just won’t move. These are the examples I have heard of, though I know there are more. An awful lot of food gets thrown out, usually food within its use by date, often still packaged and unopened. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 24-06-2010, 17 user comments

The incalculable cultural significance of The Library

Library memories

When I think back over my childhood, and how I spent time, I remember libraries. For a long time I lived in a country town, and during school holidays, the wait between the return of the mobile library seemed endless. Then it would return, I’d read the books in a couple of days, and the long wait would begin anew. In my recollections, I read everything in that van, except the Mills & Boon and Barbara Cartlands.

At school, primary and secondary, the library was my one constant, reliable friend, and the librarians appreciated me in a way, I felt, that fellow classmates did not. They went out of their way to foster my reading habits. We would exchange ideas, they would recommend books – they even purchased books with individual readers in mind – and would call parents if they were concerned about reading appetites. This relationship changed in university, but I was still completely dependent on the library for my research. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 24-06-2010, 1 user comment

Et tu, Gillard?

Overnight the face of contemporary Australian politics – that lacklustre, bureaucratic, increasingly-resembling-a-trainwreck Rudd – was met with a leadership challenge.

This comes on the back of a downward plummet in the polls [debatable] and numerous backflips on the ETS, refugees, Afghanistan and recent confrontations over the RSPT – ‘that great, big fat tax’ the mining industry and the Liberals are so distraught about.

So Labor’s factional warlords have decided it’s time for a new figurehead, and few doubt that Julia Gillard will win. But what does Gillard really represent?

Gillard has been an IR lawyer since 1987, a politician since ’98. She may have been on the Left in her days of student politics, but it’s difficult to detect a trace of that now. Conservative and progressive pundits alike adore her. She’s never challenged Rudd on any policy and there seems to be this idea – ostensibly because she’s a woman? – that she has the best interests of refugees, the Australian public and the mining sector at heart. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 24-06-2010, 42 user comments

Non-fiction review – Symbols of Australia

Symbols of Australia
Melissa Harper and Richard White (eds.)
UNSW Press

Symbols of Australia Symbols of Australia is a fascinating read, with a total of thirty writers dissecting and analysing the symbols of Australia, from the Opera House to the Coat of Arms, to the Pavlova Cooee and all in-between, everything’s up for grabs.

Symbols of Australia is much more than a brief history of Australian symbols; it’s a study of the symbols from a cultural studies perspective. The myriad meanings and contestations of the symbols are discussed as well as historical origins. Perhaps the best example of this is the chapter on The Southern Cross by Jane Taylor. She charts its existence from a constellation seen from Europe 2000 years ago, the topic of poems and mystical associations, to its material manifestation in the Eureka stockade. She then moves onto the present day and its embodiment as a symbol claimed by diverse and oppositional groups such as the Australian Communist Party, various unions, rednecks and the racist National Action. (Strangely she didn’t discuss its use by the BLF, probably the most well-known organisation to use it in the present day.) ... read more

Written by Rohan Wightman on 23-06-2010, 2 user comments

The poetry of Overland 199

The poetry from Overland 199 is now available online. If you’re not currently a subscriber, and have not yet managed to track a down a copy, read them online and see why Overland has such a fine reputation:

Cameron Fuller − ‘There’s a bomb on this train of thought’
Sue Watson − ‘Brush turkey’s’
J K Murphy − ‘Valley gutter’
John Kinsella − ‘Resurrection Plants at Nookaminnie Rock’
Adam Ford − ‘Salt’
Josephine Rowe − ‘The Man Who Shot Lions’
Amanda Surrey − ‘the great ocean road’ ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 23-06-2010, 1 user comment