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Olyotya, Africa
[Hello, how are you, Africa]

Africa, Africa. South Africa around Johannesburg, Botswana in the village near the border with SA, the Kalahari desert, Uganda – the airport, the city of Kampala, the Village of Katebo near Lake Victoria … on my mind. Like tears. Like hundreds of faces. Like hundreds of small children spontaneously cheering, celebrating a gift of two soccer balls – a ratio that would cause a Western kindergarten riot of reactionary unfairness tantrum and a potentially murderous grab for possession (and that’s just the parents). A village of people with so little food, gifting us with a feast. Maybe it’s the World Cup, on the periphery of my apprehension, but Africa is on my mind.

Africa is on my mind when I see soccer players lined up to play, each with an African child. There are so many children. So many working children. Children carting water. Children working in agriculture. Children sleeping piled up together in tiny spaces. ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 22-06-2010, 2 user comments

‘Women are no longer prepared to put up and shut up’

One of our esteemed Overland bloggers, Trish Bolton, has an opinion piece about sexual harassment in the workplace in today’s Age, ‘Women are no longer prepared to put up and shut up’:

HE CORNERED me at the back of the shop, stood over me and ripped open my vest, swearing when he saw I was wearing a bra. This was the 1970s, I was 18 and he was my boss.

A year or two later in another workplace, a senior sergeant flung a notebook in my face after I refused an invitation to after-work drinks. On yet another occasion, I accepted a lift home from a respected male colleague and sat mortified beside him as he relayed to me in graphic detail his wife's sexual failings.

I might have thought I was just plain unlucky, had female friends and colleagues not regularly shared similar stories. More amazing is that not once did any one of us consider reporting the perpetrator.

More than 30 years on, I still hear stories from women who think they have no choice but to tolerate men touching them up or making crude asides in the workplace: men of every age and from every walk of life, men who go home at night to wives and children and men who are pillars of the community.

... read more

Written by Editorial team on 22-06-2010, 3 user comments

Cattle country

At Kalala Station, 8km from Daly Waters, three hours south of Katherine in the Northern Territory, we are out of bed at 5:30 am and in the yards before dawn. I have seen the sunrise more often in the few weeks since I came to Kalala than I have in the last three years. Sitting in the early morning dust on the cattle run fence, I ask Sam, a 21-year-old ringer, ‘Have you always wanted to work with cattle?’

He shrugs. ‘It’s all I’ve ever known.’

I watch the cattle kick up dust as they’re moved into the pound and I think about how different this feels from home. The cities are saturated with the product of rural Australia, but they are hardly watching cows get drafted for market, dipped for travel below quarantine lines, dehorned, castrated, spayed, branded, immunised, milked, taught to follow a fenceline, being treated by a vet, fed molasses when they’re sick, or charging at a ringer who gets in their way. There are also cars to fix, tyres to change, trailers to wash down, fences to mend, bores to cover, employees to feed, buyers to source, bank managers to impress. There are helicopters, light planes, motorbikes, vegetable gardens, and supply sheds. There are stock camps, hay camps, weaner camps, horses, abandoned calves, pigs, dogs. And I think about the animals themselves and everything they provide for Western society: not just meat but also milk, cheese, clothing, luggage, shoes, jewellery... ... read more

Written by Stephanie Convery on 21-06-2010, 22 user comments

On banana-cream pies

Kurt Vonnegut famously said that fiction is so much hot air, and that fiction writers’ opposition to the Vietnam War proved this. ‘We dropped on our complacent society’, he said at a PEN meeting in the early 70s, ‘the literary equivalent of a hydrogen bomb. I will now report to you the power of such a bomb. It has the explosive force of a very large banana-cream pie – a pie two meters in diameter, twenty centimetres thick, and dropped from a height of ten meters or more’. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 18-06-2010, 18 user comments

Non-fiction review –
Journeys to the Interior

Journeys to the Interior
Nicholas Rothwell
Black Inc.

'Journeys to the interior' coverI’d read a few articles by Nicholas Rothwell and was somewhat ambivalent about what I’d read. I was unsure of his political perspective on life in the NT. He'd made some good points, but often his conclusions disturbed me; this was especially true of some of his pieces on the Intervention in the Australian.

There’s nothing better than having your opinion on a writer upended. This was the case by the time I’d finished reading Journeys to the Interior, his collection of essays and musings on his journeys through the remote desert and tropical country of NT. ... read more

Written by Rohan Wightman on 18-06-2010, 8 user comments

Non-fiction review – Reporting Conflict

Reporting Conflict: new directions in peace journalism
Johan Galtung and Jake Lynch
UQP

'reporting conflict' coverMost of us are familiar with media treatments of wars with a focus on violence, and winners and losers. Jake Lynch and Johan Galtung call this the ‘low road’ of war journalism. They contrast it with the ‘high road’ of peace journalism that looks at the conflict and all the parties who have an interest in the outcome of the conflict. The authors detail their arguments supporting peace journalism and its role in telling the whole story to see how conflict can be transformed into an opportunity for human progress. The book explores various theoretical ideas and how they link to the practice of peace journalism. The chapter on objectivity, balance, truth and ethics dispels various prevalent myths and offers useful approaches to good journalism. This book is worth every minute of reading time for those reporting conflict or interested in how conflict is reported. ... read more

Written by Sharon Callaghan on 17-06-2010, 25 user comments

Meanland extract – The great paywall of Murdoch

Murdoch wants to put our news behind a paywall, beginning with The Times and The Sunday Times, via a new payment model supposed to kick in in the very near future. Doubtless this is something he’s been planning since his first forays into the internet – like the purchase of MySpace – proved financially fruitless.

Bloomberg’s Matthew Lynn claims the project is doomed to failure:

It's too late to start charging for newspapers online. The content isn't good enough, and newspapers themselves are a product of technologies that simply don't work in a digital economy. All Murdoch is going to achieve with this move is to kill off one of the most famous media brands in the world.

... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 17-06-2010, No comments

Fiction review – Come Inside

Come Inside
GL Osborne
Freemantle Press

Come InsideCome Inside is a beautifully written, evocative novel told from many perspectives and over a long expanse of time. Despite the possibility of the rather slim volume becoming heavied by such a vast and varying platform, it remains light and unburdened in tone. The reader, or at least this reader, feels that GL Osborne knew what she wanted to do with her novel and wasn’t going to be swayed by thinking she had to tie details together or fill in gaps. Strangely however, this may be the very thing that leads some to view the story as too vaguely formed. ... read more

Written by SJ Finn on 16-06-2010, 4 user comments

Fearful of fear itself –
the short stories of Graham Greene

‘The End of the Party’
Complete Short Stories
Graham Greene
Penguin

Graham Greene's short storiesGraham Greene described his short stories as ‘scraps’, and ‘escapes from the novelist’s world’. ‘The End of the Party’, however, delves into the serious subjects of death, fear, faith and human relationships – common to many of his novels – woven into a dark, supernatural tale. Written in 1929, ‘The End of the Party’ is one of Greene’s earlier short stories. It originally appeared in Nineteen Stories (1947), and is now included in Twenty-One Stories (1954), and Complete Short Stories (2005). ... read more

Written by Lina Vale on 16-06-2010, 7 user comments

Writing and helplessness and being comfortably numb

I’m thinking about writing and helplessness and being comfortably numb. I was chatting with my nephew, 27, as we set off to see Exit through the Gift Shop:

(sold out so I suggest you book ahead!) Now, dear reader, 27 is the young man’s age – my sisters and I are not

Written by Clare Strahan on 15-06-2010, 22 user comments

The 2009 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize – judging the winners

The 2009 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets saw a staggering 925 entries. Keri Glastonbury, Overland’s poetry editor and judge, discusses in her report what she admired in the winning entries and touches upon notions of the academicisation of poetry and the state of the emerging poetry scene:

Networked communities

The winner of the 2009 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets is Derek Motion for his poem ‘forest hill’. It is somewhat similar in style and theme to last year’s winning poem, ‘emoticon’ by Tim Wright, in that it deals with fractured personal archaeologies. In ‘forest hill’ the poet goes back to his primary school:

& it’s obvious. i’m unearthing the school’s time-capsule, secretly, after nightfall. the balaclava didn’t even involve a choice. i edit scathingly. i mock the other raaf kids’ dreams. i make a claggy pulp out of their failed foundation cursive. at the bubblers i consider sobbing for their facebook realities, but instead do this. i prance through the half-formed stimulus buildings like non-threatening catacombs. biggles-like. ... read more

Written by admin on 15-06-2010, 1 user comment

Giving writers a voice
– a Barry Scott investigation

In 2009, Barry Scott, Transit Lounge publisher, received a CAL grant to investigate the American independent publishing scene. In his Overland essay, Barry shares his research – from Chin Music Press to McSweeney’s – and reflects on what that independent spirit could mean for Australian publishing:

During 2009 I was the fortunate recipient of a Copyright Agency Limited grant to meet with small independent publishers in the US to discuss the state of the industry. As a small press publisher from Melbourne, I was looking for something to indicate that people were tired of the mall-like sameness of the publishing industry, the stranglehold of large retails chains and the domination of media conglomerates. What I saw didn’t dispel my fears regarding the economic viability of independent presses: consumers are ultimately going to want what they have heard about repeatedly, something that comes more easily with a large marketing budget. Yet I was reassured by the initiatives of small publishers to nurture a vibrant culture of writing and reading.

... read more

Written by admin on 11-06-2010, No comments

Thanks Michael Winterbottom, but I’ll spend my money elsewhere

Just as the Sydney Writers’ Festival has packed itself up for another year, the Sydney Film Festival has rolled into town to cater for the needs of those not satisfied by Dan Brown adaptations and cooking shows (thank you, Mr Carey). What a grand thing the festival is too, if for no other reason than it gives everyone the opportunity to visit the opulent State Theatre for a tenner. SFF brings with it this year the prerequisite controversial offering: Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me in which Casey Affleck plays a sheriff who spends his downtime beating women to death. The controversy – as one would guess – is about the explicit depiction of these beatings, namely two scenes which detail the repeated kicking and punching of actresses Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson respectively. The scenes are ‘aided by such realistic prosthetics that Alba is, by the end, a bloody mess and unrecognisable’. ... read more

Written by Claire Zorn on 10-06-2010, 6 user comments

Meanland extract – New publishing models: a shifting of power

Guest post – Sam Cooney

This article appeared in the May issue of WQ, the Queensland Writers Centre’s monthly publication. Past issues are online, as is a wealth of other info for Queensland and Australian writers.

WQPublishing isn’t dying. Don’t believe anyone who says it is, because they are reckless and hunting for headlines. Yes, publishing is changing, and fast. Author Philip Pullman, having just launched an enhanced iPhone app along with his latest book, says that all the changes make him feel ‘as if I’m tied to the front of a runaway train with a driver who has just had a heart attack’. An industry that not long ago was stalwart and reasonably predictable is now hurriedly embracing (or being forced to embrace) ebooks, free content, and similar new-fangled developments. But dying? Not a chance. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 10-06-2010, 1 user comment

Twitter discussion with Tad Tietze about the Greens and social democracy

Because you support independent media and are thus a subscriber to Overland, you've no doubt already read Tad Tietze's provocative article from the latest edition on the past, present and future of the Australian Greens. In case you haven't, the essay is now online.

Tad's thesis has already occasioned much debate over at Larvatus Prodeo. We'll be building on this by talking to him live on Twitter from noon today. If you're on Twitter, you can ask questions yourself (using #OL199); if you're not, you can still follow the discussion via the web. ... read more

Written by admin on 10-06-2010, No comments