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Radiothon on RRR: make contact

Radiothon-header-smallRadiothon 2010 has begun on Melbourne's 3RRR FM. What's that to do with Overland? Well, it's partly that 3RRR supports writers and writing in a way that no other media does. On Aural Text, for instance, alicia has been promoting local gigs, independent publishing/publishers, zinesters and performers for more than a decade. In that sense alone, there's substantial overlap between the mission of the two organisations.

But it's more than that. With the Meanland project

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 16-08-2010, 2 user comments

The yarts debate thingy

Australia's creative revolutionThe Greens are the only major party to publish an arts policy for the 2010 election. Neither the ALP nor the Coalition websites provide even a bullet point on arts policy. It doesn't rate as an issue. This is both and good and a bad thing. It's good because there is no suggestion that the arts budget will be cut by either party. Then again, we know that anything is possible once government has been won, especially by the razor-ready Mr Rabbit. It's also a good thing because the arts, as an issue, is firmly embedded in the national political consciousness as a given, an essential component of our society and culture. ... read more

Written by Boris Kelly on 13-08-2010, 2 user comments

Labor running scared?

So I received this in my PO Box this morning. No envelope. Apparently members can use their union membership to campaign for the ALP – but not for the actual issues mentioned (it’s good that the unions would use their workplaces to campaign for issues but why just for the ALP?).

ALP 'letter'

The text can also be found on Cath Bowtell’s site as a personal endorsement from ‘campaign volunteer Edwina’. It was authorised by State Secretary and Campaign Director, Nicholas Reece. ... read more

Written by Benjamin Laird on 13-08-2010, 20 user comments

Theatre review: Sappho…in 9 fragments

SapphoStepping off the St. Kilda Road tram at Southbank Boulevard for a short walk to the Malthouse Theatre on a sunny Melbourne winter’s afternoon is a very lovely thing to do.

It’s true that Melbourne’s independent arts scene is eclectic, marvellous, under-funded and perpetually under threat. ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 12-08-2010, 5 user comments

Fiction review: The Nine Flaws of Affection

The nine flaws of affection
Peter Farrar
Ginninderra Press

Peter Farrar feeds words onto the page like a priest delivers the Eucharist. Each word is selected specifically to add to the arch, and just enough words are used to reach resolution. Peter Farrar, as the medium of the stories, has removed all unnecessary words, including some personal pronouns, leaving us with nine portraits of debilitation delivered with extreme priority. Each story has proven itself among the best literary journals in the country, including Overland, Wet Ink, Etchings and Page Seventeen.

The nine flaws are detailed in the stories of the collection, nine portraits of the seriously disenfranchised, victims of loss either through war, betrayal or simply, life. ... read more

Written by Mark William Jackson on 12-08-2010, 1 user comment

Hasbara: explaining the actions of the Israeli government

In The Iron Wall, Oxford Historian Avi Shlaim describes Operation Kinneret. On 11 December 1955, a paratroop brigade, led by Lieutenant Ariel Sharon, attacked a Syrian military installation. The Israeli army killed 50 Syrians, and took 30 Syrian prisoners, suffering six deaths and ten injuries in the process. Shlaim writes that this was ‘an unprovoked act of aggression by Israel’, which

was not preceded by any unusual incidents. The Israelis were waiting for the slightest pretext to launch their carefully planned assault; when the Syrians proved uncooperative, the Israelis provoked the incident. On 10 December a police vessel was sent close to the shore, specifically in order to draw Syrian fire. A Syrian soldier fired a few shots that scraped some paint off the bottom of the patrol boat. No one was killed or wounded. This was the pretext for the IDF operation. Most observers agreed that the punishment was out of all proportion to the provocation. This judgment needs to be qualified in one respect: there was no Syrian provocation.

... read more

Written by Michael Brull on 11-08-2010, 3 user comments

Attack of the knuckle draggers

In an article in the latest edition of The Monthly, former Iemma staffer Mark Aarons says this of Labor Right backroom artists Mark Arbib and Karl Bitar:

Enter Arbib and Bitar and their focus groups. Their technique involves targeting the least politically committed voters in key marginal seats. Swing voters of this kind care most of all about themselves and are not loyal to any particular party or leader. The Arbib-Bitar theory is that these people determine who wins government, and that their views should therefore predominate in policy-setting. In a bizarre reversal of conventional political wisdom, leadership is redefined as following such people by pandering to them.

Arbib and Bitar are the inheritors of Graham Richardson’s ‘whatever it takes’ approach to the maintenance of power and were, of course, part of the shadow-team that rolled Rudd and installed Gillard. If Aarons is correct, the move against Rudd was in large part a response to the fidgety vacillations of 250000 self-interested, knuckle dragging (generic, non-racial sense), swinging voters as measured by Labor’s ‘internal polling’. The other macro factors at play in their decision to move on Rudd were the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme and the Mining Super Profits Tax, both of which were vehemently and vociferously opposed by the mining industry in expensive, well-organised public relations campaigns. Clearly, Gillard has been promoted on condition that she delay action on climate change to some indeterminate time in the future and soften the mining tax. But we know all that. ... read more

Written by Boris Kelly on 10-08-2010, 12 user comments

Fuel for your fire

Sunday: the Liberal Party ‘launched’ their election campaign and everybody watched on in complete apathy because their election campaign has been going since November 2007 and we’re sick of it already. I’m willing to bet the Labor Party’s campaign launch (scheduled for 16 August) will be just as much of a faff-filled non-event. I want to be excited – I really do – but the truth is, this whole election disgusts me. You – Australian politicians – you disgust me. I’m not enthusiastic about you. I’m not inspired. I can’t even find the energy to laugh at you. I’m just angry – ALL THE TIME.

I’m angry because the best you can offer me is another three years of conservative mediocrity and stagnation. Stagnation is not progress, it’s a fucking insult. I’m offended because you think I’m not worth the risk. I’m disgusted because you talk to me like I’m a child and it’s not okay – it’s never been okay – but you hardly make sense now anyway. This language that used to belong to us both gets bent up and mangled in your mouth: forward means backwards, liberal means conservative, atheism means indoctrination, freedom means war, love means immorality, art means conformity, sustainable means racist. I can’t say what I mean anymore without running up against your roadblocks, so I’m forced to find words that you haven’t yet stolen – snowdrop, velutinous, mellifluous, fumarole – just to remember where the ground is. Just to remember what it means to have meaning. ... read more

Written by Stephanie Convery on 10-08-2010, 9 user comments

Colour me beige, it’s an election

Voting Australia 40sIt’s time to decide Australia. It’s time to stand up and grasp the rope of democracy – woven from the fabric of thousands of Anzac souls – and swing between apathy and outrage, determination and despair, boldness and boredom. It’s possible to swing between Julia and Tony as well, although the association of ‘Tony Abbott’ and ‘swinging’ is enough to put one off one’s Iced Vovos – and let’s face it, if you are reading anything associated with Overland, it’s unlikely you would consider voting for the Tonester. Then again, this is a strange and often disturbing age we live in and there are only so many times you can say you are voting for Jed Bartlett and still get a laugh. Eventually we are all going to find ourselves in a cardboard booth at the local primary school, with the only person to turn to for advice being the woman who is handing out the pencils, the one in the turquoise muumuu who makes sticky buns for the tuckshop. And even then, I’m pretty sure she’s not allowed to share her opinion. We will all be left on our own to decide between beige and beige, between two candidates with little to distinguish them from one another besides their genders. (Or just vote for the Socialist Party for the heck of it.) We will have to put numbers in boxes. Or will we? ... read more

Written by Claire Zorn on 9-08-2010, 15 user comments

On voting

When my daughter turned 17, the government sent her a birthday card and an enrolment-to-vote form, in preparation for the big 18: voting age. Six months later, this ‘gift from the government’ has been unearthed in an office reorganise. This morning, I gave it to her and she threw it on the bench. ‘They’re all fucked,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to vote.’

A permanent resident since the age of three who became an Australian citizen in 1994, I brought out my inner voter in 1996. I was thirty-one years old.

... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 9-08-2010, 8 user comments

Towards 200

Today, I've been putting away a full run of old Overlands. As we move to the launch of edition 200, it seemed like an idea to put up a few of the past covers that caught my eye. So here's  a bunch of them, selected on no basis other than I thought that they looked kinda cool.

OL67


Ol147

OL149

OL55

OL156

OL161

OL163

OL177

OL188

... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 6-08-2010, 10 user comments

Failed novels

So last month the girlfriend and I went to see Christopher Hitchens talk about his new book of memoirs. I'm not really into memoir so probably missed out on some of what he said, however, did get one real gem out of the evening.

Among other things, he and school friends – and later, other friends, including Salman Rushdie – used to play a game of inventing titles of books that didn't quite make it. The favored example given was Mr Gatsby.

This has of course inspired us to come up with as many failed book titles as we can. I've started with the following:

Alice in an Interesting Place
The Conjuror of Oz
The Moderately Well Known Five
Diary of a Prostitute
Anne of the Green Roof (and the sequel, Anne from a Small Town)
The Manipulative Mr Ripley
The Unconcluded Novel
Older Girls
American Lunatic
A Long While Alone ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 6-08-2010, 16 user comments

The drinks are on Overland

The beginning
Overland’s 200th issue, believe it or not, has just gone to print. That’s 56 years and 200 issues. Who would’ve thought a humble, left-wing magazine founded by Realist Writers group from the Communist Party would still be hale and hearty in 2010? And not just hale, not just hearty, but at the forefront of literature and culture -- and with a thriving online community to boot?

Seriously though, we are mighty proud that we still produce, time after time, issue after issue, an intelligent and provocative publication.

The issue
Cover Overland 200
The 200th issue is brimming with controversial essays on culture and politics from some of Australia’s most rebellious writers like Chris Graham, Anwyn Crawford and Clive Hamilton; riveting fiction from Christos Tsiolkas, Janette Turner Hospital and Karen Hitchcock; and a poetic experiment unleashed from the minds of 20 poets working in unison – plus a graphical remix of a story from Overland 1 by Bruce Mutard. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 5-08-2010, 4 user comments

Time and space and the literary journal

Time and spaceYesterday I read the most scintillating post over at Nieman Journalism Lab: ‘Following up on the need for follow-up'. It was the kind of piece you read and wish you’d written, and can be summarised thusly: we need to move beyond our news cycles – ‘the daily paper, the nightly newscast, the monthly magazine’ – because our reality is no longer confined by them. Here’s Megan Garber (author of the post) quoting Matt Thompson (from NPR and Snarkmarket): ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 5-08-2010, 1 user comment

Still colonising Aboriginal land

The story about the foundation of the first colony in Australia is well known; it was about water. None being available at Botany Bay, the First Fleet sailed north, and in a little cove halfway down Port Jackson they saw what was to become known as the Tank Stream. Its original name is now forgotten.

It had its source near the present Hyde Park and tumbled down through the picturesque bush, to cross the beach on the western edge of the cove. This original beauty has been built over and destroyed, but tourists still rave about the how attractive the harbour city is.

And so on. Australia has been progressively settled and developed, and at many sites there was controversy and resistance, starting, of course, with the original inhabitants whose spiritual kinship with country obliged them to protect it from desecration and over-exploitation. ... read more

Written by Stephen Muecke on 4-08-2010, 13 user comments