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Garma

The first thing that sticks out about Garma are the tents. Rows and rows of them set up in designated areas: artists, volunteers, cultural tourists, paying attendees, academics, forum participants – all the way across the other side of the bungal ground to the Yolgnu camp. It’s a mini-city that exists for five days all set in the middle of a stringybark forest, which as you could guess makes for an interesting festival.

The theme of this years festival, the twelfth, was Indigenous Education and Training. The festival began with an open day for Yirrkala community, which included a visit to the school and art centre. Owing to transport problems I missed the school visit but did get to attend the art centre – an amazing building complete with perhaps the most comprehensive multimedia facility I have seen in a community. We’re talking 9 or 10 Macs complete with editing facilities. The centre also has its own cinema where films of past Garmas, ceremonies, footy matches, bark painting and pandanus weaving can be viewed. ... read more

Written by Scott Foyster on 30-09-2010, 3 user comments

10 SHORT STORIES YOU MUST READ IN 2010

10 SHORT STORIESSome time ago I reviewed last year’s free anthology offered by the Books Alive campaign with any purchase from its 50 Books You Can’t Put Down list. Let’s just say if I was Roger Ebert I’d have given it two thumbs down. This year the Australian Government-funded campaign has been re-branded Get Reading! and there’s another anthology giveaway, so I was interested to see how it compared. ... read more

Written by Irma Gold on 30-09-2010, 4 user comments

When Are You Going to Make an Honest Man of Me, Bob?

Whatever happened to queer activism? Where once it was aggressively and staunchly for human rights, consciousness-raising and real social reform, it seems now to be dominated by a drive towards the inoffensive and the inconsequential. The contrast of the Stonewall activists (in the most combative sense of the term) – ‘low class’ drag queens, hustlers and transsexuals – to today's gay activists – harping on about wanting to get married and settle down with kids in the suburbs – is both markedly dissimilar and ultimately inevitable. Doubtless there are some sections of the LGBT community who are not pushing for an ersatz heterosexuality, but that does not seem to be the dominant voice.

Stonewall activists ... read more

Written by Matthew Sini on 29-09-2010, 7 user comments

The Overland line

Over on his blog, Emmett Stinson comments on my article on creative writing courses in the university, ‘Liberated Zone or Pure Commodification?’ There is much to agree with in Stinson’s post, though his defence of creative writing courses is rather tendentious.

Still, there were several points that attracted my attention. In particular, Stinson critiques my argument for an engaged literature. He writes:

Davidson’s piece is ultimately interesting and even-handed, although it runs what currently seems to be Overland’s party line on what literature should be, which is ‘a literature that takes us back into the world – that thinks about the issues that surround and affect us – rather than away from it: a culture of engagement rather than escapism, of reflection rather than consolation’. As I’ve noted elsewhere, an extremely problematic set of assumptions underpins this notion of literature (and more on this below).

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Written by Rjurik Davidson on 29-09-2010, 11 user comments

Rape culture

A friend of mine, let’s call her K, has a son who just turned fourteen. She’s fairly committed to the idea of raising him as a relatively decent human being and, being a fairly active person online, she recently asked her blog for help finding books and DVDs and the like on how to be a gentleman. The replies were somewhere between empowering and heartbreaking. Rather than tips on holding doors open for women and other gentlemanly conduct, they were more suggestions on not having sex with a girl who is drunk. It was more about rape culture and how you go about breaking that to a boy without suggesting you think that he is – or is ever likely to be – in any way culpable. And it got me thinking again about just how differently our society treats men and women. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 28-09-2010, 58 user comments

Fiction review – The Anthology of Colonial Australian Romance Fiction

'The Anthology of Colonial Australian Romance Fiction'The Anthology of Colonial Australian Romance Fiction
Edited by Ken Gelder and Rachel Weaver
MUP

I read this book while embodying the bush cliche – lurching between cattle stations and floodplains, rainforest and thick scrub, dipping into the stories by the light of campfires and fading torch batteries. Given these unexpectedly apt settings I suppose I could have found myself in good company with a book of colonial romance fiction. But the truth is, I’m not sure how much of it I actually enjoyed. ... read more

Written by Stephanie Convery on 28-09-2010, 5 user comments

Don Draper and the American underclass

'Rainbow Pie'Two books came lovingly wrapped to the breakfast table on Father’s Day. The first was Joe Bageant’s Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir and the other was Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America. At first glance the two books appear to have very little in common. I am a fan of the AMC cable TV series Mad Men, so Vargas-Cooper’s survey of American society and culture provides an interesting companion piece; and, coincidentally, I had caught a snippet of Philip Adams’ interview with Bageant only days before, so I had some sense of his interest in the politics of the American underclass. But having now read both books I see a fascinating synergy between them that finds its locus in the character of Don Draper. ... read more

Written by Boris Kelly on 27-09-2010, 9 user comments

To drink or not to drink

Overland 200Boris Kelly, one of Overland’s regular bloggers, has an essay in Overland 200 on Australia’s alcohol habit, ‘Killing the worm in ourselves’. It begins like so:

C2H5OH, or ethyl alcohol, is a clear, colourless, volatile and flammable oxygenated hydrocarbon produced by the fermentation of sugar that is used, among other things, in the preparation of beverages. It is also one of the oldest and most efficacious of psychoactive drugs – and we love it. Anecdotal evidence – and, for most of us, personal experience – leads to this conclusion; OECD figures (2008) confirm it. Australians over the age of fifteen consume an average of ten litres of pure alcohol per capita each year. This puts us in the mid-range of comparative countries, with Luxembourg (which is, incidentally, estimated by the World Bank in 2008 to be the world’s most affluent nation) way out in front with 15.5 litres. The National Health and Medical Council of Australia concludes that, while most Australians enjoy a drink for relaxation and enjoyment, a ‘substantial proportion of people drink at levels that increase their risk of alcohol-related harm’ (my emphasis).

To abstain from drinking is to be regarded with a certain suspicion, as if you are not quite trustworthy or, in the case of men, not masculine enough. The right to drink is sacrosanct. Along with the beach, the barbie and the football oval, alcohol is emblematic of the Australian way of life and an icon of our democracy. It is ubiquitous across lines of class, education, profession and gender. Walk down the red carpet at any gala corporate event and you will find a gauntlet of waiters bearing libations. In Kings Cross on a Saturday night you will see young girls sitting in the gutter, eyes glazed over, stiletto heels awry, mini-dresses stained with vomit. Out in suburbia, attend the average eighteenth birthday party and watch the guest of honour chug-a-lug vodka shots until the bottle is drained.

Alcohol is the world’s favourite drug – and in Australia, where it has long been identified as a social and a health issue, it is also a political problem.

... read more

Written by Editorial team on 27-09-2010, 3 user comments

New editors, new competition, new poem

Editors
Overland is pleased to announce the appointment of new editors for 2011. From edition 202, the poetry editor is Peter Minter and the fiction editor is Jane Gleeson-White.

Peter Minter is a leading contemporary Australian poet, editor and scholar. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Empty Texas and blue grass, co-editor of Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets and was poetry editor at Meanjin from 2000-2005. His work appears in The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry and many other Australian and international publications, and has been honoured with numerous prizes and awards including The Age Poetry Book of the Year award (Empty Texas), the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship (Poetry) and fellowships from the Literature Board of the Australian Council for the Arts. His most recent projects include co-editing the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature and the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. He lectures in Indigenous Studies and Poetics at the University of Sydney. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 27-09-2010, 2 user comments

Doomed to repetition? The Left and the social democratic inheritance

'Ill Fares The Land'As he battled terminal illness in late 2009, acclaimed historian Tony Judt delivered a lecture at NYU that would become the basis for his final book. But rather than be obsessed with endings, he used the occasion to put out an impassioned call for new beginnings, based on the spirit of a past era that now seems all but lost to us despite its relative proximity to today.

Ill Fares The Land deserves to be a key referent for the Left as it thinks through a way forward after three decades of neoliberal hegemony. Judt’s book lays out a well-argued claim that we need not a destruction of capitalism but a re-tipping of the scales to match those of an earlier period – the post-WWII social democratic consensus – defined by a more sensible balance of state and market, public and private, regulation and freedom. In the widely quoted opening passage, he writes eloquently of our current malaise: ... read more

Written by Tad Tietze on 24-09-2010, 3 user comments

Fiction review – Equator

'Equator' coverEquator
Wayne Ashton
Freemantle Press

By the time I got it together to choose a book from Overland’s list to review, I was saying: Send me over whatever you’ve got. Novels, I’ll read novels. When two arrived and I read the first two pages of each, I reluctantly chose the tome, a doorstopper as Phillip Adams would say, a 680-page weapon – if you can lift it and get enough swing to wallop someone over the head with it. But ther

Written by SJ Finn on 24-09-2010, No comments

When writing Australia

In Overland 200, Marion Rankine examines originality or lack thereof when writers write Australia, ‘Sometimes it takes a writer’:

Flicking through an old issue of Overland (edition 182) I came across an essay by Malcolm Knox entitled ‘Pushing Against the Real World: The Case for “Original” Australian Fiction’. It sparked my interest – I was grappling with similar ideas at the time – especially by mentioning a paper delivered by Mark Davis in 2005 in which he argued that the ‘Australian literary novel’ is suffering a slow and inevitable demise. Substituting ‘original’ for ‘literary’ (on the grounds that originality is more ubiquitous than concepts of the literary allow), Knox makes a persuasive case for the importance of originality in Australian fiction. After some reflection, I would like to extend his argument to include not just fiction but all writing in Australia and, most particularly, writing about Australia.

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Written by Editorial team on 24-09-2010, No comments

Melbourne getting all poetic

With the closing ceremony of the Overload poetry festival at the Grace Darling Hotel on Sunday, I was disappointed poetry would once again retreat from the limelight. The experience I had this year, participating in the festival as a poet, was far more exciting than my role reviewing it here on Overland last year. Observing from afar is quite a different experience to being part of Melbourne’s poetic voice. Over this year I have gotten to know many of Melbourne’s poets by attending regular poetry readings and it is only recently that I have come to appreciate just how lucky I am here in Melbourne to be a part of such a vibrant poetic and overall artistic community. I didn’t have a chance to attend all of the interesting and diverse readings and events that were part of the festival, but I thought I’d write a few words reflecting on my own personal experience. ... read more

Written by Koraly Dimitriadis on 23-09-2010, 3 user comments

A post from Tanzania: Preaching to pictures

On the ferry between Pemba Island and mainland Tanzania there was a video playing in the lounge area. It was, as a man I met on the trip described, ‘preaching to pictures’.

I met Abdul in a cheap guesthouse the night before the weekly ferry was due to leave for mainland. He is one of those guys who is infinitely interesting: born in Somalia, he left three months before civil war broke out and spent three years in a camp in Pakistan. At twenty, he arrived in Canada. He got himself to university, worked for the Canadian government, took a series of contracts in Liberia, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Kenya and Afghanistan, and is now working for the World Bank in Dar es Salaam. We were napping between conversations when he sat up and pointed at the television.

‘I speak a little Arabic. And this,’ he said, ‘is not the kind of thing they should be feeding the Tanzanian people.’ It was a half hour program espousing the almighty power of Allah, set to a series of images. It was a combination of sermon and passages from the Koran. For thirty minutes we watched news footage of natural disasters interspersed with clips from Hollywood disaster movies, shots of Westerners drinking and smoking followed by shots of Westerners being swept away by the Boxing Day tsunami – buildings flooding, bridges collapsing, cars up trees, James Cameron’s Titanic crashing into an iceberg. ... read more

Written by Louise Pine on 23-09-2010, 3 user comments

Meanland: Putting the community back in culture (and not a moment too soon)

The last few Meanland posts have focused on the nature of copyright and how it works and affects reading, writing and publishing in our new settlements on the digital frontier.

Many people feel a distinct sense of impending doom, as though creative and financial control have been wrested from the hands of writers, artists and musicians and let loose on the infinite and unpoliced data cables across the world. But copyright, by its very nature, is extraordinarily restrictive. Currently, for your typical, non-full-time creator, there is no means of saying to another artist, ‘Can I use your work?’ Rather we rely on ‘permission culture’, in which cultural products are monitored and controlled by corporations.

Contrary to what copyright culture and modern capitalism would have us believe, the sharing of culture is the norm for individuals, for artists and for society as a whole. In mediaeval Europe, say, someone would tell a rip-roaring (and doubtless violent and bloody) story that you remembered and retold when you travelled to your next village. And maybe you retold it with some slight embellishments. From its earliest days, human cultural history was dependent on the oral tradition, which transferred culture between generations and communities. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 23-09-2010, No comments