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Raining cats and dogs and rubbish, too

It’s been raining cats and dogs in Victoria.

We’re leaping puddles, keeping an eye on overflowing water tanks and sighing with relief as Melbourne’s parks and trees slurp up the huge soaking.

But the rain that tumbles into creeks and rivers also floods our waterways with enough rubbish to fill the MCG. In Melbourne alone, three billion pieces of litter – a bag of dog poo someone was too selfish to bin, a rusting battery discarded without a thought, a baby’s dummy fallen unnoticed on the footpath – spill from gutters, down drains and into waterways every year.

The rubbish that collects in our streets is an apt metaphor for consumption gone mad: takeaway cups, plastic lids, half-eaten food and drinks, wrappers, cans, straws, cosmetics, pens, DVDs, car parts, furniture, electronics, polystyrene packaging, plastic wrap, coathangers, hair brushes, building debris, bike parts and jewellery. In fact, almost anything you can name can be found in a gutter or drain near you. And most of what you’ll find will be plastic. ... read more

Written by Trish Bolton on 22-09-2010, 6 user comments

RIP Josefa Rauluni

Two days ago, Josefa Rauluni, a Fijian asylum seeker, was killed.

Darwin detention centre – AAPThe newspapers reported he ‘fell’ from a roof, before quoting those who knew it was a suicide. Josefa pleaded with the government not to deport him. They didn’t listen. He jumped from the roof a few hours before they were going to expel him to Fiji.

We shouldn’t just blame the bureaucrats who callously made and stuck to their decision. We should blame the mainstream political spectrum. Labor and Liberals agreed that refugees are a problem, and this problem should be solved by preventing them coming here. They did not stand for the basic proposition that refugees are human beings, the persecution they suffer is awful and we should be proud and eager to help out those who think Australia should treat them better. Obviously, Labor and the Coalition don’t think Australia should be a refuge for those suffering persecution in Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Iraq and so on. ... read more

Written by Michael Brull on 22-09-2010, 6 user comments

The education devolution

Once upon a time, in the not too distant past, education was the means to which anyone could transform their lives. In the near future if you want your child to attend university they will need to attend a private school or one of the few selective high schools in the country. If your child is likely to go into a trade, they will go to a public high school.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire and Teaching to Transgress by Bell Hooks, texts written twenty years apart, came to similar conclusions. Education is the key to social, economic and personal change, which can transform into political change. Hollywood, too, has mined this notion to great and dramatic effect. Think of The Freedom Writers, The Step It Up franchise and To Sir With Love (though not Hollywood) – all of which present education as a transformative tool. ... read more

Written by Rohan Wightman on 21-09-2010, 3 user comments

The perils of blogging

My name is Mark William Jackson and I was a compulsive blogger. It has been eight weeks since my last post. At my worst I would spend up to two hours per evening posting, responding to comments and checking statistics. If I wasn’t in my dashboard I was checking my email to see if anyone had left a comment. I was obsessed and I had to stop. I started blogging as a way of promoting my poetry but the blog is a wicked beast in the hands of an addict – by the end I was writing poetry to support the blog.

It has been well documented (usually by bloggers) that a blog, along with facebook and twitter, are essential tools for the aspiring writer. Blogs are a cheap and easy way to get your work out to millions of potential readers. Start a blog and scream ‘death to the publisher infidels, we don’t need you anymore’. But, herein lies the danger, when the blog becomes the product instead of the marketing tool. ... read more

Written by Mark William Jackson on 20-09-2010, 20 user comments

Ben Eltham on the Australia Council

In Overland 200, Ben Eltham makes a provocative argument about the future of the Australia Council. Here's a snippet.

The Australia Council has lost its way ...  It has failed to meaningfully engage with the arts practices of everyday Australian artists and no longer enjoys the support of many of those who create art in this country. The time has arrived to seriously re-assess the role of the country’s chief cultural policy body.

I believe it is time for the Australia Council to be abolished.

You can read the full article here.

... read more

Written by Editorial team on 20-09-2010, 14 user comments

Do we want social justice?

Many years ago, I worked as a community worker in a drop-in centre. One day, a wonderful young man – who struggled physically and mentally in life – collapsed. A violent incident had shattered his fragile sense of peace and security in the world. Two female colleagues and I went to tell his parents he was hospitalised and offer some support. One parent was too inebriated to talk and the other offered that their son should toughen up and be a real man. We sat in my car outside our workplace for five hours talking wildly about the state of the world. We made ridiculous jokes, laughed hysterically, cried unselfconsciously and exhausted ourselves so we could eventually go home and forget the torn, worn linoleum with dark red stains in the entrance to his parent’s home.

This story came to mind because it is about our shared need for solidarity, expression, acknowledgement, support, care and love. It’s a reminder how desperately bleak and unfair life is when these are absent. ... read more

Written by Sharon Callaghan on 17-09-2010, 3 user comments

White people: what the hell is your problem?

That's a clip from a Fear of a Brown Planet live show. In Overland 200, Jacinda Woodhead investigates the FOBP hip-hop workshops in Footscray, Melbourne. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 17-09-2010, 2 user comments

Everyday anthropology

A weed by definition alone says a lot

buffel hills

In his books The New Nature and Feral Future, Tim Low writes about the adaptability of weeds and introduced species to thrive and transform the natural environmental of Australia. Through the stories of explorers writing about the Harpy-like crows, the endangered bell frog living in the old quarry pools at Homebush, and chapter titles such as ‘nature needs weeds’, Low writes of how nature can strive and thrive alongside cities and humans. His is a writing that avoids the nostalgia that can creep into environmental writing that holds on too tightly to what this country used to look like. It’s a writing that appreciates nature for what it is today. That’s not to say that all weeds should remain or that some introduced species shouldn’t be halted in their progress, for they cause problems that need to be dealt with. It’s more a rethinking of a case-by-case basis. ... read more

Written by Scott Foyster on 17-09-2010, No comments

Walmadany: one place fighting against many

The Western Australian Government’s proposal to develop, along with Woodside Petroleum, a $30billion liquefied natural gas plant at Walmadany (James Price Point), north of Broome, is a startling example of how capitalism and colonialism can converge to ensure cultural and ecological destruction. Walmadany is no mere speck on the map. It is certainly no ‘unremarkable stretch of coastline’ as the Premier, Colin Barnett, put it on Four Corners earlier this year. Rather, it is right in the middle of sacred Gularabulu and Jabirrjabirr land. We know it is sacred because one of three major song cycles for the area passes right through it, from north to south. This is exactly why the Gularabulu family, led by Joseph Roe, are so desperate to protect it.

It’s not hard to visit this land either. In fact, each year Roe and his wife, Margie Cox, take a group of whitefellas along the path of this song cycle – the Lurujarri Heritage Trail. For ten days tourists are led across some of the most dramatic stretches of country imaginable: shining plates of aqua blue ocean, blood-red cliffs, clusters of paperbarks shivering in the breeze, fat, rolling sand dunes. The focus is on teaching others about country, and about how to care for it. ... read more

Written by Stuart Cooke on 16-09-2010, 11 user comments

Into the underbelly of the beast

'Betrayal'Non-fiction review
Betrayal: The Underbelly of Australian Labor
Simon Benson
PanteraPress

Paul Keating famously said, ‘where goes NSW, so goes federal Labor’. I read Betrayal: The Underbelly of Australian Labor before the federal election, and watching the drama unfold I have to say it was a prescient read.

Simon Benson, Chief political reporter for the Daily Telegraph focuses on the fall of Morris Iemma as NSW Premier and his ill-fated attempt to privatise the NSW electricity supply. His forensic examination of the Iemma government, including the machinations of the faceless apparatchiks that really run Labor, as well as the factions and unions, throws a revealing light on federal Labor. ... read more

Written by Rohan Wightman on 16-09-2010, 3 user comments

An election looms: a post from the Zanzibar archipelago

As we’re getting back to normal life after our election, Tanzania is gearing up for theirs. Amid a continent of countries suffering the effects of famine and civil war, Tanzania is considered to be one of the success stories, with widespread religious tolerance, and moderate and balanced politics. Five years since the last election, the incumbent party Chama Chama Mapinduzi (CCM) and its leader Kikwete are out and about in the countryside on the campaign trail. Winning power on the mainland looks to be a sure thing for them. But on Pemba and Uguju, the two main islands of the Zanzibari archipelago, things are quite different.

Since the early 90s, when the Tanzanian constitution was amended to legalise opposition parties, the mainlanders have had three relatively smooth elections. The CCM has ruled continuously and the country has been plodding along much the same since its independence from Britain in 1961. ... read more

Written by Louise Pine on 16-09-2010, No comments

Meanland: Regarding the very modern ebook machine thing

Nick Hornby and his booksAt the conclusion of his column in the July/August issue of The Believer, Nick Hornby – a popular novelist with an aptitude for imparting his reading habits – promised: ‘In next month’s exciting episode, I will describe an attempt, not yet begun, to read Our Mutual Friend on a very modern ebook machine thing. It’s the future.’

The future, the one that used to be around the corner but now

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 16-09-2010, No comments

Alison Croggon on nationalism in theatre

Writer, poet and bloggerAlison Croggon recently spoke in the Wheeler Centre as part of the Critical Failure series.

... read more

Written by Editorial team on 16-09-2010, No comments

Drugs, Afghanistan, Terrorism and US Corporations

We might be forgiven for thinking US and NATO allies are interested in keeping opium cultivation down. However, as Afghan farmers start sowing their next poppy crop, we’d be fools not to recognise how comprehensively embedded the heroin trade is – not only in the war in Afghanistan, but in the funding of terrorism in general and, in a further twist, the lining of Western corporation coffers.

Yossef Bodansky said in July 2010, in an article about the strategic ramifications of a US-led withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan:

In global terms, the key threat is the impact that the vast sums of drug money has on the long-term regional stability of vast tracks of Eurasia: namely, the funding of a myriad of “causes” ranging from jihadist terrorism and subversion to violent and destabilizing secessionism and separatism.

... read more

Written by SJ Finn on 15-09-2010, 5 user comments

Clive Hamilton in full effect

The excerpted Clive Hamilton essay on climate denialism at the ABC has now generated nearly 800 comments over at Drum, as well as spawning a reply from climate skeptics. You can now read Hamilton's original essay from Overland 200 in full online. This might be a good time to mention that, until the end of September, we're offering a special deal for new subscribers: if you sign up now, you'll receive five editions for the price of four. If you've been enjoying the content from Overland 200, now's the time to do the right thing and give the magazine your support. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 14-09-2010, 1 user comment