Blog

Fiction review – What is left over, after

'What is left over, after'Natasha Lester has three children and lives in Western Australia. This is good news for me, otherwise I would want to be her. Her first novel won the 2008 TAG Hungerford award, she’s written for Overland, indigo and Wet Ink, and she just won a Publisher Fellowship from Allen & Unwin.

Her first novel, What is left over, after, benefits from having the kind of title that made me want to read it without knowing anything about it. It sounds like the title of a Romantic-era poem, something from one of Coleridge’s contemporaries swiped for a contemporary take. I love it. The book is also pretty good. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 14-09-2010, 7 user comments

Anorexia, capitalism, riot-grrrl

In Overland 197, Anwyn Crawford contributed a devastating critique of Nick Cave, one of the most-discussed articles we’ve published in the past year or so. For Overland 200, she’s written a much-needed intervention tackling some of the major issues in contemporary feminism. It begins like this:

A chart hung above the chalkboard in Mrs Brandie’s classroom, written in the patient, legible hand of a primary school teacher. Black marker on white card, two columns: name, weight – Anwyn Crawford, 34 kg.

I’ve forgotten the name of the lightest member of the class, but not her figure, the lowest weight on the chart: 18 kg, limbs like kindling. My maths, at age eight, was good enough to know that I was nearly double this. I knew enough to know that I was fat and she was thin, and I was utterly ashamed. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 13-09-2010, No comments

Fiction review – Child of the Twilight

She may have grown up in Tasmania, but I’m claiming Carmel Bird as a Melbourne writer because she lives here now. If you haven’t heard of her, why not? The woman has a prolific publishing history, beginning with her first collection of stories in 1983.

I published my first two books myself. If you decide to publish your own book, do it cheerfully, whole-heartedly, using all the information you can get, and be realistic in your expectations. It is probable that the book will not be reviewed, and it probably won't be a prize-winner or a best-seller – although it might be. You will also be the subject of a certain amount of derision and also, interestingly enough, of envy. Other people can be quite jealous of your guts when you publish your own book.

... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 13-09-2010, 3 user comments

Our s11

Ten years ago today, at 6 am in the morning, I was sheltering from rain at the Crown Casino in Melbourne. The Victorian government had built an enormous fence to stop protesters from disrupting the Asia Pacific Summit of the World Economic Forum, which had strolled into town to hold what Alexander Downer termed a ‘Business Olympics’. Drenched, I was (silently) contemplating if this was all an enormous mistake and whether the claim that Seattle could come to Melbourne was no more than fantasy. I should not have doubted. As the blockade that day stopped over 200 delegates from attending the WEF, and resulted in the dysfunction of the Summit, I felt simultaneously enormously powerful and fantastically tiny amongst the many thousands who were there.

... read more

Written by Elizabeth Humphrys on 11-09-2010, 9 user comments

This dirty word

Baby footThis morning I stood in my sun-drenched garden thick with the perfume of jonquils. Everywhere around me was new life. The apple trees full of tight little buds, grass thick and bright from recent rain, the birch tree trailing bushy new growth. And on this day filled with lushness my baby was due to be born.

Except that he or she won’t be, because at 12 weeks I miscarried. But there in my diary, written in bold blue pen next to today’s date, is my happy exclamation: Baby due! I didn’t cross it out, liquid paper over it, try to wipe it from sight. I left it, as a kind of memorial I suppose. And today, reading those swooping words leaves me with a slow sifting sadness. ... read more

Written by Irma Gold on 10-09-2010, 15 user comments

‘That is so gay!’

I am not politically correct. I make the funny with friends about their sexualities, their lifestyles, their cultural stereotypes. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with calling my gay friends ‘poofs’ or ‘faggots’ (this may of course be easier for me to do considering I am one of those pesky gays), making my Indian friends laugh at my poor excuse for an impression of a beatific yogi, or taking pot-shots at German friends about efficiency. The reason there’s nothing wrong with these things is because I am conscious of what I am doing and saying. I am less making fun of my friends and more making fun of a stereotype. In that way, I suppose I am being politically incorrect.

The problem with using language such as ‘faggot’ when you are not aware of its history and what it signified and still does signify is that you make light of the violence behind such language. When I call a fellow homosexual friend a poof or even a fag, I am fully aware of the word’s history and am using it in a very specific, ironic manner. I even try to encourage straight friends to join in, but they’re often reluctant to do so, for obvious ‘politically correct’ reasons. But really, the reason I am ‘allowed’ to use those terms is not so much that many gay people have allegedly reclaimed them, more that my intention is extremely aware of the word having a history as an insult. And with this, comedy gold ensues! ... read more

Written by Matthew Sini on 10-09-2010, 13 user comments

The burqa and cruise missile liberals

Late last month, the Age published a piece by Sushi Das re-opening the so-called 'burqa debate'. Das argued:

The burqa is not just confronting, it is frightening because of what it looks like and what it stands for. You simply cannot discuss it without at least a passing glance at what is happening to women in conservative Muslim countries such as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.

When people pussyfoot around injustices because they fear being labelled racists or worry they will fan bigotry, or think they have no right to pass judgment, it creates a void, not intelligent debate. This void is inevitably filled with rants from those who hold polarised positions. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 10-09-2010, No comments

The power of self-delusion

Young Emerging Writers Night at the Sydney Jewish Writers’ Festival


Steve ToltzMuch is being made at the moment about the number of students enrolling in creative writing courses across our fair land. In fact, it is fair to say that in the next decade Australia’s biggest challenge won’t be overpopulation; it will be a severe skills shortage due to the fact everyone is chucking in their jobs and going off to ‘learn’ how to be a writer. If you want to read about the way this may or may not be impacting on Australia’s literary culture, I strongly recommend reading Rjurik Davidson’s article ‘Liberated zone or pure commodification?’ in the current issue of Overland. (I would happily cut and paste it right here, but appropriation hasn’t really taken off in the literary community the way it has in visual arts.) Suffice to say, there are a lot of folk out there tapping away on their keyboards in the hope that one day they will make it into print. Or to use an animal metaphor (which regular readers will know I am rather fond of) there are a lot of hungry caterpillars out there wondering how they can help themselves emerge from their cocoons as beautiful butterflies rather than dusty brown moths – squashed under a pile of rejection slips. ... read more

Written by Claire Zorn on 10-09-2010, 4 user comments

MWF – In conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson

Sunday 29 August. Kim Stanley Robinson sat calmly at the front of the vast reaches of BMW edge. Lucy Sussex – a longtime supporter of Overland – interviewed Robinson in a freewheeling discussion about his work and opinions. It’s not surprising that that the hall wasn’t full: Robinson was the Guest of Honour at the World Science Fiction Convention a few days later. Many of his fans no doubt planned to catch him there. Still, it’s a pity the session wasn’t better attended, for Robinson is one of the most astute commentators on politics and history. He possesses qualities too rare among novelists; most importantly he thinks deeply about his work; he has an aesthetic and political project. As a result, Robinson is not simply a novelist, but a commentator – a kind of public intellectual that is all too rare. As a radical leftist, Robinson – along with another SF leftist at the festival, China Mieville – has the knack of appearing eminently reasonable, rational, knowledgeable. It is hard to underestimate his value. ... read more

Written by Rjurik Davidson on 9-09-2010, 9 user comments

MWF – Writing Indigenous Australia

I’m writing a PhD on Indigenous Australia and have been travelling the Top End researching for six months or so. The Melbourne Writers Festival began the very day after I arrived home. Given the topic of my PhD, attending the Writing Indigenous Australia seminar seemed like an appropriate thing to do.

The panel was made up of one Indigenous and three non-Indigenous writers. Hannah Rachel Bell opened with a brief talk about Storymen – ‘an excavation of converging world views exposed through personal memoir, letters, paintings and conversations’ – which meditates on her relationship with Ngarinyin lawman Bungal Mowaljarlai, the fiction and philosophies of Tim Winton, and the relationships between land, story, and male rites of passage. ... read more

Written by Stephanie Convery on 9-09-2010, No comments

MWF – A year for Australian writing

MWF session: A year for Australian writing

Cambridge History of Aus LitThis session had it all, from heckling to backslapping, from scholarly commentary to dogged insistence. It was what you could call a well-rounded experience. Funnily, looking back, the topic, based on the publication of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature and The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, may have been buried among everything else. Even the delivery, wiry and technical, a skilful performance of university-polished quality, seemed enshrouded in the controversy of what these works weren’t, rather than what they were. ... read more

Written by SJ Finn on 9-09-2010, 3 user comments

Bookless shelves

Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself. – Tom Robbins

Martin Hughes and Zoe Dattner interviewed Richard Nash at the Wheeler Centre and replayed the interview on RRR’s Max Headroom on 22 July 2010. Due to the miracle of modern technology, I listened to it the other day. ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 8-09-2010, No comments

The new order

It seems, then, that we have a government. What to make of the result?

Andrew Robb recently wailed that a Labor-Green coalition would install ‘the most left wing government in Australia’s history’. Now, of course, that’s not, like, actually true or anything, but the rhetoric does highlight how remarkable this outcome actually is.

Remember, a year or so ago, Ruddism was in full bloom, with Labor presiding – just as Kevin07 had promised – over a tremendously socially and economically conservative administration. What’s more, it was cocky in its conservatism. Against critics on the Left, Rudd could point out that he’d campaigned as Labor’s most right-wing leader and had defeated John Howard on that basis. Whether that’s an accurate understanding of the 2007 election is a different question but the point is that Rudd had a more-or-less coherent story to tell about his government’s conservatism. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 8-09-2010, 12 user comments

Water and the Murray Darling Basin

Forty percent of all Australian water is used by agricultural irrigation in the Murray Darling Basin. At least that's my estimate, based on some widely available and often quoted figures*. So 40% of all of our water is used in an industry that employs 3% of the workforce. This could almost be fair, I suppose, as all industries have specific needs, and all of them will necessarily need more of given resources than represents their workforce population. Except that water is unique; it's not just an environmental resource, but a human right. Which means 3% of our population are using ten times their appropriate allocation.

Which still could almost be fair enough. I mean, everyone has to eat, right? The Basin does contain 75% of Australian irrigated agriculture, so they've certainly got a reason to use it. But that ignores the fact that while 75% of irrigated agriculture is in the Basin, only 40% of overall farming is. It also ignores that it produces only a quarter of the value of agricultural production in Australia, around $A9.6 billion a year, and a third of Australia's food supply. Suddenly it sounds like irrigated agriculture might be a poor return for our water. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 7-09-2010, 2 user comments

‘Telling whites what they want to hear’: Chris Graham on Noel Pearson

Noel Pearson gave a keynote address at the recent Melbourne Writers' Festival. He also featured heavily in the election campaign, most often in the speeches of Tony Abbott. In his essay from Overland 200, Chris Graham casts a critical eye over Pearson's politics.

Whatever you think of Pearson’s politics, it almost certainly doesn’t match what Pearson thinks of Pearson’s politics.

Since his transformation in 2000, Pearson has been asserting that he’s not a conservative. Again, from his ‘The Light on the Hill’ speech: ‘Much of my thinking will seem to many to indicate that I have merely become conservative. But I propose the reform of welfare, not its abolition.’ And he was still running the line seven years later. Writing in the Australian in July 2007, Pearson says: ‘My aim has been, as Dennis Glover wrote in The Australian yesterday, to “set higher standards for the Left” by critically examining the outcomes of ostensibly leftist policies.’ ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 6-09-2010, 4 user comments