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Congratulations to Shaun Tan

Congratulations to Shaun Tan for his Oscar for Best Animated Short for ‘The Lost Thing’. The forthcoming Overland 202 contains a special colour feature on Tan and his work. He also contributed this spectacular cover image.202frontcover

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Written by Editorial team on 28-02-2011, 3 user comments

Did you read … Meanjin?

The latest Meanjin, Volume 70, the first edition for 2011, is also the Meanjin-swansong of its editor Sophie Cunningham who took the helm in 2008 and resigned unexpectedly in 2010. Sophie’s editorial wraps-up her time with the journal and welcomes the newly appointed Sally Heath.

This edition of Meanjin begins with the rather droll ‘Mulgrave, je t’aime’ by Oslo Davis, a cartoon that should bring a smile to the lips of many Melbournites and friends-of-Melbournites. Goodness only knows what would happen to the ‘faux hipsters’ if they made it out as far as Warburton … ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 28-02-2011, 5 user comments

Speaking of ‘them’…

As 2010 was wrapping itself up in Christmas paper and curled ribbon, my sister-girls Cadie and Kimberlee came to stay with me for a few days. They live in Queensland and it had been months since I’d seen them, so we decided to go out for a couple of drinks. The cute little bar down the road was closed but the local pubs were making the most of seasonal alcoholism, so we walked a couple of extra blocks to the hotel by the railway station.

I knew this particular establishment it for its trashy music and not-so-subtle clientele, and I warned the girls before we went that it wasn’t the classiest of places. Sure enough, we hadn’t even been there for ten minutes before some blokes sauntered up and asked if they could sit with us.

Too polite (or perhaps not drunk enough) to tell them to get lost, we assented. The conversation that followed was that kind of awkward, reluctant exchange that is always made more ridiculous by the fact that you have to speak louder than usual to be heard over Rihanna and Eminem - and to compensate for the fact that the people you’re talking to are actually quite drunk. There were three of them and they were in their late twenties. It was their office Christmas party and they were at the pub with a larger group of people, most of whom were milling around some tables about 10ft away, heads together, throwing us occasional glances. It wasn’t long before a couple more blokes wandered over, one of them receiving more of a welcome than the other as the guy directly across from me threw his arm around his friend and slapped him on the chest. ... read more

Written by Stephanie Convery on 25-02-2011, 9 user comments

A cure for stuttering

film3It’s true I think, as Adam Phillips remarked in one of his later essays, that we continually speak each other’s unspoken thoughts. We are not as discrete as we appear to be. There are many things in our lives that get spoken over and over, that we can’t stop speaking of, that are, in a sense, barely intelligible markers of things we don’t really know we are turning into utterance. It’s as if there is always something unspeakable inside us.

We all have pockets of unintegrated stuff hidden away within; autistic bits, psychotic bits, dissociated bits, and so on. They try and make themselves known again and again, in all sorts of weird ways. It’s as if we keep stuttering over and over, even stuttering about our stuttering. Those of us who are readers and writers may well be the worst stutterers of all. Writers speak in books, over and over. It’s as if the highly literate are people who just can’t shut up. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 25-02-2011, 3 user comments

Wireless + public transport = win

WiFiI recently saw a sign indicating that Sydney Buses is soon going to do a trial where the M10 bus service has wireless internet on board for six months. This was a simultaneous ‘yay!’ and ‘ohhh’ moment for me. The former because it’s a great idea we should be getting into, and the second because, well, wireless internet as a means of encouraging public transport use was an idea I came up with about nine months ago and have been meaning to write about ever since. Now I look like I’m jumping a bandwagon rather than demonstrating leadership, but that ship has sailed (particularly if it’s a ferry).

In any case, I think the trial is a great idea – possibly one that could have been better initiated, but good regardless. I think it would have been better to do the trial on a train or ferry service, where people are usually on the vehicle for longer and it’s a steadier ride, and therefore more conducive to internet usage. I also think it should be trialled across more than one bus service in case there’s something very specific about the M10 that affects the way people use it. Still, internet on public transport is a good idea in my book. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 24-02-2011, 8 user comments

The day the lights went out in Overland

Gin_and_Tonic_with_ingredients – notfromUtrechtImagine my shock, horror and dismay when I went online to get my Overland fix and got absolutely, wtf, nothing. That’s if you don’t count a message, repeating ad infinitum, that my connection had timed out.

Quick to self-blame for technology stuff-ups, I gave myself over to a number of scenarios: had I clicked something accidentally with my newly acquired acrylic nail extensions (French polish, if you must know), did I have a virus (well yes, I’d had a nasty dose of summer flu but this time round it was my computer’s questionable state of immunity causing the V&Ds), or was this simply a sign my laptop was dying and the blue screen of death imminent? ... read more

Written by Trish Bolton on 24-02-2011, 11 user comments

Still waters

It’s 22 January, and the first gathering of the Still Waters Black Womens Storytelling Network. The group founder, Zimbabwean writer Fadzai Jaravaza, pauses, takes a breath, looks around at the group of beautiful brown women gathered for tea in a small room at the Institute for Postcolonial Studies in North Melbourne and asks ‘Any questions?’ There’s a short silence. Tinashe Pwiti, a young Zimbabwean woman of 22, clears her throat. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘why are we called Still Waters?’

I smile, wondering the exact same thing, and shuffle my three-month-old daughter into the red sling strung across one shoulder, eager to hear Fadzai’s response. One of the baby’s eyes opens suspiciously but she ultimately succumbs to sleep. Still Waters doesn’t seem, to me, to be an obvious christening for this newly formed storytelling sister-circle. Water is such a life force – so all-powerful in its movement and strength. Water floods, drowns, devastates, replenishes and revives. Water slides land, washes away foundations and even erodes stone. Still Waters seems somehow helpless, ominous, melancholy. It makes me think of stagnant ponds and lifeless children, of time standing still. ... read more

Written by Maxine Clarke on 23-02-2011, 7 user comments

On the sacking of Jason Dowling

Jason Dowling has been sacked. Not for behaving badly at work, but for behaving badly in his own spare time. Jason posted some offensive comments on Facebook, was dobbed in to his boss by a stranger who happened to stumble upon his page and then given his marching orders. What’s the world coming to?

It’s not the first time bad behaviour outside of work hours has resulted in dismissal. As early as the late nineties, a Telstra employee was sacked for getting into a fight while at after-work drinks. The Commission member found that ‘employers do not have an unfettered right to sit in judgement on the out of work behaviour of their employees’. Vice-President Ross went on to say that ‘an employee’s behaviour outside of working hours will only have an impact on their employment to the extent that it can be said to breach an express or implied term of his or her contract of employment’. The VP must have thought that getting into a fight outside of hours wasn’t mentioned as a no-no in the employment contract. ... read more

Written by Isy Burns on 23-02-2011, 4 user comments

‘Oh the humanities!’ (or: A critique of crisis)

Crisis in the humanitiesTo most people who have studied the humanities, the benefits of such an education are self-evident. I could list all the joys of ethics, rhetoric, aesthetic analysis and critical thinking; the specific thinkers that introduce these concepts like Plato, Aristotle, Burke, Nietzsche, Wollstonecraft, Marx, Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, Russell or Arendt, among many others. I could extol the virtues of great literature or wonderful cinema, and probably (thanks to a few anthropology minors) try to explain why some cultures think different things to others. Or I could transmit to the reader how much I love history, and how that love was fostered by my education, and eventually turned into the major of my first degree. ... read more

Written by Matthew Sini on 22-02-2011, 6 user comments

On waking up

2010-2011_Arab_world_protests.PNG: *Arab League: Serg!oEgypt. A revolution on the scale of the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution, the Women’s Revolution. Millions are changing everything because they can’t bear the oppression any longer; because they’ve captured the imagination of another way.

Iran, Yemen, Bahrain … Egypt’s imagination inspired by Tunisia. Tunisia inspired by … Facebook? Well, clearly Facebook is just one moment in a long history. ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 22-02-2011, 3 user comments

Meanland: On participatory revolution

Egypt and twitterLast week media theorist and writer Jay Rosen coined a new genre; ‘Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators’, it’s called. The genre takes some knowns:

• Since the invention of social media there have been uprisings and revolutions: Iran, Moldova, Tunisia, Egypt, and more

• Social media helps ‘sex up’ the reporting of these situations through its dynamism, immediacy, on-the-ground reporting

• Some ‘get carried away’ by the sexing up, mistaking it for journalism

• Some others get worried about all this focus on social media as ‘revolution’, so have to remind people that ‘it’s not that simple’

... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 21-02-2011, 11 user comments

Decision Points: a review

bushmemoirjpg-George W Bush comes, he says, from ‘a family of bestselling authors’. His mother and father wrote books, as did his sister, his wife and his daughter. Even his parents’ dogs, C. Fred and Millie, ‘authored their own works’.

Well, if Millie can do it, W can, too – and, one presumes, using much the same technique.

The real author of Decision Points seems to be speechwriter Christopher Michel, a twenty something wunderkind, who has tweaked Bush’s notes into the bland but serviceable prose of a corporate press release. As the title suggests, the book’s neither a memoir nor a biography but an account of those moments when the man who called himself the Decider did his best deciding. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 21-02-2011, 4 user comments

In defence of the rock critic

Lester Bangs‘Your mileage may vary’, Georgia Claire’s recent piece on the worthlessness of rock criticism, gave the impression of an archaeologist stumbling across a snippet of text from some curious – if clearly uncivilised – tribe. (Which, in fairness, isn’t an inaccurate description of most rock critics.) How funny these people are, with their made-up words and grammar-bending syntax!

Her point, of course, was that a description of Sydney band The Laurels, and rock criticism at large, make no sense. On at least one level, she’s absolutely right. As an example of the English language, it’s simply not much cop. What exactly is a psychedelic juggernaut, if not a garishly painted road train? ... read more

Written by Myke Bartlett on 21-02-2011, 4 user comments

Egypt rises

Protestors in Egypt – by 3arabawy

For eighteen consecutive days I was glued to Al Jazeera English and Twitter, watching and tweeting in awe as the Egyptian revolution unfolded. As Hosni Mubarak stepped down from the Egyptian presidency handing power to the military, an email alert drew me to a story from Tunisia: People streaming into a house to congratulate the parents of Mohamed Bouazizia. On 17 December last year Mohamed, a 26-year-old Tunisian vegetable seller, set himself alight after local authorities seized his goods and scales. His death sparked the revolution in Tunisia that led to the resignation of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and ushered in a new era in the politics of the Middle East. Suicide is not permitted under Islam but days after Mohamed Bouazizi burned himself alive in an act of protest against high food prices, unemployment and authoritarian rule, incidents of self-immolation spread through Egypt and Africa. 35-year-old Salah Saad Mahmoud had come to Cairo to find work, buy a home and marry but found himself stranded, living on low wages and unable to cope. He set himself alight in the street. Two textile workers did the same after a sustained campaign of strikes staged in protest against working conditions. The self-sacrifice of these low-paid workers proved to be the catalyst that led to the eruption of protests we have seen on the streets of Egypt over the past eighteen days. Along with the three hundred killed during street clashes with security forces after 25 January, these people are the martyrs of the Egyptian revolution. ... read more

Written by Boris Kelly on 14-02-2011, 10 user comments

i is the revolution

your transaction has been processed by paypal
this purchase will appear on your credit card bill as
item: revolution
number of items: 1
cost: $AUD priceless

the revolution thanks you for choosing itself

the revolution is downloading onto your ipad
& being transferred onto your iphone
it is an irevolution
the revolution is i
i is the revolution

the revolution is available in e-book form
the revolution/s full text is available for 99c on amazon
the revolution comes in 4 short podcasts
that can be worn as a USB bracelet
the revolution hz been turned on
you must follow the revolution
it will be abbreviated to fit its own twitter feed:
the revolution will drop all vo

Written by Maxine Clarke on 14-02-2011, 10 user comments