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LOL Bolt and free speech

‘The Holocaust started with words.’

Perhaps Ron Merkel, lead counsel for the nine Aborigines suing Andrew Bolt under the Racial Discrimination Act, would have been better to use a more local example. The policy that allowed the government to ‘assume full control and custody of the child of any aborigine’ (the Aborigines Protection Amending Act 1915), for example, or the Northern Territory Emergency Response Bill 2007, which aimed ‘to improve the well-being of certain communities in the Northern Territory’, but which its architect, Mal Brough, recently described as ‘yet another failed approach’. Or even the findings in the deaths-in-custody cases like that of Cameron Doomadgee – where, once again, no disciplinary charges were laid. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 31-03-2011, 12 user comments

Rundle on Assange

202-cover-200px1Our new edition – featuring the exquisite illustrations of Shaun Tan, an open letter from Alexis Wright, and essays from Wendy Bacon and Bob Gosford – is out and we’ll be publishing articles from it online over the next few weeks.

If you make haste with your subscribing, however, you’ll be certain of securing a copy of what is sure to be a limited edition.

‘Open-eyed conspiracy his time doth take’

Written by Editorial team on 31-03-2011, No comments

Poetry Prize announcement & interview

mrobertsonfound-web-logoOverland and the Malcolm Robertson Foundation are thrilled to announce the winner of the  2010 Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Writers:

Runners up:

Thomas Denton – ‘The Pirouette’
Judy Durrant – ‘and day breaks’

Written by Editorial team on 30-03-2011, 6 user comments

Non-fiction review: From Moree to Mabo: The Mary Gaudron Story

1194_mary_gaudronFrom Moree to Mabo: The Mary Gaudron Story
Pamela Burton
UWAP

From Moree to Mabo is the compelling and readable biography of a remarkable lawyer. Although some of the detailed analysis of the key cases and political turmoils of Mary Gaudron’s time as Solicitor General of NSW can be overwhelming, it is hard to put this book down. If you don’t know who Mary Gaudron is or if you cannot explain what is meant by equal opportunity or if you have never heard of section 75(v) of the Australian Constitution, then this is a good book for you. ... read more

Written by Rhona Hammond on 29-03-2011, 4 user comments

Parallel lives

Regular readers  might remember an extraordinary interview in Overland 196 with a man called Thomas Shepherd, who had been an undercover agent for ASIO inside various left-wing organisations for over fifteen years. Shepherd kept his identity secret from his closest associates, even embarking upon a relationship with someone who knew nothing of his secret life. Before his eventual exposure, he grew sympathetic to the ideals of those he was spying upon. The whole experience left him with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, for which he was  seeking compensation.

A few days ago, the British Guardian published a remarkably similar piece, a feature on a man called Mark Kennedy. Kennedy had spent seven years as an undercover police agent infiltrating the British environmental movement. He, too, became romantically involved with some of those he was investigating and adopted their ideals -- indeed, at one point in the interview, he criticises the movement for not being radical enough.  And like Shepherd, Kennedy now suffers from PTSD. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 28-03-2011, 3 user comments

International writings: Elizabeth Kadetsky on Naked City

Elizabeth Kadetsky continues our series of regular cross-posts from international writers or journals with similar political or aesthetic sensibilities to Overland.

elizabethkadetskyElizabeth Kadetsky's short stories have been chosen for a Puschart Prize, Best New American Voices and Best American Short Stories notable stories of 2009, and her personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, Santa Monica Review, Antioch Review and elsewhere. She has been a fellow at MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation, Djerassi Resident Artists Program and the St. James Centre for Creativity in Malta. A 25-year practitioner of Iyengar and Ashtanga yoga, she lived in India as a Fulbright scholar and wrote a memoir about her studies with the yogi BKS Iyengar, First There Is a Mountain, published in 2004 by Little, Brown. She is visiting assistant professor of creative writing in the MFA program at Penn State.

... read more

Written by Editorial team on 25-03-2011, 1 user comment

The Go Set and me

The_Go_Set_-_The_Hungry_MileIt seems somehow amiss to ponder the mystery of how music may move and motivate us to action when so much of the planet and its people are in unimaginable crisis. Yet I will share this anecdote, as I am sure it is somehow linked to an ongoing process of thinking and acting that can go towards making useful changes.

We were walking towards the festival exit when we heard the bagpipes and a frenetic beat that turned us around again and led us to a place where there was no other option than to jump into the air as much as we could and bit by bit shed our warm layers into a pile by the pylon and keep leaping into the air smiling with the space around us enjoying the mix of years in the crowd who registered their cause being belted out from the stage where the energy behind the band’s sweat made us want to jump with joy and body memories of every struggle and the times when folk got together trying to defend the voice of someone being kicked down and silenced.

... read more

Written by Sharon Callaghan on 25-03-2011, 2 user comments

Meanland: Marshall McLuhan is stalking me from beyond the grave

Marshall-McLuhanNot a fan of media theorist Marshall ‘the medium is the message’ McLuhan? Okay, I don’t go in for the technological determinism either, but you can’t deny that the man was uncannily prescient when it came to predicting how our culture would develop – a ‘global village’, electric technology ‘reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life’ – and how these changes would be feared – ‘we drive into the future using only our rear view mirror’. He even divined the demise of print culture, and ‘electronic interdependence’. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 24-03-2011, 10 user comments

All Along the Watchtower

watchtowercoverAll Along the Watchtower
Michael Hyde
Vulgar Press

Michael Hyde’s All Along the Watchtower is a recent Australian example of the trend of memoirs by 60s activists, which has also seen the publication of Tariq Ali’s Street-fighting Years (1987, 2005), Luisa Passerini’s Autobiography of a Generation (translation published 2004) and Tom Hayden’s Rebel: A Personal History of the 1960s (2003). (See Radical Middle for 50 accounts written by US citizens alone.) ... read more

Written by Sophia Always on 22-03-2011, 3 user comments

The revenger’s comedy

Kevin_Rudd

In early January, on a random scrap of paper on my desk, I wrote: ‘I just want it said, if there is any need to say it, that it seems blindingly obvious to me that Kevin Rudd is already wondering if he can do to Julia Gillard what she did to him; shaft her and become Prime Minister.’ Over New Year, Rudd had a kind of mini unofficial campaign launch at the Woodford Folk Festival, where he revisited the ‘I’m here to help’ slogan and played to an audience still hoping that someone will take action on climate change, stop treating refugees so criminally and start to act and think like a person with a soul not owned by flesh-eating aliens from the planet Zok. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 21-03-2011, 8 user comments

Antithesis presents: words outside the wog box

As I’m typing this blog post, only a few kilometres away on Lonsdale Street in the city, the annual Antipodes festival is in full swing. There’s fairy floss, carnival rides, imported Greek singers, bouzouki, Greek dancing and, of course, souvlaki. The Antipodes festival has been running since 1987 and, according to their website and to many Greeks in Melbourne, it is ‘a celebration of all things Greek’. But surely there’s more to being Greek than Antipodes, or the collection of ‘wog boy’ films? Challenging the Greek stereotype isn’t the only reason a few prominent Greek-Australian artists came together and created Antithesis, it was also to expose the hidden underground art created by Greek-Australians that for some reason, isn’t pushing through to the mainstream. As the curator of the literature/

Written by Koraly Dimitriadis on 19-03-2011, 16 user comments

Meanland, busy as a bee

bookstoreThe next Meanland event, The evolution of the bookshop, is just on the horizon: With Amazon.com, ebooks and print-on-demand, are we seeing the end of the traditional bookstore? In the first Meanland event for 2011, a panel of retailers, e-traders and industry insiders discuss how book selling is changing and what that evolution means for readers, writers and literature. Hosted by writer, editor and publisher Chris Flynn.

When: 6:15PM - 7:15PM, Wednesday 30 March
Where: The Wheeler Centre
Cost: Free, but bookings recommended ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 18-03-2011, 2 user comments

Review: Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets

2010-OUT-OF-THE-BOX-coverOut of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets
Michael Farrell and Jill Jones (eds)
Puncher & Wattman Poetry

I’ve put off reviewing this book. During the whole of 2010 I must have reviewed one too many collection of academic lyricism which clashed violently with my academic burnout. The result was that every contemporary poem I read – I’m sorry to say – sounded like it was written by one of the same two imaginary people: ‘Jane Masters’, the female lyric poet doing some kind of postgrad creative writing course and preoccupied with how to overwrite everything, and ‘Joe D’oh’, the punctuationally challenged experimentalist who can’t (or can’t be bothered) editing his stream of consciousness for the reader’s sake. ... read more

Written by Tara Mokhtari on 17-03-2011, 6 user comments

NFZs and other benevolent interventions

No foreign intervention – via Lisa Goldman

There is a fissure in the Left at present; in Australia, it’s playing out on the pages of Crikey, liberal blog Larvatus Prodeo and Benjamin Solah’s Blood and Barricades. The Left is divided between western intervention in the Libyan uprisings, or not. About a UN-endorsed no-fly zone over Libya, or not. About whether such interventions are right, tactically speaking, or not. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 16-03-2011, 68 user comments

After a nuclear event

Japan after the quake

We don’t know yet how serious the nuclear crisis in Japan will be. With luck, the leaks will be contained soon. God knows, the Japanese people have suffered enough. But what’s happened so far highlights the fundamental problem with nuclear energy.

The case against atomic power is – and has always been – very straightforward.

Nuclear reactors produce substances that are astonishingly deadly. Those substances stay toxic for tens of thousands of years. No-one has yet developed an adequate means of disposing of nuclear waste, something that the boosters of atomic energy rarely like to mention. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 15-03-2011, 14 user comments