Overland literary journal

QE review: The Happy Life

Quarterly Essay 41
The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World
David Malouf
Black Inc.

Clichés rendered by the deft literary hand of David Malouf must inevitably be far more eloquent than those bashed out by the average typing monkey, but it doesn’t mean they have changed in substance. In the first Quarterly Essay for 2011, David Malouf looks at happiness – The Happy Life to be precise – and the clichés are right there in the first paragraph:

There can be no one, however miserable the conditions of their daily existence, who has not at some time felt the joy of being alive in the moment; in the love of another, or the closeness of friends or fellow workers; in a baby’s smile, the satisfaction of a job well done or the first green in a winter furrow; or more simply still, bird-song or the touch of sunlight.

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Written by Stephanie Convery on 7-04-2011, 3 user comments

Caroline Hamilton speaks

Caroline Hamilton is a research fellow in the Department of Publishing and Communications at the University of Melbourne and has also worked as a freelance writer. Her latest book One Man Zeitgeist: Dave Eggers, Publishing and Publicity is published by Continuum. Caroline chats to Overland about her article ‘The Exposure Economy’.

How did you come to write ‘The exposure economy’?

I’m researching the working lives of independent writers and publishers at present and as part of that project I delved in to the blogs of many local writers. One issue which kept cropping up in some form or another was the problem of getting paid. Writers were keen to take on opportunities only to discover the work was unpaid.

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Written by Editorial team on 7-04-2011, 20 user comments

Bob Gosford Speaks

Bob Gosford is a writer, lawyer and ethnoornithologist who lives and writes in the Northern Territory. He lived for three years in the small township of Yuendumu, 300 kilometres from Alice Springs, and has recently moved from Alice itself up to Darwin where he’s working for the Northern Land Council, an Aboriginal council responsible for the administration of Aboriginal lands in the Top End.

As part of our new interview series, Bob chats to Overland’s Clare Strahan about his article in the latest Overland, ‘They took our culture – now there is no law’.

Bob speaks here of the role of customary law as ‘being unexceptional and accepted rather than some sort of deviant or outlying behaviour’, of the ‘difficult balance’ of reporting and giving people a voice, the fundamental shift in the relationship between the federal and NT governments and between the government and the people, mandatory income management and class, and what he likes best about the ‘Babel of languages and cultures’ that is Australia’s Northern Territory. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 6-04-2011, 2 user comments

The next breath

I am not a sporting person. Some people are born with the ability to catch balls with their hands as if they have an in-built homing device. I, it would seem, was born with such a homing device in my head. If I enter a park and there is someone, somewhere within a two-kilometre radius throwing a football – or whatever it is you’re supposed to do with them – I can guarantee that said football, sooner or later, will hit me in the head. Thus whenever I have attempted to ‘play’ a sport I usually spend the whole time shielding my face with my hands, something which impedes ones ability to ‘play’ somewhat.

Some years ago, however, I discovered a sport of sorts which suits me perfectly. Swimming. The beauty of swimming is you don’t have to interact with anybody or anything except the water. You literally immerse yourself in it. No talking to anyone. No-one shouting ‘butter fingers!’ at you. You even get to wear a disguise: goggles and a latex cap, which transform one into a sort-of insect cross Peter Garrett. (Don’t worry, Overlanders, I’ll get to the bit about writing soon. Threw in that semi-political reference to keep you going.) ... read more

Written by Claire Zorn on 6-04-2011, 12 user comments

Patricia Gillespie speaks

Patricia Gillespie is a writer and editor who has put her career on hold to care full-time for her mother, Marie. Below, Gillespie, a PhD student at the University of Melbourne focusing on aged care and elder rights, gives us an insight into the writing of her Overland 202 article, ‘[In]dignity’.

What are you hoping people will take away with them from reading ‘[In]dignity’?

I hope it would prompt the same kind of responses my thesis evoked. The responses ranged from one university staff member calling her mother after reading it and asking her how she was; to generating a sustained sense of disquiet, and another professor declaring it should be mandatory reading for those embarking in the areas of human services.

I hope that reading this story might prompt people to reconsider their views of what it is like to live as an elder, and broaden their understanding of the issues they, and eventually others, will face.

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Written by Editorial team on 5-04-2011, 9 user comments

Wendy Bacon speaks

Walkley Award-winning writer and professor Wendy Bacon is the acting director of the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism in Sydney, an investigative journalist and non-practising media lawyer, a long-time political activist, and has worked and taught around the world. Wendy campaigned against censorship in the 1970s and writes about those experiences for Overland in her article ‘Being free by acting free’.

Wendy chats with Overland intern Clare Strahan about what’s the same and different about activism from the early ’70s to now; the conservatism of academia; feminism and women in prison; the constraints of media professionalism; the digitalisation of early editions of Tharunka, the flowering of the alternative press and the need for diversity in the media; and the inspiration of WikiLeaks. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 4-04-2011, 1 user comment

I am woman hear me tweet in numbers too big to … ignore

What do twenty-first-century women and the sixteenth-century Protestant revolt have in common? The advantages of a new, epoch-changing communications technology.

Last week on the Overland blog Jacinda Woodhead raised the ghost of Marshall McLuhan and his 1960s catch phrase ‘the medium is the message’. The medium might be the message – but what if a message suddenly finds a new medium?

This famously happened in the sixteenth century when Martin Luther wrote the ‘Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences’ in Wittenberg in 1517. This was not a revolutionary act. It was merely one more in a line of scholarly disputations against the church. Luther used the medium of his day – a handwritten Latin tract – to protest against the behaviour of the clergy at his local church, which contained an extensive collection of spurious holy relics including vials of the Virgin Mary’s breast milk. ... read more

Written by Jane Gleeson-White on 4-04-2011, 17 user comments

Rjurik Davidson: Imagining new worlds

For Overland 202, we thought we'd try something different – author interviews and other supplementaries to accompany our published pieces, so you can get more of an insight into how these pieces came to be.

Here, Rjurik Davidson, associate editor at Overland and author of The Library of Forgotten Books, chats with Overland intern Clare Strahan about writing politically engaged fiction, free will and determinism, complicating fiction, the radical ’60s, sexism and the New Wave, inner space and outer space ... and his latest Overland essay, ‘Imagining New Worlds’.

Part I ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 1-04-2011, 7 user comments