Blog

Waltzing with Jack Dancer: a slow dance with cancer

'Waltzing with Jack Dancer' coverWaltzing with Jack Dancer: a slow dance with cancer
Poems by Geoff Goodfellow
Story by Grace Goodfellow
Wakefield Press

This review is dedicated to Guido Schivella, who lost to cancer in 2008, and to Charisse Mitchell, who will beat cancer in 2011.


Cancer is indiscriminate, picking its battles with seeming randomness. There are hypothesised causes: smoking, drinking, sun etc, but they are not definitive. Cancer picked the wrong fight when it tried to take on Geoff Goodfellow, the man HG Nelson describes as ‘tough nut’. Geoff’s boxing training, working-class background and teenage daughter were three things that cancer didn’t count on. ... read more

Written by Mark William Jackson on 11-05-2011, 15 user comments

JobWatch: the end is nigh

Jobwatch

Let’s say you’re a worker in Victoria and you get fired, but you don’t qualify for Legal Aid and you can’t afford a solicitor. The industrial relations laws, however, have just become so complicated. Didn’t Howard change things? Didn’t Rudd change them back? Thankfully, you can call JobWatch for help.

JobWatch is an employment rights legal centre which provides assistance to Victorian workers about their rights at work. They run a free and confidential telephone information and referral service for Victorian workers, they work to educate the community on employment law and workers’ rights, they campaign on law reform and promote workplace justice and equity for all Victorian workers. They are an independent, not-for-profit organisation funded by the Victorian Government. ... read more

Written by Isy Burns on 10-05-2011, 1 user comment

Ding-dong, the witch is dead

Obama-clinton-watch-bin-laden-raidIt started with television images that resembled a macabre outtake from a Hollywood blockbuster and it seems to have ended like one too. Ten years ago it was the planes hitting the towers, like a trailer from an upcoming Die Hard film, and last week it was the crowds celebrating outside the White House mirroring the arrival of Dorothy in Oz.

Whirled out of the heart of America, Dorothy dropped out of the sky into Foreigners-ville, crushing an incarnation of evil under solid American timbers in a weird pre-figuration of last week’s raid in Pakistan, where our American heroes were themselves whirled into the sky (though Stealth-ily) and dropped into the land of the freaky towelheads, right onto the head of the biggest baddie of them all. Cue singing, dancing and general merriment. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 9-05-2011, 15 user comments

The only track on my iPod*

I cannot stop listening to this version of ‘Black Stacey’.

Saul Williams’s new studio album, Volcanic Sunlight, is rumoured to be available any day now.

*Could be a slight exaggeration.

... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 7-05-2011, 7 user comments

You can only get so close on Google Earth

Cover of Ann Shenfield's bookYou Can Get Only So Close On Google Earth
Ann Shenfield
Arcadia

Ann Shenfield is recognised as an animation filmmaker and author-illustrator. You Can Get Only So Close on Google Earth is her debut poetry collection.
Poems within the collection have been recognised, winning such prizes as the Rosemary Dobson and Max Harris Poetry Awards in 2007 as well as publication in journals such as Visible Ink and Glass (2003).

A recurring theme is death; the death of a father when the poet was 5 years old, and the relatively recent death of a sister. Indeed, both traumatic experiences. I did, however, find the imagery used in the particular poems to be a bit flowery and assume the poet has reconciled the trauma of these events. ... read more

Written by Mark William Jackson on 6-05-2011, 14 user comments

Authors press on

Overland readers may recall the catch-cry: ‘publish or perish’. Currently, new problems are making publication difficult. Threats include the appearance of a new Goliath, ‘the digital age’ of ‘multi media’;  the excluding cult of  authorial celebrity; chain bookshops bankrupt in both senses, financially, and in their misguided efforts to follow supermarkets;  writers’ centres offering  mirages of ready paths to the redemption of easy publication.  Doom-sayers predict books themselves will perish. The media endlessly recycles discussion of all these problems; but to no purpose. The recent repetitive debate about cheaper books was noisy but left no group better off.

The latest bad news is  that, apparently, the library of the University of New South Wales is disposing of large collections of books and journals  under the pressure of increasing costs and a consequent change-over to  more use of online access which is cheaper and favoured by students.  So it may be that even the role of libraries as conservers and custodians of books, may be under challenge, that the barbarians are inside the gates ... read more

Written by Laurie Hergenhan on 6-05-2011, 3 user comments

Punch and Judy and the theatre of politics

Punch & Judy

Punch & Judy: the double disillusion election of 2010
Mungo MacCallum
Black Inc.

Mungo must have been punching out Punch and Judy during the election – trawling the mediascape for fodder and spitting it back out between midnight and 4am, when only he and Tony Abbott were awake. Like all of us, he was surprised at the result but like most of us, upon reflection, wasn’t that surprised and Punch and Judy reflects this. In his analysis of the election, the result seems almost inevitable by the book’s end. Both candidates were useless and more alike than different policy wise, so there hardly seemed any point in voting unless you voted Greens or Independent as they were the only ones saying anything contrary to the unified voices of the Coalition and Labor. ... read more

Written by Rohan Wightman on 5-05-2011, 6 user comments

Goldstone’s bias pt 2: intentionality and evidence

In his op-ed for the Washington Post, Goldstone made the remarkable claim that if he had known during his investigations ‘what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document’. This was supported by two primary claims in support.

The first: ‘While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee’s report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.’ He supported this by reference to the notorious murder of 29 members of the al-Samouni family. Goldstone says: ‘The shelling of the home was apparently the consequence of an Israeli commander’s erroneous interpretation of a drone image, and an Israeli officer is under investigation for having ordered the attack.’ He is confident the issues will be appropriately resolved: ‘While the length of this investigation is frustrating, it appears that an appropriate process is underway, and I am confident that if the officer is found to have been negligent, Israel will respond accordingly.’ ... read more

Written by Michael Brull on 4-05-2011, 1 user comment

Tobogganing, childrenʼs writing, lateral thinking and (unfortunately) Martin Amis

Amis as Max – Patricia StormsI have often wondered whether a blog on childrenʼs literature was appropriate for the Overland blog. Then issue 202 appeared with cover feature on Shaun Tan and a column by Alison Croggon about the experience of childhood and the often-inaccurate interpretation of it ...

Many years ago I found myself hurtling down a snow-covered hill aboard a toboggan. As the toboggan, captained by my elder brother, hurtled toward the large mound of snow that bordered the carpark – with no sign of slowing down – two things were at the forefront of my mind. The first was the knowledge that the toboggan had no braking system; I knew this because I had inspected it thoroughly before reluctantly climbing on. The second was the feeling that most of the people in the world were clearly idiots, particularly those who seemed to enjoy and willingly participate in snow sports. I was three years old. ... read more

Written by Claire Zorn on 3-05-2011, 7 user comments

Death of bin Laden

So Osama bin Laden has been killed. Ok. Now what?

In the short term, an orgy of ghoulish US nationalism, as the media drools over the bloodied corpse,  a body that, we're told, the US now has in its possession, to be (no doubt) lovingly displayed at some future date.

Bin Laden was a mass murderer and no friend of the Left. Still, what does it say about our era that that the decade's biggest news story centres not on a new scientific discovery nor a medical breakthrough nor the extension of healthcare nor the provision of public housing but rather on the celebrations attendant upon a public enemy being gunned to death?

Will the wars come to an end? Of course not. Bin Laden never played any role in Iraq nor in the Afghan insurgency. As for the new quagmire in Libya, well, that's a pretty good example of how the the killing can continue without any reference to al-Qaeda whatsoever -- Gaddafi is to that war what bin Laden was to the other two. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 2-05-2011, 7 user comments

Justin Clemens on two Dorothies, two Porters

Overland 202 contains Justin Clemens’ sparkling essay on Dorothy Porter, Peter Porter and Dorothy Hewett. It’s now online for your reading pleasure.

... read more

Written by Editorial team on 2-05-2011, No comments