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The Protectors: a journey through whitefella past

The Protectors: a journey through whitefella past
Stephen Gray
Allen & Unwin

The ProtectorsFor much of John Howard’s reign as Prime Minister debate on Australian history took a polarised view: the Black Armband History versus the White Revisionist’s History. The culmination of which was John Howard’s refusal to apologise to the Stolen Generation. With Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology, and the bi-partisan support for it, it seemed that that debate had ended, that a compromise had been achieved. But has it? In his book The Protectors: a journey through whitefella past, Stephen Gray addresses this question by asking what are we apologising about? ... read more

Written by Scott Foyster on 30-06-2011, No comments

Meanland: The death of the book, and other utopian fantasies

Well, it’s official: the (printed) book is dead, long live the (e)book.

Or so many political and cultural elites would like us to believe. On the very day of my writing this blog, for example, we were subjected to federal Minister for Small Business Nick Sherry’s apocalyptic diagnosis that Australian booksellers will be annihilated within the next five years, thanks, in part, to the (supposed) explosion of online sales of ebooks. In a less dramatic and more considered register, Kate Eltham, CEO of Queensland Writers Centre, pontificated on the ABC television’s Jennifer Byrne Presents, that the advent of ebooks and e-readers was disrupting ‘the underpinning supply chains that are currently supporting modern publishing’. ... read more

Written by Ali Alizadeh on 29-06-2011, 7 user comments

At the Sydney Film Festival: Toomelah

toomelahToomelah
Director: Ivan Sen
★★★

Ivan Sen’s debut feature film was 2002’s Beneath Clouds: a road movie about two Indigenous Australian teenagers trying to escape the depressing realities of their lives by fleeing to Sydney. It’s a solid film and I was thoroughly looking forward to Sen’s third feature, Toomelah. Especially as it was the only Australian feature I chose to see at the festival. Not for lack of choice and possible quality mind you; Scarlet Road, which I wanted to see, was sold out and I knew Sleeping Beauty would be in theatres soon. ... read more

Written by Peter Francis on 28-06-2011, 2 user comments

Poetry or pornography?

With the launch of my second poetry chapbook, Love and Fuck Poems, approaching, I thought it timely to write a post to hopefully generate some discussion about poetry and pornography, and the fine line between the two – or can they be the same thing? It’s a question that’s been dancing in my mind the last six months. Before that time the thought never crossed my mind to explore this kind of poetry. But then I was introduced to a poet named Ben John Smith, editor of Horror Sleaze Trash and suddenly my poetry world was expanded to new horizons.

Ben was featuring at Passionate Tongues Poetry readings at Brunswick Hotel the first time I was exposed to his poetry, and he invoked a strong response – people either loved or loathed him. Mention his name to some poets and they’ll reciprocate with a look of disgust. ‘His work isn’t literature!’ someone said to me, ‘he’s sexist, misogynistic – he’s a pornographer, that’s all he is.’ And I received more than a few complaints when I interviewed him on 3CR’s Spoken Word program a few weeks ago. I’m working with Ben to put together a show for my launch where we will be going head-to-head, poetry style, and I have to say, getting to know him as a person, he is a far stretch from the ‘sexist pig’ people label him to be. In fact, he has been in a loving relationship with his girlfriend for ten years, so what seems to be the problem here? ... read more

Written by Koraly Dimitriadis on 27-06-2011, 108 user comments

Elena Jeffreys on whether the Left should support stricter regulation of the sex industry

Last month, Overland invited Elena Jeffreys, of Scarlet Alliance, to participate in a debate in our print journal that proposed that the Left should support stricter regulation of the sex industry. Unfortunately, for various reasons, the debate didn't come to fruition. However, Elena gave us permission to publish her initial argument here on the blog. We invite comments below.

Over-regulation is the problem
Elena Jeffreys

There is nothing ostensibly more or less ‘wrong’ with sex work, porn, stripping, online web cam, phone sex or BD/SM that isn’t wrong with any other industry and workplace under capitalism. Except the over-regulation we face. Those who want to re

Written by Editorial team on 24-06-2011, 3 user comments

At the Sydney Film Festival: Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Cave of Forgotten DreamsCave of Forgotten Dreams
Dir: Werner Herzog
★★★★

In 1994 three French speleologists discovered a cave hidden behind an old rockslide in southern France. Inside they found a particularly beautiful cave with rock paintings eventually dated to 32 000 years before the present. They are the oldest known cave paintings, preserved so well because of the rockslide protecting what was once an open cave from the elements, animals and humans. It is called Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave after one of its discoverers, Jean-Marie Chauvet, and a natural rock arch nearby. ... read more

Written by Peter Francis on 24-06-2011, No comments

My Limmud Oz speech

I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, and pay my respects to their elders past and present.

When explaining why BDS advocates were banned from presenting at Limmud Oz, the Executive explained that ‘the BDS campaign is an attack on Israel’s basic legitimacy and harms the Jewish people as a whole’.

I am nothing if not reasonable, so I wanted to report other treacherous, self-hating Jews who would not be welcome here either. Socialists are notoriously unreliable, and here’s what one living in Palestine in 1931 said:

We declare before world opinion, before the workers' movement, and before the Arab world, that we shall not agree, either now or in the future, to the rule of one national group over the other. Nor do we accept the idea of a Jewish state, which would eventually mean Jewish domination of Arabs in Palestine. ... read more

Written by Michael Brull on 23-06-2011, 2 user comments

At the Sydney Film Festival: Surviving Life

Surviving_life_posterSurviving Life
Director: Jan Švankmajer
★★★

Czech director Jan Švankmajer’s Surviving Life is a whole movie in the style of Terry Gilliam’s animations. Or, more accurately, Gilliam’s animations are in the style of Švankmajer, who was a major influence on the Monty Python member. In an amusing introduction Švankmajer explains the film is a ‘psychoanalytic comedy’. He continues to say that the stop-motion style has been used in place of live-action because that was too expensive. The story has its origin, he says, in one dream he had, which he then wrote the rest of the scenes around. Whether this is true or not is irrelevant; Surviving Life is a surrealist film where the only reality is dreams. ... read more

Written by Peter Francis on 23-06-2011, No comments

A Kerry Leves memorial

kerry at katoomba - Jenni Nixon

A Shrine To Lata Mangeshkar Puncher and Wattman, 2007 (Shortlisted for both the 2009 NSW Premiers Prize and Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize)
Water Roars, Illusions Burn Vagabond Press, 2002
Territorial AnT Studios, 1996
Green, Poems 1971-78 Sea Cruise Books, 1978

It is with great sadness that we commemorate the death of Kerry Leves, poet, reviewer, man of great heart, spirit and intellect, and long-term friend and contributor to Overland.

In keeping with his open-hearted generosity, we have invited a few of Kerry’s closest friends to write here with their fondest personal memories and recollections. John Stephenson has kindly contributed an intimate and thoughtful obituary. ... read more

Written by Peter Minter on 22-06-2011, 17 user comments

Winning Meanland essay 2: The internet has not impacted upon my reading habits in the slightest

For the ten minutes before my children sleep the internet has not impacted upon my reading habits in the slightest. Tonight’s book is a treasure. Behind its thick crème cover, its pages, also crème, are stiff and square with sixties-vintage pictures. Chapter One, Down the Rabbit-Hole, begins on page eleven.

Alice‘Why not page one?’ a son asks.
‘If you flick through and count,’ I say, ‘it’s page eleven.’

But he’s forgotten what I’ve said, absorbed in the blurred edges of Alice’s golden hair once painted with watercolours or pastels.

We tried ebooks over the summer (kindle on iPhone). The pictures were ordinary, the numberlessness was disorientating and the text too small on that piddly screen. It was decided. For the nightly family read, we will stick with tradition. ... read more

Written by Diane Simonelli on 22-06-2011, 15 user comments

Susan Bennett speaks

Susan Bennett colourEmerging writer and self-confessed clever pumpkin Susan Bennett knows how to stir the pot, blogging her mix of politics and food at Fudging the menu. Co author of The Cook’s Toolkit by Clever Pumpkin, Susan is currently working on the intriguingly titled Trial of the Romance Novelist and her novel, Grace, the premise for which came to her under the influence of exercise: ‘I was stair-training when the Pink song ‘So What’ came on … filling my head with images of The Sopranos women whacking The Sopranos men’. Susan chats with us about her short story Daylight, published in this edition of Overland. ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 21-06-2011, 2 user comments

Larissa Behrendt on fiction

Larissa Behrendt is a writer, barrister and law professor, and celebrated Australian personality, passionate about the rights of Indigenous Australians and the development of Australian culture. In 2009, she was the NAIDOC Indigenous Person of the Year and in 2011 voted NSW Australian of the Year.

Larissa BehrendtTalented across several genres, Behrendt's bibliography includes many articles for various legal journals and two nonfiction books, Aboriginal Dispute Resolution and Achieving Social Justice. Her debut novel, Home, won the Queensland Premier's Literary Award and the David Unaipon Award in 2002, as well as the Deadly's Award for outstanding achievement in literature (2004) and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel in the South East Asian/

Written by Clare Strahan on 20-06-2011, 1 user comment

At the Sydney Film Festival: Armadillo and The Tree of Life

ArmadilloArmadillo
Director: Janus Metz
★★★★

Janus Metz’s Armadillo takes its name from a forward operating base in Helmand province. The documentary focuses on a platoon of Danish soldiers and their deployment from February to August 2009. The impression given of the Afghanistan War during their tour is a war by inches. The Taliban are less than a kilometre from the base and throughout the film the troops fight over and win and lose a few tiny villages and farmland. In this stalemate the Taliban seem to have the upper hand: the stalemate being a goal in itself. ... read more

Written by Peter Francis on 20-06-2011, 1 user comment

Extreme weather and Mother Earth: nature gets legal rights in Bolivia

Evo MoralesAs extreme weather becomes the norm Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, believes that to fight climate change we need to recover the values of indigenous people.

Indigenous Australian writer Alexis Wright says something similar in her essay ‘Deep Weather’ in the latest issue of Meanjin. Noting the devastation of the 2009 Victorian bushfires, the 2011 floods in eastern Australia and Cyclone Yasi, as well as extreme weather events around the world, Wright wonders ‘what the traditional Indigenous caretakers of the land think about these extreme weather events of flood, fire and wind’ and asks why we’re not hearing their ancient stories about ‘how to respect the weather’. Her blunt reply? What Indigenous Australians say ‘is not considered relevant’. ... read more

Written by Jane Gleeson-White on 17-06-2011, 12 user comments

The Public Service pay dispute

FWA rallyWhen the CPSU took 12 government agencies to Fair Work Australia (FWA) a couple of weeks ago in a dispute over negotiating enterprise agreement, it barely rated a mention in the press.

And, if the comments in the Sydney Morning Herald’s online edition are anything to go by (‘The Australian Public Service might go on strike? Would anybody notice?’ and ‘How about the government reduce the rate of pay for public service jobs so we can all enjoy paying a little less tax? Better still; how about they halve the public service? That'd be a good start...’), the public unsurprisingly have little sympathy for a public service pay claim. ... read more

Written by Isy Burns on 17-06-2011, No comments