Overland literary journal

Egalitarianism in one country?

Lane Kenworthy considers the correlation of social democratic outcomes in a nation’s politics with a strong labour movement, in the context of American politics:

But what if you live in a country with labor unions that are weak, and getting weaker? What if your country is the United States?

He goes on to list a set of strategies to deal with the problem (outreach, incrementalism, baby steps) all of which, it seems to me, are already being undertaken by the Democratic Party. I think it’s reasonable to take the Obama administration as Exhibit A in considering the effectiveness of Kenworthy’s prescription.

Written by Joshua Mostafa on 29-07-2011, 1 user comment

Never lie when you can sleep: Dreaming up The Waterboys

The Waterboys
Peter Docker
Fremantle Press

In a radical reimagining of Western Australian history, Peter Docker presents a land 300 years after colonisation, where the West’s most sought-after resource is not iron ore but water. The Aboriginal people are waging a guerrilla war against the eastern states Water Board, who have been controlling the West and its water for one hundred years in a secondary colonisation. Central to The Waterboys are Conway and his friend and fellow soldier Mularabone and the tale begins with the two men stealing a Water Board truck to smuggle water. Mularabone’s people live underground in a warren of caves reminiscent of the North West’s Windjana Gorge, where the Aboriginal warrior Jandamarra held his last stand. Their methods of resistance are digital meets herbal: cloaking devices and holograms, then body pastes made from plants and ochre to combat the deadly ultraviolet light. ... read more

Written by Sarah Drummond on 28-07-2011, 7 user comments

Meanland: Barbarism, politics and the poet-blogger

My entry for the Meanland blogger competition began with a reference to the work of the Marxist thinker Walter Benjamin and his mostly enthusiastic view of the impact of modern technology on artistic production. I’d like to begin this blog with a quote from Minima Moralia, the wonderfully complex and magnificently complicated book by Benjamin’s friend and fellow German Marxist, Theodor Adorno, who most definitely did not view technological advancement as a positive condition for artistic production. ... read more

Written by Ali Alizadeh on 27-07-2011, 20 user comments

On My Sister Chaos

My Sister Chaos
Lara Fergus
Spinifex Press

There are three characters in this intense story: twin sisters and a house. The women are never named and the location of the house is never given – although the trams suggest somewhere in Melbourne – and their shared history suggests Bosnia or perhaps Kosovo. Fergus has been careful to leave the details to the very minimum such that the story becomes universal and appropriate to any country where there has been an explosion of ethnic violence, systematic rape and torture. ... read more

Written by Rhona Hammond on 27-07-2011, 1 user comment

Britney Spears vs King Murdoch

In passing conversation, we learned our friend Danilo Prnjat has a bizarre tattoo. He revealed his well-toned arm where an ink sketch of a bald Britney Spears clutches a shaving razor in her hand. Intrigued, we gathered around his arm to stare at the famous Britney breakdown moment permanently etched into his skin. Despite our various ways of retreating from tabloid tales, we immediately recognised the image of Britney staring into the lens in 2008 when she denuded in a hairdressers and publicly broke down. It was splashed all over the world and I remember thinking that while nations rise and fall, and famines crawl by, the ‘news’ blandly reports another celebrity crash into madness, substance abuse and extreme public humiliation. Do I look or turn away in protest?

I obviously looked. ... read more

Written by Bronwyn Lay on 26-07-2011, 4 user comments

Melbourne Green School

The Green Institute, a non-profit organisation based in Australia, is grounded in the principles of ecology, social justice, democracy and non-violence. As part of its commitment to building the capacity of like-minded people, the institute is holding a two-day Green School on Saturday 30 and Sunday 31 July at Fitzroy High School, Falconer Road, North Fitzroy.

Come along and participate in forums which cover topics including leadership and gender, climate change and transport and climate and post-growth economics. There will also be hands-on workshops designed to enhance your campaigning and communication skills. ... read more

Written by Trish Bolton on 26-07-2011, 1 user comment

Attack of the 50ft heroine

Ah, women. Give them the vote and the next thing you know they’ll be writing books and jumping up and down about equality. In pants!

Recently, on a particularly cold Sydney night, four such women braved the elements, gathering in Shearer’s Bookshop, Leichardt, to discuss heroines and all the messy stuff that goes with them, including yeast infections. (It’s okay, chaps, stay with me. Last time Ill mention it. Promise.) This, the second of a series of author events titled ʻWhen Genres Attackʼ, featured PM Newton, Kirsten Tranter, Mardi McConnochie and Georgia Blain. The discussion traversed Bear-Grylls style across many a rocky terrain, including: the apparent gender bias in The Miles Franklin Awards, the expectations and baggage loaded on female characters, and the ways in which books by female writers are marketed. It is on this last point that I will pause and feast, before building a small waterproof shelter for myself from the carcass. (No, stay! It’ll be fun.) ... read more

Written by Claire Zorn on 25-07-2011, 11 user comments

Petition in support of David Hicks

On 20 July 2011, the Australian government served David Hicks with a notice of their intent to restrain any funds obtained from the sale of his book, Guantanamo: My Journey, under the Commonwealth Proceeds of Crime Act.

After Hicks was captured in Afghanistan and sold to the US by the Northern Alliance, he spent six years in Guantanamo Bay without trial or charges. He alleges that, during his detention, he was tortured. He spent much of his captivity in 24-hour solitary detention.

Hicks was eventually brought before a military commission, in a procedure condemned by lawyers and human rights groups everywhere. With no other way to get home, he accepted a deal, under which, in return for pleading guilty, he served a short sentence in Australia. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 21-07-2011, 218 user comments

Muslim stories from a White Australia

Ali Abdul v The King, Muslim stories from the dark days of White Australia
Hanifa Deen
UWA Publishing

Ali Abdul v The King is an engaging foray into the lives of the Afghan cameleers, as seen through the archives. ‘Australian Muslims had left behind a paper trail and underneath ... lay a hidden history.’ Hanifa Deen started her archival search for Muslim men living in Australia during the years of the Immigration Restriction Act. She discovered photographs of row upon row of handsome men. I think this is when her interest really sparked, for her descriptions of these men are tantalising; in particular when she discovers the photograph of her own grandfather who came to Australia in the 1890s. There were so many stories Deen could have told and, as she wrote in her introduction, she had to decide who ‘to marry and who to leave at the altar’. Hanifa Deen settled her gaze upon the ‘troublemakers’; the cameleers, hawkers and pearl divers who caused bureaucratic stirs: an astute choice for the archivist and storyteller. ... read more

Written by Sarah Drummond on 20-07-2011, 6 user comments

All those wizards and dragons

Earlier this week I watched Jennifer Byrne present a program on fantasy. As a reader and writer of fantasy (among other things), I found the panel discussion a bit shallow and (surprisingly, given it was on the ABC) fully embracing the market categorisation of fantasy rather than a decent discussion of just what might comprise fantasy as an aesthetic category. But then, perhaps it was not so surprising. Now, this might strike some as pedantry, but every time ‘fantasy’ is reduced to epic fantasy serials in the medievalist vein, filled with elves and dragons and wizards, I get a serious case of the irrits. This is not because I dislike fantasy serials in the medievalist vein; it is because it confuses part for sum. ... read more

Written by Matthew Sini on 19-07-2011, 7 user comments

The friends and enemies of feminism

Feminism in Australia has many enemies. Some of them are more or less open opponents. For example, there is Miranda Devine. She complains about the ‘elitism, condescension and moral rootlessness’ demonstrated by the inexplicable opposition of many feminists to Sarah Palin. She has also complained about its devotion to ‘such trivial pursuits as trying to convince the world that fat is good’. Elsewhere, Devine advocated the allegedly ‘new feminism, which involves women reclaiming marriage, motherhood, femininity and domesticity as valid feminist choices’. This new ‘feminism’ may seem to the naive a rather familiar doctrine as to how women should behave. That it is described as feminism is an issue to which I will return. ... read more

Written by Michael Brull on 18-07-2011, 14 user comments

The Boycott Israel 19

On Friday 1 July, 19 pro-Palestinian activists, including me, were arrested in Melbourne’s CBD for opposing Max Brenner, a chocolate store that sends care packages to some of the most brutal sections of the Israeli army. The arrests show just how far defenders of Israel will go to silence dissent. Furthermore, police intimidating and violently attacking a protest in Melbourne sets a dangerous precedent for anyone wanting to demonstrate in Victoria.

That Friday, we marched into Melbourne Central where Black Pearl (formerly Jericho) once sold cosmetic products made from sea salts stolen from the occupied Dead Sea. It was our campaign of targeting Israeli-owned businesses that forced the store to move out of the shopping centre. ... read more

Written by Benjamin Solah on 15-07-2011, 39 user comments

Great men, great problems

I know women of the Left who have been raped. And who were they raped by? By men of the Left – their partners, lovers, friends. Did these cases ever reach court? No, to my knowledge they were never even reported to the police. Why not? Well, political objections to police and their function in our society aside, the women involved were hardly prepared to go through the humiliation and trauma of making their cases public.

I know women who were sexually assaulted and abused as children and teenagers. And who did this to them? Generally, men they trusted, in positions of authority – their fathers, relatives, teachers. And did any of these cases ever reach court? Only once, to my knowledge. I was a witness for the prosecution. It was a rattling experience.

Far from a vast conspiracy dating back to Socrates and forward to Julian Assange, of ‘wowser-feminists’ attempting to discredit powerful men via false allegations of sexual misconduct, my experience as a woman – and I would venture to guess that I’m not alone here – is that women who are the victims of such behaviour tend to keep silent about it. And so it has been throughout history. We’re taught to expect it, you see, because men are ‘just like that’, or because we lead them on, or because it’s our responsibility to control their behaviour, or because we resisted but not successfully (too bad that, better luck next time). Women who do make the courageous decision to speak out about their experiences can expect to be shamed, scorned, labelled as sluts and liars, and have their sexual histories and employment records and financial circumstances and any psychiatric illnesses raked over, for evidence that they might not be the spotless, virginal lambs that our society demands of its female victims. ... read more

Written by Anwyn Crawford on 14-07-2011, 17 user comments

Meanland: Something is happening here but we don’t know what it is … apologies Bob

The mainstream debate on the future of the book is still very much caught up in the print versus digital question: whether we engage in one industrial process or another, to produce one form of technology or another, to essentially deliver the same artefact: a device capable of storing and delivering text-based information.

While the artefacts produced are quite different in form (print book vs ebook) they essentially perform the same function and, in that sense, they can be considered to be the same.

This is a necessary, but at the same time short-term focussed, argument. It looks at what we have now (and have had for as long as any of us can remember in terms of books), the text-based, and seeks a way to preserve that information storage and dissemination concept into the future.¹ ... read more

Written by John Weldon on 13-07-2011, 3 user comments