Overland literary journal

Racist #1 – The ute driver

It’s the end of semester, and I’m bloody tired. In fact, I’m probably looking forward to the school holidays even more than my son. Boy’s totally spent as well. He’s five and a half. It’s his first year at school and believe me, you can tell when the end of term is coming. The poor little critter has been absolutely smashed with tiredness come three thirty pick-up over the last week. He shuffles his feet out of school each afternoon babbling and incoherent, offering random nonsensical insights into various parts of his day.

Man has the kids’ weekends – so much of the week for me is the lunch-box-packing home-work-hassling dinner-bath-bed-out of bed-breakfast-dressed-school mayhem. So this afternoon I’m happy: wheeling nine-month-old Girl along the main street of our white-picket-fence suburb looking forward to the next two weeks of jama-clad French toast mornings, museum trips and non-school-assigned reading. ... read more

Written by Maxine Clarke on 8-07-2011, 15 user comments

Judy Durrant speaks

Judy Durrant is runner up in the 2010 Judith Wright poetry prize for new and emerging poets in Australia with her poem 'and day breaks', published in Overland 203.

We've asked Judy to share with us a little of what led her to write 'and day breaks', what inspires her, what she's hoping the reader will take away with them from reading her poem, and where she's going next ...

Catalyst

Written by Clare Strahan on 8-07-2011, 1 user comment

Robert McKee and storytelling

Robert McKee is the best-known screenwriting teacher in the world. A few years ago, I interviewed him for Inside Film. He was thoughtful and incisive. I admired his opinions about film, a subject on which he showed considerable taste, and at the same time felt wary of his certainty about himself and his notion of storytelling, his conviction that stories were a civilising force and that without them, living was unthinkable.

Later, I attended his Story Seminar. On stage, he was a dominating personality, standing at the front of the room for up to twelve hours a day over three days to explicate his theories of storytelling, with asides for jokes and for his personal opinions, on sometimes completely unrelated issues. McKee sees himself as a custodian of forgotten truths: at one point, he warned that anyone whose phone rang during the seminar would have to pay him twenty dollars, not for rudeness, but because they needed every moment to cover the essential task of understanding ‘story’. ... read more

Written by Rjurik Davidson on 5-07-2011, 3 user comments

Paul Mitchell on fiction

Melbourne-based writer Paul Mitchell has published two books of poetry, Minorphysics and Awake Despite the Hour. His short fiction collection Dodging the Bull was published by Wakefield Press in 2007. Journalist, fiction writer and poet, Paul’s work has appeared in Black Ink’s Best Australian Stories & Poems, Scribe’s New Australian Stories, HEAT, Meanjin, Overland, the Age, the Big Issue, Crikey and more. Collaborating with musician Bill Buttler, Paul has also produced a spoken-word CD As if nothing is happening. And it is. ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 4-07-2011, No comments

Gods of the state: atheism and barbarity

[N]ot to have tried to see through the whole apparatus of mystification – was already criminal. … For being in a position to know and nevertheless shunning knowledge creates direct responsibility for the consequences – from the very beginning.
Albert Speer quoted in Ellsberg (1972: 275)

Intellectual and political emancipation

Peter Gay (1966: 33) notes that the French philosophes ‘liked to visualize themselves reenacting historic battles, to denounce religious fanaticism’ and the ‘barbarism and religion’ that had dominated the past. They stood for the possibility that reason might be ‘the master of civilization.’ From the same Enlightenment point of view, the topic of barbarism and religious fanaticism has recently become an obsessive, burgeoning subject of scholarly and media commentators. In this intellectual environment, my concern is the extent to which the champions of reason are, indeed, in practice, on the side of civilisation as they proclaim. ... read more

Written by Peter Slezak on 1-07-2011, No comments

Rodney Croome on the history of freedom to marry in Australia

In Overland 203, Rodney Croome has written a groundbreaking and timely essay on the history of marriage in Australia. ‘True and good citizens’ begins:

On Friday 13 August 2004, in an unusually emotional debate punctuated by tears and rage, the Australian Senate passed a Howard government amendment to the Marriage Act 1961, defining matrimony as the exclusive union between one man and one woman for life.

That had been the definition ascribed to marriage by the courts for over a century, one that lawmakers felt too obvious to declare in statute. But in 2003, Canadian provinces, starting with Ontario, began solemnising same-sex marriages. Because there is no residency requirement for marriage in Canada, a stream of Australian same-sex couples flowed across the Pacific to wed, only to have their marital rights stripped the moment they walked back through Australian Customs.

At the beginning of 2004, two such couples sought a ruling from the Federal Court on whether Australia’s relatively liberal laws on foreign marriages extended to the recognition of their Canadian unions.

... read more

Written by Editorial team on 1-07-2011, 1 user comment