Overland literary journal

Drought

drought

she can’t crawl yet
but my sassy little daughter
bum-shuffles her way
toward the broadsheet
smirking back at me / in defiance

the paper is open
to a young somali woman
trying to finger-feed rice
to her wasting child

maya stares at them
transfixed

then / trying to catch
the dying baby’s gaze
she lifts chubby brown fingers
to cherubic mouth
& smiles

the young mother
half-turns from the camera
lowers suffering brown eyes

there

drought ravaged
desperate
broken

& but by the grace of god

go i

On Sunday 14 August, I'll be performing some poems and a Q&A about my writing at the CaribVic Youth Arts Festival in Melbourne which runs from 3pm to 7pm. Other featured artists include artist Tony Phillips, filmmaker Jason Phillips and musician Lloyd Watson-Jones – really looking forward to this one! You can find out more details about this event, how to book, and about the Caribbean Association of Victoria at the CaribVic blog.

Written by Maxine Clarke on 11-08-2011, 2 user comments

‘This earth, this realm, this England’

England in 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field;
An army, whom liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed—
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley

... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 10-08-2011, 21 user comments

Lethal word play

Semantics is getting me down again. This time, it’s a word of monstrous proportions – the word ‘Monster’ itself.

Yesterday I opened my copy of The Age and read that word being used in a way classically assigned to your standard-issue media expression of moral panic – in Ted Lapkin’s opinion piece, ‘Anders Breivik's monstrous crimes a life-and-death issue’.

So, unless you’ve been under the proverbial rock, Breivik is that Nordic perpetrator of hate crimes the world has watched, aghast. And, in direct reference to the ‘but what about our children’ argument (last bastion of right-wing politicians everywhere), Breivik’s crimes went directly to the children, with the most ‘atrocious’ of his terrorist acts aimed at the youth group of the Labour Party of Norway. Lapkin’s argument? Breivik hurts our children – death to him!¹ ... read more

Written by Genevieve D Berrick on 10-08-2011, 2 user comments

To review or not to review

When Gideon Haigh wrote about the demise of literary reviewing in ‘Feeding the hand that bites’ last year, he was unforgiving:

What is perhaps just as troubling as the lacklustre infomerciality of so much Australian reviewing – gushing over the latest vogue, avoiding anything that cannot readily be pigeonholed – is that the situation suits so many vested interests in Australia’s small, snobbish, fashion-conscious, self-celebrating literary scene. It veils the publishing industry’s lazy, parsimonious, hidebound practices.

... read more

Written by Louise Pine on 8-08-2011, 14 user comments

Ali Alizadeh on catalysts and inspiration

Born in Teheran, Ali Alizadeh won a young adult’s literary award at thirteen and became the subject of a documentary film for the [then] Kingdom of Iran’s national television. In 1989, his family emigrated to the ‘mostly hostile environment’ of Queensland, Australia.

Since completing his PhD in Professional Writing at Victoria’s Deakin University, Ali has published Eyes in Times of War; with Kenneth Avery, translations of mystical poems of a Sufi master, Fifty Poems of Attar; the novel The New Angel; Iran: My Grandfather; and his new collection of poetry Ashes in the Air. ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 5-08-2011, No comments

Me and the Melbourne Writers Festival

Well, look out; I’m one of five UNblogger competitors selected for this year’s Melbourne Writers Festival. My pass is in the mail and I’m excited. A minimum of ten events are on my obligation horizon (oh, what a hard life it is) and from them I’m to wrestle at least eight blogs, so watch this space! This year’s festival is all about ...

Stories Unbound

Ye gads, the title makes me think of ebooks. But maybe that’s just because I’m involved with the possible creation of one; a collection of short stories for an otherwise papery literary journal; and I’ve already been confronted by the question that perhaps the ‘good’ ones are ‘too good for an ebook’ and wondered if I should go ferreting around for an Arts grant to make a ‘proper’ paper publication possible. An idea that doesn’t stray too far from my heart’s desires. ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 4-08-2011, 16 user comments

The Hicks petition

A fortnight ago, the Australian government announced its intention to seize funds that David Hicks has received from the sale of his memoir about his time imprisoned in Guantanamo. The court case is today.

Many Australians are stunned by the decision. To those people, the Hicks case represents a foul miscarriage of justice during the Howard years: an Australian citizen detained in 2001 and abandoned in a legally dubious prison run by the US military, a prison notorious for detention without charge or trial, gross human rights violations and allegations of torture.

When David Hicks was finally charged, it was under the Military Commissions Act of 2006 – an Act created at least five years after his capture. That is to say, fighting the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in 2001 wasn’t a crime. Hicks finally signed a plea bargain in 2007 out of ‘desperation’ to escape Guantanamo. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 3-08-2011, 20 user comments

Utoya and the fascist mind

Until Boris Kelly popped up on the weekend with his usual lucid description of things, I was starting to wonder if Utoya would pass uncommented by the Overland blog. The Overland blog is often punctuated by some odd silences (nothing to date on SlutWalks or the implosion of the Murdoch empire), and any conversation in any circumstance is always notable for what is not said as much as what is. Of course the silences are no doubt partly a result of Ol bloggers being a disparate and unpaid group with only occasional time and random motivation. But still there’s never a lack of room for ad nauseam discussion about the end of the book and so on and so forth. It’s always seemed to me that Overland can be the place where things can be said that can’t be said anywhere else, and that’s the whole point of both journal and blog. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 1-08-2011, 33 user comments