Overland literary journal

Andrew Bolt, racial vilification and ‘freedom of speech’

Magna est veritas et praevalet
Great is truth, and mighty above all things

I welcome the decision of Justice Bromberg in Eatock v Bolt, delivered in the Federal Court in Melbourne on Thursday. It is, to my mind, a just decision, and not just in law.

Predictably, of course, the decision has not been welcomed by many (and in this context it is very much worth reading the statement of one of the plaintiffs, Dr Anita Heiss). The noise machine has veritably exploded in angry fury, with absurd and risible claims being made that ‘it is now illegal to discuss racial identification’, to pick just one of the stupidities being touted in the lamentable revival of the hoary and false notion of ‘political correctness’. ... read more

Written by Mark Bahnisch on 29-09-2011, 9 user comments

Shame.

But I reckon the worstest shame is yours
– Kevin Gilbert

Last week actor David Gulpilil was sentenced to twelve months prison (seven months suspended) for assaulting his wife. It was a high-profile case. Perhaps, you might argue, because domestic violence is a serious and ongoing issue in Australia. Or possibly because Gulpilil is a celebrity, and his personal life is seen as in some way belonging to the public domain. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 28-09-2011, 13 user comments

A utopian man

Utopian Man
Lisa Lang
Allen & Unwin

I enjoy reviewing books for the Overland blog. This is my fourth. I tell all my friends and anyone who will listen about the books I am reading. A few weeks ago I met my friend Sarah for a coffee and she asked, ‘What are you going to review next?’

‘Well, it’s a novel based on the life of an amazing man called Edward Cole who had a book arcade in Melbourne around the turn of the last century. It won the Vogel in 2009. I’ve read it through once and it was good. Need to give it another read though. I think the author might have been a little bit in love with her subject and I found myself casting the movie in my head.’ ... read more

Written by Rhona Hammond on 26-09-2011, 3 user comments

Dispatch from our intern

Troy Anthony Davis, who was convicted in 1989 of killing off-duty white police officer Mark MacPhail, was executed by the state of Georgia yesterday. Killed by lethal injection, Davis was pronounced dead on Wednesday at 11:08pm ET.

And yet there were significant doubts about his guilt. Davis’ execution was delayed for approximately four hours while the US Supreme Court considered an appeal, but ultimately the Court denied a last-minute stay of execution. Davis, an African-American who was convicted when he was only twenty, maintained his innocence until the end, and in the moments before his death he told the family of MacPhail he had nothing to do with the police officer’s murder. ... read more

Written by Roselina Press on 23-09-2011, 5 user comments

The burned-out Sixties

A Very Irregular Head
Rob Chapman

When Syd Barrett retired from public life at the age of twenty-five, he become one of the most enigmatic figures in popular music history. For the briefest of times he had burst onto the London Underground scene of the 1960s. Like scattered fireworks, he quickly faded into darkness. His more than thirty years of silence, combined with stories of LSD-induced madness, left him as an unsolvable puzzle.

Just what happened to Syd Barrett that turned him from a vibrant genius at the centre of the London counterculture to an antisocial recluse? As in all biographies of Barrett, this question hovers over Rob Chapman’s A Very Irregular Head. In trying to answer it, Chapman sets out to puncture many of the myths that have surrounded Barrett, particularly that of ‘Syd the acid casualty’. Taking his method from literary biographies, Barrett’s rapid ascent to become a defining figure of the London Underground and his precipitous decline is told with sensitivity and scrupulous research. ... read more

Written by Rjurik Davidson on 21-09-2011, 9 user comments

Writing is always a political act

An interview with John Kinsella

Poet, journalist, activist, academic, editor and playwright (just to name some of his many occupations), John Kinsella has written more than thirty books, won numerous prizes, including the Grace Leven Poetry Prize, Age Poetry Book of the Year, WA Premier’s Book award for Poetry and senior Fellowships from the Literature Board of the Australia Council. He has published poems (including Wheatlands with Dorothy Hewett); short stories: Grappling Eros; novels: Genre and Post Colonial; and memoir: Auto, published by Salt in 2001. A vegan, John has written passionately about the ethics of veganism. He chats to us today about his piece ‘A rural diary’ featured in the latest edition of Overland. ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 21-09-2011, 2 user comments

Emmett Stinson on why publishers need to take self-publishing seriously

Writer, editor, short story writer, reviewer, academic and co-founder of Wet Ink, Emmett Stinson is currently shortlisted for the 2011 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards, for his collection, Known Unknowns , published by Affirm Press. He chats with us today about his essay ‘Vanity Fair’ featured in Overland 204.

You write, ‘In a traditional publishing contract, there is a division of labour: authors focus on what they are good at (writing), while publishers concentrate on their strengths (editing, printing, marketing, etc) ... ‘ With the increasing commodification of writers (expected to promote themselves and create a ‘platform’) and the level of perfection required of manuscript submissions meaning that writers are increasingly pressured to use freelance editors and pay for their services themselves, does the ‘traditional publishing contract’ still exist? ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 20-09-2011, 5 user comments

Limits of liberal critique: Murdoch, the media & the Manne QE

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.
– Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845)

Robert Manne has done everyone who hates the right-wing, hysterically partisan and mendacious editorial approach of The Australian a considerable service. In the latest Quarterly Essay he has compiled a dossier of some of the Murdoch paper’s most egregious crimes. It is a testament to his scrupulous attention to detail, wide-ranging knowledge of the issues involved and commitment to concretely uncovering systematic (rather than incidental) biases that the paper’s collection of responses by its editorialists and opinion writers limps along using isolated anecdotes and non sequiturs against mountains of evidence marshalled by Manne. ... read more

Written by Tad Tietze on 20-09-2011, 25 user comments

Justice is AWOL

There’s a flood of concern about asylum seekers lately, and ‘oceans of cant and hypocrisy’ to run alongside it. The attention isn’t unexpected, because such unease tends to come in waves, but this one feels – potentially – tidal.

When the majority of Australians want refugees processed onshore (62% of Labor voters and 44% of Coalition voters), and it costs significantly less to do so ($40 000 annually for community detention vs $0.5 million annually for offshore), yet the government and the Coalition contemplate joining forces to amend Acts – thereby dismissing the overly sentimental concerns of the voting public and preventing intervention by a court of law – it feels like justice has taken a holiday and left us to fend for ourselves. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 19-09-2011, 7 user comments

Fail again, fail better

Jessica Whyte′s essay from Overland 204 about a Left renewal in philosophy is now online.

Written by Editorial team on 16-09-2011, No comments

‘Reading Coffee’, and a little on the writing process

It’s a thrill to have a story included in a journal close to my heart: Overland. ‘Reading Coffee’ is my third story published this year and also my third story published in my debut year as a writer. Hopefully there will be many more to come (perhaps one without a beverage in the title.). A hearty congrats to all the contributors in 204, especially the other two fiction writers: Jacinda Woodhead and Charlotte Wood.

I thought I’d take the opportunity to share a small part of the process with you. I’m not somebody who has a fountain of dazzling ideas, they don’t fall for me from the sky like rain and when I do have one I often examine it briefly and then toss it away in realisation that it’s lacking that indescribable factor that could potentially transform good to great. Yes, it’s the x-factor, how droll. ... read more

Written by Anthony Panegyres on 15-09-2011, 2 user comments

On articulating trauma

Ellena Savage is the latest essayist in Overland’s CAL-Connections Project, an endeavour that draws attention to the systemic exclusion of certain groups within Australian literary culture by partnering emerging writers from under-represented backgrounds with established editors. In Overland 204, the focus was on women writers.

We spoke with Savage, who is the immediate past editor of Melbourne University’s student magazine, Farrago, about her essay ‘My flesh turned to stone’, which explores the nature of trauma and the significance of talking about traumatic experiences. ... read more

Written by Roselina Press on 14-09-2011, 2 user comments

Now we have Bono

When the dust and ash settle, it seems that only then can we gain some kind of perspective on an event. Things can be parcelled out, measured and assessed. Of course narratives start competing as well, and histories are written. But history is always written after the fact, that’s its nature I guess. Only lunatics or politicians would look to their actions with an eye on history, as if they were writing a story they already knew the end to.

In this regard I was thinking not about the September 11 attacks but about what have become known as the London Riots, and about a few things that happened to me as well, both in the far and recent pasts. Sometimes in the immediate heat of an extraordinary event something can be understood that cannot be understood in the future in the same way. Something can be said that can’t be said at other times, and can never be said again. I’m not trying to promote a romantic privileging of the traumatic. As someone whose day job involves working with people who have often routinely used violence to make things happen, or with others who have experienced great violence I don’t subscribe to any kind of ‘It’s all good’ theory, or think that people magically benefit from something called ‘closure’. Sometimes it’s just all bad. And when it’s all bad, there can be a kind of bottomless loneliness revealed to life. Suddenly you don’t share a world view with anyone else. Suddenly you have experienced something that another cannot understand or comprehend. Something has gone that you can never get back in any form and something else has been simultaneously revealed that you can never forget. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 12-09-2011, 3 user comments