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Animal People

Animal-People-Charlotte-Wood-cover2-212x300Animal People
Charlotte Wood
Allen & Unwin

Shortlisted for all sorts of excellent awards, most notably the Miles Franklin for The Submerged Cathedral, Australian writer and editor Charlotte Wood also blogs on ‘food, writing and reading’ at How to shuck an oyster. Animal People is her latest novel.

I’ll confess it. I’m an animal person. Vegetarian. More lik

Written by Clare Strahan on 16-10-2011, 6 user comments

Occupy Sydney: protesters assemble at Martin Place

Around a thousand people converged on Martin Place in Sydney’s CBD for the Occupy Sydney protest on Saturday October 15.

Martin Place is home to the Reserve Bank of Australia, across the road from the state Parliament and nearby are many major banks and corporate headquarters.

Sydney protest1–KAusburn

Protesters spoke out against corporate greed and called for economic justice. Speakers from the crowd spoke about the plight of refugees, and Premier Barry O’Farrell’s industrial relations changes and their impact on public sector workers. ... read more

Written by Kate Ausburn on 16-10-2011, 7 user comments

Occupy Melbourne: some initial thoughts

photoThe Melbourne City Square was once a public space before the various private bars and hotels and restaurants that now dominate the area claimed it for their own. In that respect, it provided a fitting venue for Occupy Melbourne to reclaim.

By my count, there were about a thousand people in the square today: a thousand people talking with each other about politics and social change.

This is unequivocally a good thing.

There’s been a lot of criticism of the Occupy Oz protests, most of it remarkably vapid.

Yes, everyone knows that, as every pundit tediously repeated last week, the situation here’s not the same as the US: the economy’s more stable and unemployment’s lower. But so what? ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 15-10-2011, 60 user comments

Beyond belief

Jeff Kennett

I quarrelled with myself when I heard a decade ago that Mr Jeff Kennett was starting up an initiative for depression. How could someone who’d closed hospitals and schools in such an unthinking swath in the 1990s – an act that undoubtably sent many into a maudlin state – now come forward as a crusader for depression? That was one side of the disagreement, while the other went something like: I guess anything that’s going to bring some awareness to the plight of those suffering is a good thing. ... read more

Written by SJ Finn on 14-10-2011, No comments

All about Charlotte Wood

Charlotte Wood 2011 72dpiCharlotte Wood is an Australian fiction writer and author of four novels. Her last novel, The Children, was shortlisted for the Australian Book Industry Association’s literary fiction book of the year. She also edited Brothers & Sisters, a collection of short stories and non-fiction about siblings by twelve Australian writers, including Nam Le, Christos Tsiolkas and Cate Kennedy. In her spare time she writes a blog on cooking, and she is currently working on a non-fiction book about food. ... read more

Written by Roselina Press on 13-10-2011, 4 user comments

The Bolt decision

By now, oceans of ink have been spilled over the decision against Andrew Bolt. In commenting on the case, I would like to draw out some relevant issues that I think have not been adequately discussed. As I have repeatedly written at ABC Drum and elsewhere in defence of Bolt’s right to be disgusting, I’m not going to focus on my civil libertarian commitments in this post.

A terrible day for free speech: the hypocrites
The front page of the Herald Sun , Australia’s biggest selling daily with 1.3 million readers, declared: ‘THIS IS A SAD DAY FOR FREE SPEECH’. By Andrew Bolt. It may seem that Mr Bolt has not been entirely silenced. There’s no law against his critics – unless of course, they criticised him too harshly, in which case they might have been sued for defamation. Nevertheless, our free media featured a response to Bolt’s first article by Chris Graham, with perhaps around 17 419 readers. ... read more

Written by Michael Brull on 13-10-2011, 2 user comments

So real it hurts: notes on Occupy Wall Street

occupy-wall-street-green-climateI first went down to Occupy Wall Street last Sunday, almost a week after it had started. I didn't go down before because I, like many of my other brown friends, was wary of what we had heard or just intuited that it was mostly a young, white male scene. When I asked friends about it they said different things: that it was really white; that it was all people they didn't know; and that they weren't sure what was going on. But after hearing about the arrests and police brutality on Saturday, September 24th and after hearing that thousands of people had turned up for their march I decided I needed to see this thing for myself. ... read more

Written by Manissa McCleave Maharawal on 11-10-2011, 7 user comments

Saint Steve Jobs

bloodappleI can’t be the only person who on seeing the mindboggling hysteria over the death of Steve Jobs found himself insistently murmuring ‘Foxconn, Foxconn’, over and over as if they were uttering a protective mantra. If I hear one more person gratefully sigh that Jobs was a genius, while lovingly fondling their iPhone, I’ll probably heave into my breakfast.

It might be true that Jobs redefined the way we think about telephones, personal computers and music players, and it’s probably quite an achievement to put most of the planet’s population on the same playing field technology-wise. Whether you’re the Queen or a hooded kid from Tottenham, the iPod is now your music player of choice. But still your iPod/

Written by Stephen Wright on 7-10-2011, 47 user comments

Meanland: Travels with my iPad

I can’t imagine leaving home without a book.

I’ve been travelling overseas recently. A good part of travelling and preparing to travel has always been about the book. Of course there are the novels and travel guides read before leaving, but more important are the books to take on the trip.

For me, it’s always a series of books; the travel guide, the book I leave home with, the book bought at the airport or train station, the book bought in the place I go to, and the serendipitous book exchanged with a fellow traveller. On a long trip I’m generally lugging somewhere between two and five books – a sizable slice of my baggage allowance.

You’d think I’d be a perfect candidate for downloading all the books into one slimline eReader or tablet. But I couldn’t do it. The title of this blogpost is a lie. In my recent travel, I remained determinedly old school. ... read more

Written by Catherine Moffat on 6-10-2011, 1 user comment

Words from Cyprus

CyprusHi Overlanders! Greetings from Cyprus! Island of Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty. I am here working on my novel, Misplaced. One-quarter of my novel is set in Cyprus, the rest in Melbourne. I have been writing my novel for six years. I am amazed at how much richer my prose is simply by being amongst the Cypriot people and way of life. The characters are coming to life through the dialogue and Cyprus is a living, breathing character. What has also taken me by surprise is that I came to write Misplaced and all this other writing is coming out of me too. I have been writing a travel diary of sorts on my website/

Written by Koraly Dimitriadis on 4-10-2011, No comments

Rundle on Bolt

First published in Crikey.

BoltThe Andrew Bolt judgment (Boltgate? Gatebolt) has had and will have a lot of keystrokes devoted to it over the next while, but most of them will be from either the liberal-left, the cultural left, or the Right. The liberal-left will be well represented by David Marr’s SMH piece last week; the cultural left covers a lot of people identified as ‘the left’ or ‘the Left’, usually by the Right, and will be in no doubt that it is right for the state to rein in Bolt’s skin-based racial classification attempts. The Right has its mission: to repeal section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act. ... read more

Written by Guy Rundle on 3-10-2011, 20 user comments