Overland literary journal

Wireless + public transport = win

I recently saw a sign indicating that Sydney Buses is soon going to do a trial where the M10 bus service has wireless internet on board for six months. This was a simultaneous ‘yay!’ and ‘ohhh’ moment for me. The former because it’s a great idea we should be getting into, and the second because, well, wireless internet as a means of encouraging public transport use was an idea I came up with about nine months ago and have been meaning to write about ever since. Now I look like I’m jumping a bandwagon rather than demonstrating leadership, but that ship has sailed (particularly if it’s a ferry).

In any case, I think the trial is a great idea – possibly one that could have been better initiated, but good regardless. I think it would have been better to do the trial on a train or ferry service, where people are usually on the vehicle for longer and it’s a steadier ride, and therefore more conducive to internet usage. I also think it should be trialled across more than one bus service in case there’s something very specific about the M10 that affects the way people use it. Still, internet on public transport is a good idea in my book. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 24-02-2011, 8 user comments

Your mileage may vary

I made my first foray to the Oxford Art Factory this week to see a gig by Jenny Lewis’ new band, Jenny and Johnny, who were quite decent. They were supported by a band I’d never heard of called the Laurels, so, in preparation, my companions and I looked them up online to learn a bit about them. I shall now quote from the Triple J website to make sure I get the phrasing of this description exactly correct.

The Laurels are a shoegaze band from Sydney whose psychedelic juggernaut has accumulated accolades, guitar pedals and fans in approximately equal proportion.

... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 11-02-2011, 15 user comments

Plastic water bottles, how I loathe thee

I loathe plastic water bottles. I detest them, I really do. I think they’re ridiculous, wasteful, overpriced and faintly offensive. They’re faintly unhealthy, and insulting. I prefer them to the endless consumption of bottled soft drinks, but I still consider them more pointless. And, in the words of my eighty-five-year-old great aunt, they’re a little bit ‘old lady’.

Let’s face facts. Australia is a first-world country, which means we have among the cleanest water in the world. We have occasional health scares – Giardia, in the 90s, being the last I can think of – but the class of our water systems is such that we know about them. Our water is treated to such high standards that it’s honestly faintly ridiculous, given we use only two per cent of it for actually drinking. In fact, our quality of water is so high that study after study shows people can’t tell the difference between bottle and tap water. When all of that is true, it’s frankly absurd to purchase water at $3 for 600 ml, not to mention wasteful, decadent and sodding selfish. We do not need purified, mountain waters, bottled and transferred to us over hundreds of kilometres. Think of the carbon miles. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 15-12-2010, 10 user comments

Non-fiction review: Why vs Why: Nuclear Power

Why vs Why: Nuclear Power
Prof Barry Brook & Prof Ian Lowe
Pantera Press

It isn't easy to review a book that consist of two different people arguing each side of an argument. In this case, it's about whether Australia should pursue nuclear power, but my objections would serve for any book that worked in the same way. Why vs Why: Nuclear Power is written as a flipbook; each writer argues his case for or against nuclear power, and is then rebutted by the other. You can then flip the book to hear the opposing side, and its accompanying rebuttal. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 8-12-2010, 1 user comment

Food labelling, please

I recently went out for lunch and ran into this sign:

Which I think is about the best thing in the history of time. It is a breakdown of the ingredients in each of the restaurant's dishes, indicating which contain dairy, fish, nuts, and so on.

Unfortunately I’d already eaten lunch, or I would have eaten there out of sheer appreciation. As I’ve mentioned before, I have food allergies and am dating a vegan, both of which can make eating out difficult. Everywhere I go, I need to check if meals contain hidden dairy, which is the case more often than you’d think. I always have to request its removal, sometimes in very explicit terms. I have on more than one occasion requested a salad not be served with feta cheese, only to have it arrive covered in parmesan or the like. I appreciate the attempt at providing me with an alternative, but in my case, it’s not actually helpful. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 2-12-2010, 3 user comments

Non-fiction review: Here on Earth

Here on Earth
Tim Flannery
Text

Flannery’s new book Here On Earth reads like a cross between Bill Bryson and Jared Diamond, which is reassuring given it has the title of a Leelee Sobieski film. It also sort of makes sense; both of these authors have read and commented on the book, and Diamond is referenced throughout. Flannery has clearly read their work and is borrowing from their styles, which I enjoyed.

The book talks a lot about the Gaia Hypothesis and essentially argues for it throughout. For those unaware, the Gaia hypothesis states that the world as a whole tends to act as a singular organism and has many feedbacks and other mechanisms to maintain a given state. I personally am not a fan. I believe the world does a lot of things we don’t understand and certainly has all sorts of negative and positive feedback models going on, but I find both the name of the hypothesis and many of the people claiming to adhere to it irritating. It’s all a bit hippy-pie-in-the-sky from where I’m sitting, and I was surprised to find Flannery advocating it. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 19-10-2010, 6 user comments

Non-fiction review: Into the woods

Into the woods
Anna Krien
Black Inc.

Anna Krien’s book begins with violence, travels through corruption and pain, and ends with a vague, vain sort of hope. With a structure like that, you might expect that it’s about a catastrophic event, some natural or human-created event that has crushed communities and people, and is now being overcome. And you’d be half right – it’s certainly about a kind of catastrophe in motion.

Krien’s book Into the Woods

Written by Georgia Claire on 14-10-2010, 6 user comments

Rape culture

A friend of mine, let’s call her K, has a son who just turned fourteen. She’s fairly committed to the idea of raising him as a relatively decent human being and, being a fairly active person online, she recently asked her blog for help finding books and DVDs and the like on how to be a gentleman. The replies were somewhere between empowering and heartbreaking. Rather than tips on holding doors open for women and other gentlemanly conduct, they were more suggestions on not having sex with a girl who is drunk. It was more about rape culture and how you go about breaking that to a boy without suggesting you think that he is – or is ever likely to be – in any way culpable. And it got me thinking again about just how differently our society treats men and women. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 28-09-2010, 58 user comments

Fiction review – What is left over, after

Natasha Lester has three children and lives in Western Australia. This is good news for me, otherwise I would want to be her. Her first novel won the 2008 TAG Hungerford award, she’s written for Overland, indigo and Wet Ink, and she just won a Publisher Fellowship from Allen & Unwin.

Her first novel, What is left over, after, benefits from having the kind of title that made me want to read it without knowing anything about it. It sounds like the title of a Romantic-era poem, something from one of Coleridge’s contemporaries swiped for a contemporary take. I love it. The book is also pretty good. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 14-09-2010, 7 user comments

Water and the Murray Darling Basin

Forty percent of all Australian water is used by agricultural irrigation in the Murray Darling Basin. At least that's my estimate, based on some widely available and often quoted figures*. So 40% of all of our water is used in an industry that employs 3% of the workforce. This could almost be fair, I suppose, as all industries have specific needs, and all of them will necessarily need more of given resources than represents their workforce population. Except that water is unique; it's not just an environmental resource, but a human right. Which means 3% of our population are using ten times their appropriate allocation.

Which still could almost be fair enough. I mean, everyone has to eat, right? The Basin does contain 75% of Australian irrigated agriculture, so they've certainly got a reason to use it. But that ignores the fact that while 75% of irrigated agriculture is in the Basin, only 40% of overall farming is. It also ignores that it produces only a quarter of the value of agricultural production in Australia, around $A9.6 billion a year, and a third of Australia's food supply. Suddenly it sounds like irrigated agriculture might be a poor return for our water. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 7-09-2010, 2 user comments

To bed without supper

If our recent political debacle lends itself to analysis beyond Australia’s political choices being pretty dire, it may as well be two pet theories of mine. The first is pretty simple and goes like this: it isn’t enough to diss the other guy. You have to have policies, principles, and, above all, a plan for the future if you want to be elected.

The second is, Australia’s parliamentary system and our two primary parties are so utterly combative that it prevents us getting anything done.

I started hypothesising this around January and I’m a little depressed that it was proven this quickly.

I figure these two theories are argued for by the fact that Australia pretty much couldn’t be bothered to elect either party. And I do believe that’s what it was. People weren’t really torn between who to vote for. Everyone I talked to was either sticking with a party they'd always stuck to because they’d always stuck to them, or didn’t know who to vote for. Or were so mad they were handing in informal votes, which I personally gave real consideration to. Then there was the Greens vote, which I think is a protest vote as much as a ‘greenslide’, no matter how much I wish otherwise. But back to my theories. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 30-08-2010, 1 user comment

Environmental issues – not so ‘out there’

Earlier I was doing reading for a subject for my Masters. It was about the various forms of environmentalism as they had existed in the past, and in the then-present (1996). Among the last things in the given reading was a table of environmental ideas divided up by how wacky they were considered to be.

The ‘mainstream’ ideas were dull, and are now pretty much universally adopted, as were most of the ‘acceptable’ views. Those titled ‘mildly controversial’ were ideas that now, at least for me, are no longer remotely controversial. But what I was really amused by were the lists labelled ‘Still too way out’ and ‘abandoned’. While some of them may have been fruitcake territory at the time of writing, at least some are on the way back in. And it’s interesting, to say the least, to see what was considered crazy in 1996, but is now just accepted: ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 17-08-2010, 1 user comment

Failed novels

So last month the girlfriend and I went to see Christopher Hitchens talk about his new book of memoirs. I'm not really into memoir so probably missed out on some of what he said, however, did get one real gem out of the evening.

Among other things, he and school friends – and later, other friends, including Salman Rushdie – used to play a game of inventing titles of books that didn't quite make it. The favored example given was Mr Gatsby.

This has of course inspired us to come up with as many failed book titles as we can. I've started with the following:

Alice in an Interesting Place
The Conjuror of Oz
The Moderately Well Known Five
Diary of a Prostitute
Anne of the Green Roof (and the sequel, Anne from a Small Town)
The Manipulative Mr Ripley
The Unconcluded Novel
Older Girls
American Lunatic
A Long While Alone ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 6-08-2010, 16 user comments

Now, I’d like to share my thoughts on refugees

I had thought with the election of the Rudd government in 2007, and the abandonment of the frankly shameful Pacific Solution, Australia had moved on from its most disgusting phase of xenophobia. Unfortunately, the last three years, and more specifically the last six months, have proven me wrong. And with Julia Gillard, a prime minister whom I really want to like, introducing what is now being called the East Timor Solution, it may be time to correct a few misconceptions.

All of the rhetoric about asylum seekers seems to come back to the phrase ‘boat people’. They’re ‘queue jumpers’, they’re ‘illegal immigrants’, they pay people smugglers; they’re doing something somehow wrong. Ignoring for a moment seeking asylum is completely legal, the majority of asylum seekers don’t even arrive by boat. Over eighty percent of asylum seekers arrive on planes, on existing visas, and then either apply for refugee status or overstay illegally. Even the government’s own immigration website states that ‘[t]he majority of asylum seekers are people who have arrived in Australia legally and subsequently apply for protection’. So, just for starters, the majority of asylum seekers aren’t boat people at all. ... read more

Written by Georgia Claire on 9-07-2010, 31 user comments