Overland literary journal

Occupied

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. I spent the morning reading about it and watching archival footage like that included below. It is Australia’s longest running continuous protest, one that has occupied Parliament lawn for four decades despite police intimidation, perpetual harassment and being legislated against. It began when four young Aboriginal men from Australia's Black Power movement pitched an umbrella in response to William McMahon's announcement that there would be ‘no Aboriginal title’ to Australian land. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 26-01-2012, 14 user comments

Ron Paul: next president or protofascist?

There’s a joke on the new tumblr, Shit Liberals Say To Radicals, that goes, ‘Sure, Obama’s not perfect, but consider the alternative.’ Followed by the fine print, ‘I did, it’s called socialism.’

It’s amusing, especially so given the debate that has occurred on Twitter and around the blogosphere this past fortnight. Discussion in Australia was spurred by the post ‘Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies’, by left-leaning libertarian Glenn Greenwald, a blogger frequently read by the Australian left because of his obsession with America’s declining empire. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 13-01-2012, 32 user comments

Occupy Melbourne: eviction

As one of the judges for the Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing Awards for this year, I’ve been surprised in the past 24 hours to hear myself referred to as a ‘professional protester’ by the Lord Mayor – an ‘arrogant liar’ who had had their ‘little self-indulgent moment in the sunshine’ and ‘caused at least $15,000 damage’ to City Square. Because I have been active in Occupy Melbourne. I was part of the occupation yesterday that was forcibly evicted and I joined the post-eviction protest. I wonder, how I can be capable of deciding the best writing in Melbourne, while simultaneously fitting the above descriptors?

After notice of the eviction of Occupy Melbourne hit, the speculation was that arrests were imminent if protesters didn’t vacate the Square. I hadn’t been sleeping in the Square, in fact, I hadn’t even been there every day; still I was committed to the Occupy protest. Something was evolving in that space – in all the Occupy spaces – and it had a right to continue to evolve out in the open. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 22-10-2011, 69 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

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

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

The only track on my iPod*

I cannot stop listening to this version of ‘Black Stacey’.

Saul Williams’s new studio album, Volcanic Sunlight, is rumoured to be available any day now.

*Could be a slight exaggeration.

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 7-05-2011, 7 user comments

LOL Bolt and free speech

‘The Holocaust started with words.’

Perhaps Ron Merkel, lead counsel for the nine Aborigines suing Andrew Bolt under the Racial Discrimination Act, would have been better to use a more local example. The policy that allowed the government to ‘assume full control and custody of the child of any aborigine’ (the Aborigines Protection Amending Act 1915), for example, or the Northern Territory Emergency Response Bill 2007, which aimed ‘to improve the well-being of certain communities in the Northern Territory’, but which its architect, Mal Brough, recently described as ‘yet another failed approach’. Or even the findings in the deaths-in-custody cases like that of Cameron Doomadgee – where, once again, no disciplinary charges were laid. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 31-03-2011, 12 user comments

Meanland: Marshall McLuhan is stalking me from beyond the grave

Not a fan of media theorist Marshall ‘the medium is the message’ McLuhan? Okay, I don’t go in for the technological determinism either, but you can’t deny that the man was uncannily prescient when it came to predicting how our culture would develop – a ‘global village’, electric technology ‘reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life’ – and how these changes would be feared – ‘we drive into the future using only our rear view mirror’. He even divined the demise of print culture, and ‘electronic interdependence’. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 24-03-2011, 10 user comments

NFZs and other benevolent interventions

There is a fissure in the Left at present; in Australia, it’s playing out on the pages of Crikey, liberal blog Larvatus Prodeo and Benjamin Solah’s Blood and Barricades. The Left is divided between western intervention in the Libyan uprisings, or not. About a UN-endorsed no-fly zone over Libya, or not. About whether such interventions are right, tactically speaking, or not. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 16-03-2011, 68 user comments

International Women’s Day: thoughts from the frontline

I’m a woman; here are some things I’m thinking about today:

1. Mary Poppins and that feminist sub-plot:

2. The war being waged on women and their reproductive rights (which, in many countries, like the vote, were won long ago):

• In ‘Lucky girl’, Bridget Potter recounts what she went through to get an abortion in 1962:

Michael and I checked around for remedies … One night I sat in an extremely hot bath in my walk-up on Waverly Place while Michael fed me a whole quart of gin, jelly jar glass by jelly jar glass. In between my gulps, he refreshed the bath with boiling water from a sauce pan on the crusty old gas stove. I got beet red and nauseous. We waited. I threw up. Nothing more …

When my period was a month late I gave up hoping for a false alarm and went to visit Emily Perl’s gynecologist. His ground floor office in a brownstone on a side street on the Upper East Side was genteel but faded. So was he, a short, stern old man with glasses perched on the top of his head and dandruff flakes on his gray suit-jacket. As I explained my problem, he shook his head from side to side in obvious disapproval of the loose behavior that was the cause of my visit. He instructed me to pee in a jar. The test results, he said, would take two weeks.

At that time pregnancy testing involved injecting a lab rabbit with human urine and watching for its effects. I waited to hear if the rabbit died. I learned much later that all lab rabbits used for pregnancy tests died, autopsied to see the results. It was code.

My rabbit died.

• All the proposed laws encroaching on women’s bodies:

... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 8-03-2011, 15 user comments

Islamophobia revives anti-Semitism

Progressive Jewish Australians, such as academic Ned Curthoys and journalist Antony Loewenstein, both published in Overland, along with Michael Brull, one of Overland’s regular bloggers, have written a statement appealing to Australia’s major political parties to publicly and unequivocally denounce Islamophobia:

As progressive Jewish Australians we are deeply disturbed by the recent outbreak of politically motivated attacks on asylum seeks and Muslims. As Jews we know that most of the criticisms being directed at Islam, that it is a ‘totalitarian’ religion incompatible with Australian civic norms, that its practitioners are obdurate and backward, and that the religion itself is too atavistic to be incorporated within the modern West, are simply anti-Semitic stereotypes now applied to a softer target. For example the argument that Jews are incapable of being truly loyal to the modern state was a perennial argument against full Jewish emancipation in Europe. We call on all major parties to unequivocally denounce Islamophobia and to recognize that rhetorically disenfranchising and othering any section of the Australian community will have appalling long term consequences for Australian democracy.

Signed:
Ned Curthoys
John Docker
Michael Brull
Eva Cox AO
Sara Dowse
Antony Loewenstein
Peter Slezak
Susan Varga

... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 4-03-2011, 9 user comments

Meanland: In the future, they’ll be called ‘book deletings’

HarperCollins is committed to the library channel. We believe this change balances the value libraries get from our titles with the need to protect our authors and ensure a presence in public libraries and the communities they serve for years to come.

Remember the library card inside the front cover (sometimes the back) that used to be taken out when you borrowed? Or the pages of date stamps glued one on top of the other, dating back to 1984, 1973 or beyond? Well, those days of sharing ageing library books are gone, and not merely because the printed text is being outshone by its digital sibling. HarperCollins announced to libraries last week, via the digital distributor OverDrive, that they were limiting the lifespan of their ebooks to 26 checkouts. OverDrive informed US libraries: ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 2-03-2011, 4 user comments

Meanland: On participatory revolution

Last week media theorist and writer Jay Rosen coined a new genre; ‘Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators’, it’s called. The genre takes some knowns:

• Since the invention of social media there have been uprisings and revolutions: Iran, Moldova, Tunisia, Egypt, and more

• Social media helps ‘sex up’ the reporting of these situations through its dynamism, immediacy, on-the-ground reporting

• Some ‘get carried away’ by the sexing up, mistaking it for journalism

• Some others get worried about all this focus on social media as ‘revolution’, so have to remind people that ‘it’s not that simple’

... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 21-02-2011, 11 user comments