Overland literary journal

The Stella, pub feminism and Greek goddesses

Last Friday night in Melbourne a new prize for women’s writing was officially launched. Called the Stella Prize, it’s named after Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin. The name is a nod at the fiction prize Franklin established in her will, the Miles Franklin Award, which in 2009 and 2011 presented male-only shortlists despite the fact that excellent fiction had been published by Australian women in those years.

These and other similar events – detailed by writer and editor Sophie Cunningham in her speech on why we still need feminism at the 2011 Melbourne Writers’ Festival – have led a group of women to take action to support women’s writing.

Cunningham is one of the founders of the Stella Prize and a member of its committee, along with bookish and feminist luminaries Jo Case, Monica Dux, Christine Gordon, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Susan Johnson, Jenny Niven, Rebecca Starford, Louise Swinn, Kirsten Tranter and Aviva Tuffield. The prize is part of their broader intention to, as Cunningham says, ‘work as a lobby group for women in publishing, to set up mentorship schemes, and to undertake rigorous and current research on women in publishing.’ ... read more

Written by Jane Gleeson-White on 6-09-2011, 7 user comments

Extreme weather and Mother Earth: nature gets legal rights in Bolivia

As extreme weather becomes the norm Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, believes that to fight climate change we need to recover the values of indigenous people.

Indigenous Australian writer Alexis Wright says something similar in her essay ‘Deep Weather’ in the latest issue of Meanjin. Noting the devastation of the 2009 Victorian bushfires, the 2011 floods in eastern Australia and Cyclone Yasi, as well as extreme weather events around the world, Wright wonders ‘what the traditional Indigenous caretakers of the land think about these extreme weather events of flood, fire and wind’ and asks why we’re not hearing their ancient stories about ‘how to respect the weather’. Her blunt reply? What Indigenous Australians say ‘is not considered relevant’. ... read more

Written by Jane Gleeson-White on 17-06-2011, 12 user comments

I am woman hear me tweet in numbers too big to … ignore

What do twenty-first-century women and the sixteenth-century Protestant revolt have in common? The advantages of a new, epoch-changing communications technology.

Last week on the Overland blog Jacinda Woodhead raised the ghost of Marshall McLuhan and his 1960s catch phrase ‘the medium is the message’. The medium might be the message – but what if a message suddenly finds a new medium?

This famously happened in the sixteenth century when Martin Luther wrote the ‘Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences’ in Wittenberg in 1517. This was not a revolutionary act. It was merely one more in a line of scholarly disputations against the church. Luther used the medium of his day – a handwritten Latin tract – to protest against the behaviour of the clergy at his local church, which contained an extensive collection of spurious holy relics including vials of the Virgin Mary’s breast milk. ... read more

Written by Jane Gleeson-White on 4-04-2011, 17 user comments

Fiction and politics in the 21C: a reply to Emmett Stinson

Over at Kill Your Darlings, Emmett Stinson has written an essay about two Australian responses to Ted Genoways’ much discussed polemic ‘The Death of Fiction’: Davina Bell’s ‘To My Generation of Precious Snowflakes’ (harvest, Winter 2010) and Jacinda Woodhead’s ‘A response to harvest’ (Overland blog, July 2010). Among other things, Genoways argues that ‘most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues – as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism’. ... read more

Written by Jane Gleeson-White on 25-10-2010, 30 user comments

Farewell Jessica Anderson (1916–2010) – and thanks

I can’t let the death last week of Australian writer Jessica Anderson go unremarked. Why? Because although she twice won the Miles Franklin Award (1978 and 1980) and her novel Tirra Lirra by the River has been on high school reading lists, Anderson was for most of her long life marginalised, a misfit, a sensitive and creative woman in 20th century Australia. And she writes about similarly marginalised people. She said: ‘I was very much, and always have been, preoccupied with people who are strangers in their society.’

I agree with Clive James when he says that ‘Culture builds itself like a coral reef and like a reef it entails much sacrifice’ – and I think we have writers like Jessica Anderson to thank for whatever Australian literary culture we can claim today. They are the bedrock of our literature and they paid the price – poverty, alcoholism, disappointment, frustration, madness – of creativity in an overwhelmingly philistine nation. ... read more

Written by Jane Gleeson-White on 15-07-2010, 11 user comments

Hope and anger: Raj Patel on free markets, commons and being an activist bum

Raj Patel – the author of The Value of Nothing and Stuffed & Starved – was in Sydney for the writers’ festival. In an electrifying conversation with journalist Ross Gittens, Patel blasted free market ideology, extolled ‘commons’ and confessed he’s a big disappointment to his family. Here are seven things Patel said.

1. Becoming an activist
Raj Patel has an Indian name, sounds English and lives in America. His mother was born in Kenya, his father in Fiji and Patel grew up in London helping out in the family convenience store. ‘My father thought I was a bum until I was thirty. Then I got my PhD and now I’m a Dr bum. I’m a big disappointment to my family because I didn’t become an accountant, I didn’t become a lawyer. I became an activist.’ ... read more

Written by Jane Gleeson-White on 1-06-2010, 9 user comments

The love that dare not speak its name: we need to talk about editing

I used to work for an order more clandestine than the Knights Templar, more invisible than the Invisible Woman, more prone to secrecy than Jason Bourne. We did our work in secret, erasing our identities before and after every job, writing confidential reports and often never meeting the human they concerned. I’m sure there are other professions that still operate with the secrecy and guardedness of a medieval guild. But I’m beginning to think the secrecy that surrounds my old profession is doing the sort of damage that’s done to anyone forced into secrecy. I’m thinking paranoia, depression. That profession is book editing.

Book editors regularly open themselves to an other, go deeply into that other’s innermost being (their text), and work to transform that text (and be themselves transformed) without touching it. And then they must let go of it all and be forever silent. I think all this secret intimacy is doing editors’ heads in. Writers are renowned for their paranoia, their swings between omnipotence and impotence, their depression and insecurity. But in my experience, editors suffer just as much if not more from these debilitating states – mostly without the upswing of omnipotence. Why? Possibly because they’re treated mostly like shit. Poorly paid and never acknowledged, always blamed when things go wrong. ... read more

Written by Jane Gleeson-White on 28-04-2010, 40 user comments

Cockatoo Island: when governments get it right

Last Thursday I went camping here, on Cockatoo Island, the largest island on Sydney Harbour:
Cockatoo Island has been a prison and a shipyard since European colonisation – and now it’s an urban park, with campsite. I’ve been to Cockatoo Island three times since 2008 and each time has been extraordinary: first for the Sydney Biennale, then for Nick Cave’s 2009 music extravaganza ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ and again last week.

As I walked around the island last Thursday, through its ruined warehouses and abandoned dockyards, past rusted machinery and sandstone cliffs overlooking the harbour, I thought: some government has got it right. As it turns out, it was the federal government of 2001, which put the island in the care of the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust. It got it right because it left the island alone, pretty much, and gave it to the people. Despite its convict past and dereliction Cockatoo Island feels alive, haunted perhaps but not devastated. ... read more

Written by Jane Gleeson-White on 16-04-2010, 6 user comments

The power of art – does it move you?

If, as Duchamp said, art is the interaction between the object of scrutiny and the viewer, then what is our role in that interaction, as viewers? There’s been a lot of talk about our role and rights as creators, especially in the electronic age when the means of creative production and distribution are available to so many more of us. When we’re all creators in search of an audience.

But I’m interested in how we respond and act as that audience. Can art move us so deeply it makes us act? Can art change lives?

Reading Tolstoy changed the life of Mohandas Gandhi. Tolstoy – who in War and Peace calls war ‘the vilest thing in life’ – inspired Gandhi’s non-violent resistance to British rule in India and in his honour Gandhi founded the Tolstoy Farm near Johannesburg, South Africa. And a poem from Victorian England by William Ernest Henley – ‘Invictus’ – scribbled on a scrap of paper sustained Nelson Mandela through his long imprisonment. Its last lines are: ... read more

Written by Jane Gleeson-White on 3-03-2010, 8 user comments

$200 hamburgers and The Value of Nothing

Raj Patel’s The Value of Nothing is my favourite book of the summer. It’s vividly told and riveting. Which I wasn’t expecting from a book subtitled ‘How to reshape market society and redefine democracy’.

I’ve been interested in the anomalies of capitalism since studying economics in the late 1980s when shoulder pads, Gordon Gekko and Milton Friedman’s free market ruled. Except the ‘free’ market is so patently un-free. It’s run by a few companies and financial institutions, characterised by vast concentrations of monopolistic capital, and depends on reserves of unemployed and unpaid domestic labour. Inequalities and hidden costs are fundamental to its ‘success’. But when we questioned the free market we were dismissed with the same raised eyebrow and ‘it’s very complicated’ that Bill Nighy uses in his ‘Robin Hood bank tax’ video. ... read more

Written by Jane Gleeson-White on 16-02-2010, 22 user comments