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For the patriarch

For the patriarch
Angelo Loukakis
Krinos

The glowing endorsement on the front of this collection of short stories is from Patrick White and at first glance I thought ‘What? Did he speak from beyond the grave?’ but my confusion was short-lived. This is a new publication of Angelo Loukakis’ 1981 volume. The original won a prize in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards that year and was on the HSC syllabus from 1986 until 2001. So it is possible that many people reading this review will be familiar with this set text and I am interested to see if anyone comments on it. Set texts can have the life analysed out of them but if you are lucky you remember them fondly and might want to give it another go. I have been meaning to re-read Greenvoe by George Mackay Brown for a while now. ... read more

Written by Rhona Hammond on 12-01-2012, 3 user comments

Sunday penalties and restaurants – not exactly a brave new world

Yesterday, web pages were aflutter with comments by celebrity chef George Calombaris about the high cost of paying staff to work on weekends.

An article in The Power Index reported Calombaris complaining that he’s looking down the barrel of paying his restaurant staff ‘$40 an hour on Sundays ... and it's not like they've had to go to uni for 15 years’.

‘The problem is that wages on public holidays and weekends greatly exceed the opportunity for profit … it’s just not a good business practice to be paying penalty rates. It’s really difficult to stay open and we only do it because of tourism but the reality is it’s uneconomical,’ he said.
‘So our labour laws are something that need to be looked at and we keep talking about it.’ ... read more

Written by Isy Burns on 11-01-2012, 6 user comments

‘A peculiar family history’

An interview with Robert Bollard

In the latest Overland, historian Robert Bollard writes a personal account of his exploration of his Tasmanian Aboriginal ancestry. We spoke to Robert about his article ‘Who Was Bet B?’ and his writing process.

What was your motivation for writing your article? What issues were you interested in exploring?

In some ways this is a hard question to answer. The story is interesting, obviously. And I’ve learned from writing about history that stories you identify as interesting often turn out to be interesting, not just because they’re quirky or striking in some way, but because what makes them striking, on closer reflection, reveals something of significance. ... read more

Written by Roselina Press on 6-01-2012, No comments

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

In hindsight, I can gladly admit that my original reaction to the first day of Occupy Melbourne was wrong. As a left-wing cynic, weary from years fighting alongside the fragments of an old and obsolete reactionary left, I noted the usual suspects and assumed too quickly that these dogmatic, semi-cultish organisations would try to succeed in taking over the movement. I wrongly doubted the new faces would survive the first assembly and assumed most passers-by would leave when confronted by an outdated lecture on Marx or Lenin. While the left’s key thinkers are still relevant, their use as a quasi bible by self-righteous crusaders and vanguards sits somewhat uneasily in the struggle against the contemporary form of capitalism. Yet the idealist in me was still alive and I went back the next day to see how the movement had evolved. While the square was much less populated on that Sunday afternoon, there seemed to remain a spirit of freedom and independence which made me optimistic, if not for the future of the movement, for its relevance in the ongoing emancipatory struggle. ... read more

Written by Aurelien Mondon on 5-01-2012, 48 user comments

Review: ‘The Best Australian Stories 2011’

Cover, 'The Best Australian Stories 2011'The Best Australian Stories 2011
Cate Kennedy (ed)
Black Inc.

If the job of fiction is, as many suggest, to flesh out place and cement it socially, physically and culturally in time, then, despite the variety of voice and subject matter, The Best Australian Stories 2011 succeeds with Southern Cross stars.

This is not to say that all the stories are perfect or, indeed, all facets of Australian life are represented in them, but there is a quintessentially recognisable state-of-being that renders the collection absolutely worthwhile, not to mention good reading. Short stories a cut above the rest are bound to be a delight. So allow me, as Cate Kennedy did so well in her introduction, the privilege of pulling over the menu board to tell you of some of my favourites and some that I favoured a little less in this year’s Best Of in short fiction. ... read more

Written by SJ Finn on 4-01-2012, 9 user comments

Brull’s bookshelf

I’m not a Christian, so I didn’t think of doing this earlier and saying ‘go and get these for Christmas for your pinko friends’. But the end of the year is as good a time as any. So, I thought I’d recommend some books.

I just read it, so this one’s first: Bleeding Afghanistan, by James Ingalls and Sonali Kolhatkar. I think leftists should understand the wars we should be opposing now. This book is five years old, but is very, very good. It looks at the history of Afghanistan; it rightly situates Hamid Karzai as the Western puppet he is, talks about the Islamist warlords we’ve supported, the Islamist theocracy we’ve created and the role of Zalmay Khalilzad. There have been developments since then and greater documentation. But in a pretty brief book, it’s very well reported, hits all the right notes and sets out the contours for understanding our occupation of Afghanistan. I do not necessarily agree with all of its recommendations – it is rather equivocal about ending the occupation. Specifically, the authors say public opinion in Afghanistan at the time was supportive of the occupation continuing. They therefore recommend ending the occupation when the country is safer and warlords are disarmed (or something like that). I think the former condition is the kind of condition Cheney would support – so that they could justify occupation for the next 20 years. The other recommendations are more reasonable. Considering recommendations only take up a few pages, I would not want my reservations on this score to detract from what I consider an excellent and important book, which is the one book above all I would think should be read by activists against this war. People should not just talk about bombing of civilians in Afghanistan – they need to understand more, and this book sets it out clearly and carefully. ... read more

Written by Michael Brull on 30-12-2011, 2 user comments

The state is not the remedy but the poison

On the face of it, it’s hard to argue against George Monbiot’s contention that the state is required to curb the excesses of capital, by imposing ‘legal restraints upon freedoms which interfere with other people’s freedoms – or on freedoms which conflict with justice and humanity.’ Decades of financial deregulation led to a financial crisis to which we are yet to know the full cost; the gap between rich and poor continues to grow; and governments frequently excuse regressive policies against the will of the public on the grounds of ensuring market confidence. In such times, it is understandable that Monbiot defends the role of the state as bulwark against big business, following Henri Lacondaire’s axiom that ‘between the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the master and the servant, it’s liberty that oppresses, and the law that liberates’. ... read more

Written by Joshua Mostafa on 28-12-2011, 3 user comments

All about happiness, tra-la-la

Happiness, like sanity, is something we have very few definitions of. We’ve got any number of ways of describing what it looks like to be crazy, and probably as many to describe all the variations of misery. Stephanie Convery’s review at Overland a while back of David Malouf’s Quarterly Essay on happiness showed very clearly how even the writers we have been told are literate flounder when trying to philosophise about happiness, either falling back on hackneyed definitions derived from the classics, or fumbling around on the edges of the trite language of self-help manuals. Life is unfortunately not a metaphysical exercise, just as Christmas is not a time of unalloyed bliss. Christmas is in fact a crap time for a lot of people, and family violence tends to spike at Christmas. Whether they are writers or salesmen no-one looks so foolish as the person who says they will now tell us all about happiness, as though they know what it is, as though happiness is a quality that can be acquired by buying particular objects, or reading certain books. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 23-12-2011, 29 user comments

The US forces in our country

On 17 of November Barack Obama touched down in Darwin for a visit that sent Darwin into a tailspin. The visit had been announced weeks earlier, giving Darwin time to spruce up for the visit. This included painting all the public benches on The Esplanade, where Obama was going to pay tribute to the US sailors who were killed when the Japanese bombed the USS Peary in 1942. It also included moving all the ‘Longgrassers’ (itinerant people, mainly Aboriginal, who congregate on the green grass, under shady trees during the day) out of town. ... read more

Written by Rohan Wightman on 22-12-2011, 3 user comments

Small presses and free markets

Caroline Hamilton is a research fellow in the Department of Publishing and Communications at the University of Melbourne, and has also worked as a freelance writer and editor. Her latest book One Man Zeitgeist: Dave Eggers, Publishing and Publicity is published by Continuum. We spoke to Caroline about her article ‘Sympathy for the devil?’ which is featured the latest edition of Overland. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 22-12-2011, No comments

This year in film

1. The Kid With a Bike (Le Gamin au vélo)

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium-France-Italy

2011 may be the year that 3D came into its own with auteurs from Spielberg and Scorsese to Wenders and Herzog making admirable contributions to the medium. However, this year belongs to a modestly analogue film about an eleven-year-old boy abandoned by his father and taken in by a young woman. The filmmaking of The Kid With a Bike is unshowy yet wildly kinetic, driven by the camera’s need to follow a boy whose desperation sends him running with the velocity of a wild animal. With this astonishing film, the Dardennes remind us that cinema’s true greatness lies not in technological advancements but in ideas and stories. ... read more

Written by Brad Nguyen on 21-12-2011, No comments

How dumb luck got me published

Morris Gleitzman once said that every successful writer he knew could look back to one incident of good fortune that lifted them above the crowd. I think I’ve just had mine.

I’ve always loved those stories about the serendipity of some unlikely twist of fate that has led to a publisher discovering a manuscript. Let’s face it, luck and publishing go hand in hand. Having recently acquired a good luck story of my very own (more on that in a moment) it seemed like a good excuse to interview a bunch of talented local authors about how luck has played a part in their own fortunes. ... read more

Written by Irma Gold on 21-12-2011, No comments

All linked up (but not always with enough love or grace)

There was one (probably among many) critical and seemingly obvious point when viewing Adam Curtis’s documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.

Namely, that there are many important relationships, connections and consequences from all the actions and developments that shape our lives.

Adam Curtis’s television essay journeyed from Ayn Rand to global financial meltdowns to colonialism and its consequences via machines, sex scandals and wars. There may be links between all or some of these things. However, we will never know if or how connections work without public discussions. ... read more

Written by Sharon Callaghan on 20-12-2011, No comments

Meanland: Beautiful statistics

With a glut of 4,568 emails, many of which are links emailed from my twitter account for deeper reading, I try to focus on the task at hand. After six months you’d think I’d have lost the fascination. But what I’m learning is too great to ignore. After eight years as a stay-at-home mum, I’m hungering for conversations reminiscent of those had in London when I worked for a woman who played a leading role in shifting attitudes on disability. On Twitter are shares I have not before been privy to in such abundance. The buzz comes from journalists, writers, scientists, visual artists, digital natives and others sharing literature, publishing, innovations, climate change, equality and more. It’s huge. I am gorging. ... read more

Written by Diane Simonelli on 20-12-2011, 2 user comments

Mr Rudd: Protect Assange!

This is an open letter to Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd and Attorney-General Nicola Roxon. It calls on the Australian government to take steps to ensure Julian Assange's human rights are protected. It will be delivered on 19 December 2011, but we encourage members of the public to sign the letter below by adding their full name in the comments section, together with any comment they may wish to make. Please feel free to spread the word about the letter to others who may be interested.

Bernard Keane and Elizabeth O'Shea

The Hon Kevin Rudd
Minister for Foreign Affairs
Parliament House ACT 2600

Dear Minister

We write to express our concern about the plight of Julian Assange.

To date, no charges have been laid against Mr Ass

Written by Editorial team on 18-12-2011, 885 user comments