OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 dismantling the you stand on the edge of something suddenly spac- ious as the ev- ening begins to blur, begins to nothing. stale coloured seas. what you really must do is escape, come up with rules for consuming/ dismantling the things of the past © […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 Elegy For in memoriam, Dave McComb Concurrent, we fill the city. Without, the air is too full though we break out, as dull as cotton wool, as sharp as tacks. A visceral beauty, lipstick smudge on a glass, knit as close as shorelight, dry rasp […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 Neath Colliery: a found poem Years later in the 1960’s [sic], the by then huge dump of chitter, shale, pit rubbish, etc., lit by spontaneous combustion and burnt for many years giving a nightly show of “glowing hell”, and in windy weather a panorama of […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 Culture and Its Terrors Similes, nature analogies, never so apt to term the pitfalls, assaults upon the soul’s integrity. Imagine sinking into depths deadlier than swamps twisting through the spiral of angry, lacerating waves. Yes, water absolutely the right metaphor. Element of emotion, sucking the […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 Agnus dei However white the wool, however spotless no lamb nor goat can yield up blood to cleanse; for blood, once spilled, grows thick and sticky yet smooth to smear; it sets a stain indelibly. If lamb’s blood cannot cleanse, then why would human? Yet […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 A Genuine Fact When lies pass for truth then truth must go underground to live for a while with the rats themselves survivors and also indestructible. © Will Fraser Overland 189−summer 2007, p. 72 Like this poem? Subscribe!

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 Cops on Horses happy slap the cops on horses as they slap us to make some room and chuck something fizzling to the ground so we’ll breathe and see foggy stings, a double hoof stomp for the slow ones in black and the kids in […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 Being Interviewed in The Scottish Book Collector accompanied by Les Murray In honour of the benign horror My life is a feral marriage Of the mistakenly controllable And an amok feeding on my life Call it a story if you will Small on paper and […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 At Home Washing the dishes she pauses. Her boisterous son pulls her blouse. “Mummy, come here.” She follows his footsteps and voice. A frog is poised on the path near the lawn. She sits and leans closer, sees its shallow breathing; her son pokes with […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 Advance Australian Fear Australians all, we can’t rejoice ‘cos our PM’s not fair. He’s taken away our voice And stuffed up our welfare. Our water’s gone, we’re drying out But he wants us to breed … Let history’s page reflect the rage Engendered by his […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 waiting for a change call now, yes, i am the one who buys the groceries for the household and pays the bills i do have a dog, ask me about pet food do i think about a brand when i pick up a can from […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 Shackled He had a choice but chose to look away we had a choice but chose to look away fear the great deterrent for thinking something saying something doing something fear an ancient dread still ruling us.   © Will Fraser Overland 189 − summer […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 What Spain Was Strained and dry, Spain was a diurnal drum of dull sound, smooth, open country, the eagles’ nests, silence in the whipped-up elements. How, until the lamentation, until the soul, I love your harsh soil, your rough bread, your poor people; how, until […]

OVERLAND 188 spring 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-5-2published 20 September 2007 Return to the Convincing Ground We stripped each other bare, helpless as beached whales on the convincing ground, stranded between the gearstick and the brake. Next day a stroll between the cliff edge and the shore insinuated laughter in the space between our hooded eyes, defending […]

WEB CONTENT ONLY published 12 November 2008 ‘Ours is in colour’: The New Left of the sixties, forty years on Raewyn Connell on 1968 and all that. What was the moment? Nineteen sixty-eight – in everyone’s memory the political peak of the sixties – was the year the Institutional Revolutionary Party government shot down a […]

OVERLAND 195 winter 2009 ISBN 978-0-9805346-2-7 published 21 May 2009 Germaine Greer on Kevin Rudd, things fall apart in Afghanistan, writers against climate change, and much more. Contents Regulars Jeff Sparrow –Editorial Essays Germaine Greer – Waiting in vain John Martinkus – Things fall apart Clare Wright – A lover and a fighter Andrew Macrae […]

OVERLAND 199 winter 2010 ISBN 978-0-9805346-6-5 published 31 May 2010 The pirate code Emmett Stinson on copyright, books and music Right now publishers are abuzz with discussions of ‘book futures’ and the digital revolution, but there is still an almost complete uncertainty surrounding even the most basic issues. What, if any, devices will become standard […]

OVERLAND 199 winter 2010 ISBN 978-0-9805346-6-5 published 31 May 2010 Networked communities Keri Glastonbury reports on the 2009 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets The winner of the 2009 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets is Derek Motion for his poem ‘forest hill’. It is somewhat similar […]

OVERLAND 199 winter 2010 ISBN 978-0-9805346-6-5 published 31 May 2010 Waiting for the green man One broad leathery purplish leaf was bent over at the tip. It resembled, in some ways, the head of a cobra. Striped veins, forest green, crept deeply through the purple. On the soft point of the leaf quivered a fresh […]

WEB CONTENT ONLY published 18 October 2010 An arts council by any other name Christopher Madden responds to Ben Eltham’s ‘Culture is bigger than the arts’ In his article Culture is bigger than the arts, Ben Eltham pleads for Australia’s cultural policy to be liberated from stuffiness. Cultural policy, he argues, favours ‘a dwindling core […]

OVERLAND 201 summer 2010 ISBN 978-0-9805346-8-9 published 29 November 2010 Bruce Petty drawing money Robert Phiddian on Australia’s pioneering cartoonist Political cartoonists draw characters and events. They live off the flux of the political moment, and it used to be rare for them to reach deeper, to engage satirically with patterns of power in society, […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 THE EFFORTLESSNESS OF BEING Okay so Larry and I have split, so now is the time to make that appointment with Augustine de Eustace, life coach slash stylist, because now is the time to get on top of things. He’s dressed in black, hair spiked. […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 IN PRAISE OF THE COMMON READER Ramona Koval delivers the Overland lecture The common reader … differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 THE SKY AS COMMON GROUND Mary-Ellen Stringer falls from grace onto Aboriginal land There is a joke that circulates among Others, the disaffected or dislocated people among us: What’s the difference between a rottweiler and a social worker? You know that eventually the rottweiler will […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 HOWARD’S DESERT STORM Liz Conor on paternity, paternalism and Aboriginal children I thought I knew, or at least had some idea. Until I read the Bringing Them Home report I was like any other non-Indigenous Australian. I operated under a set of understandings about our […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 A SOCIABLE PARADISE Kevin Foster considers the quest for an authentic Australia Between May and October 1851, the Great Exhibition attracted more than six million visitors to London’s Hyde Park where Joseph Paxton’s vast hangar of glass and iron, the Crystal Palace, housed acres of […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 HEARTS STARVE AS WELL AS BODIES Tom O’Lincoln on Clive Hamilton’s critique of Western society In June 2007 the Australian published a series of bizarre polemics against what it called the “psychotic Left”. Though the newspaper mentioned David Marr and Robert Manne and railed against […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 TEACHERWOMAN Olga Olenich faces dragons at tech school Perhaps a quarter of a century ago. Can it be that long? A tech school in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. Near the large sprawling cemetery and the big Ford factory. Convenient for the Turkish workers who […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 “THIS FASCIST MOB” Shane Cahill examines the wartime investigation into Japanese militarism and the Institute of Public Affairs “Fascism rears its head.” That was the caption the Commonwealth Security Service (CSS) – the precursor to ASIO – placed on a clipping from Smith’s Weekly dated […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 ART MAKES THE WORLD Nicole Moore remembers Mona Brand, 1915-2007 ASIO’s 379-page file on Mona Brand will be a rich resource for cultural historians of the Left. In her article in Overland in 2003, her last publication before she died, she described her shock at […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 THE HOTEL LOBBY Peter sat in a cane chair looking around at the hotel lobby. Outside, his parents were unloading their suitcases and arguing. “Let him do it, Pam. It’s his job,” Peter’s father said as his wife struggled to lift their heavy bags from […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2000 WINTER AFTERNOON Malcolm smiled at what he saw out the window as he crushed the pills in the pestle to a fine paste that would mix into the orange juice. In a few minutes when he took the medication down to the bedroom, Fred would […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 LOOKING OUT AT THE LIGHTS: NEW POETRY Kerry Leves Laurie Duggan: The Passenger (UQP, ISBN 070223555, $23.95) The Passenger is an oblique travelogue, a journey through landscapes that are saturated with signification: “Nearly everywhere now/ is less than ‘24 hours from Tulsa’,/ yet for Gene […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 GOTHS AND VANDALS Lucy Sussex Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver (eds): The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction (Melbourne University Press, ISBN 9780522854220, $34.95) John Harwood: The Ghost Writer (Vintage, ISBN 0099460823, $23.95) Margo Lanagan: Red Spikes (Allen & Unwin, ISBN 9781741146578, $17.95) The period […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 UNPICKING THE UNIVERSE Louise Swinn Alex Jones: Helen Garner and the Meaning of Everything (Puncher & Wattmann, ISBN 0975240552, $25) Michael Wilding: National Treasure (Central Queensland University Press, ISBN 9781921274008, $25.95) Michael Wilding and David Myers (eds): Confessions and Memoirs – Best Stories Under the […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 SWITCHED OFF: AUSTRALIA’S MEDIA Jamie Cooke Michael Gawenda: American Notebook: A Personal and Political Journey (Melbourne University Press, ISBN 052285253X, $32.95) David Salter: The Media We Deserve: Underachievement in the Fourth Estate (Melbourne University Press, ISBN 0522854206, $34.95) Unfortunate as it may be, Michael Gawenda […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 THE FIRST POET OF HIS PEOPLE Barry Dickins Bruce Pascoe: Convincing Ground: Learning to Fall in Love with Your Country (Aboriginal Studies Press, ISBN 9780855755492, $39.95) Bruce Pascoe must wonder if he shall lose friends by writing a brilliant study of the rip-off that means […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 IN QUITE A STATE Lyndall Ryan Raymond Evans: A History of Queensland (Cambridge University Press, ISBN 13978521545396, $36.95) Beverly Kingston: A History of New South Wales (Cambridge University Press, ISBN 100521541689, $36.95) Just when John Howard believed that he had taken control of the Australian […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 RULING PASSIONS Nathan Hollier Mike Donaldson and Scott Poynting: Ruling Class Men: Money, Sex, Power (Peter Lang, ISBN 9783039111374, US$57.95) Georgina Murray: Capitalist Networks and Social Power in Australia and New Zealand (Ashgate, ISBN 9780754647089, £55) These two studies of the ruling class take very […]

OVERLAND 188 spring 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-5-2published 20 September 2007 Years ago I lived – not quite legally – in a studio in St Kilda’s landmark George Hotel. I owned an old station wagon which I kept in a nearby parking lot frequented by junkies. Many mornings, around 3 am, the sound of car alarms woke […]

OVERLAND 189 summer 2007 ISBN 978-0-9775171-6-9 published 21 November 2007 Travelling Types 1 The boy reading On the Road at the railway station & the boy sneering at him, having hidden his copy of the same book in his travelling bag (both of them heading home). 2 They have just met, this couple with their […]

OVERLAND 194 autumn 2009 ISBN 978-0-9805346-1-0 published 22 March 2009 Ellis on Rudd, Connell on crisis, the year ahead in publishing, the end of the neoliberal self and much, much more. Contents Jeff Sparrow – Editorial Features Bob Ellis – Muscular timidity Raewyn Connell – All that is solid melts into air Louise Swinn – […]

OVERLAND 192 spring 2008 ISBN 978-0-9775171-9-0 published 31 August 2008 Peter Craven versus Ken Gelder, music in the desert, boxing in NYC, the return of terrorism in literature, Christina Stead as communist. Contents Jeff Sparrow – Editorial Debate Peter Craven versus Ken Gelder – Criticism and Fiction in Australia Features Hugo Race – Return to […]

winter 2008 The meaning of the Rudd revolution, the history of short histories, why kids hate Australia’s past and what happens to superheroes in the mainstream. OVERLAND 191 ISBN 978-0-9775171-8-3 Contents Features Kathleen Weekley – The Clever Principle of Similar Difference Anna Clark − Learning About Stuff Outside the Box Saskia Beudel − Desert Grasslands […]

OVERLAND 190 ISBN 978-0-9775171-8-3 autumn 2008 published 19 March 2008 Oz lit for and against the market, the peril and promise of electronic publishing, John Howard as poet, Hamilton contra O’Lincoln. Contents Editorial Jeff Sparrow Features Mark Davis – Literature, Small Publishers and the Market in Culture Emmy Hennings – Shares and Share Alike Jenny […]