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Universities in ruins
Peter Cook once said that nobody had actually read Don Quixote, and though Cervantes might have written it, even he couldn’t be bothered reading it as well. When I heard Cook say this, it relieved me of a great responsibility, that of reading Don Quixote. These days I try never to read any book that weighs more than a brick, but it’s very easy to fill one’s own bookshelves with books that should be read, rather than books that one wants to read and might enjoy.
I still haven’t read Don Quixote, and don’t own a copy so I’m never tempted to try. Gathering a library of books together can be a bit like creating a new family. Biological families, as most of us have hopefully found out, just aren’t enough. Putting together a family of choice that doesn’t in some way replicate the family of origin can be tricky. You can end up accidentally marrying one of your parents (‘You’re just like my mother!’) or squabbling with friends over a variety of objects you’re highly attached to in the same way you used to argue with your brother over who got the GI Joe and who got the Action Man. In the same way we can end up with libraries of books that we hump around for all kinds of reasons other than we enjoy them. ... read more
Written by Stephen Wright on 16-11-2011, 36 user comments
Under the hammer
On Saturday 12 November at 7.30pm, a multidisciplinary activist-artists collective called Under the Hammer will be setting up shop and having a ‘pre-launch’ at 158 Sydney road, Coburg. The pre-launch will include performances by comedian Toby Halligan, spoken word artist Khepa Markhno and 3oB DJ set as well as visual art by Van Rudd. Overland’s Rjurik Davidson spoke to organiser James Crafti.
So you’re starting up a radical cultural space called Under The Hammer. The name comes from a quote from Mayakovsky (sometimes also attributed to Brecht), which reads, ‘Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it’. Can you briefly describe the aim of the space? ... read more
Written by Rjurik Davidson on 11-11-2011, 5 user comments
An important preamble
Recently, the Office for the Arts launched a discussion paper for the development of a new National Cultural Policy:
Consultation began on a National Cultural Policy in 2009, and has involved the arts and culture sector, creative industries, the public at large and government. This has informed the development of this discussion paper, which outlines goals and strategies for the new National Cultural Policy.
What do you think about the goals and strategies in the discussion paper?
This is the preamble I wrote to the Australian Theatre Forum Open Space National Cultural Policy Group submission.
It’s often said that language – the urge to communicate – is the defining aspect of our humanity. The evolution of language in our species around a million years ago paved the way for the complex societies and cultures in which we now live. As deep as the desire to communicate is the urge to make, which can be seen in every culture and in every child. Human beings are, by definition, communicators and makers. It is an inalienable right of our biological heritage, and the basis of every culture on earth.
The arts are a lynchpin of our culture, but they are not the whole of it: they are one aspect of the continually changing and endlessly diverse network of ideas, actions and values which make up our personal and national identities and our culture. Culture is not only a defining aspect of our humanity: it is the lifeblood of any notion of citizenship. As countless thinkers have noted, access to culture is the basis of any healthy democracy.
Art is the specialised act of making, developed over thousands of years in every culture on earth. The arts reflect our innate inventiveness, our imagination. They express the conflicts and harmonies, the dreams and desires and fears, of our social and individual lives. The arts belong to everyone: the ability to respond, to be moved, to be empowered, to be excited, to speak and to make is not the privilege of the few, but the birthright of the many.
Theatre, as a collective activity which incorporates individual visions, can be seen as a microcosm of culture. Every act of theatre is in some sense utopian: a group of people come together to imagine a different reality, and work together to communicate that reality to others. Others come to witness this act of making: not to be passive consumers, but to participate in an experience. The experience ripples out through the responses of the audience and, through them, into the wider culture. Sometimes it literally changes lives.
Most Australians understand theatre through main stage and commercial productions, but contemporary Australian theatre, especially among the independent companies that constitute its best practice, reaches much more deeply into the community and has developed an enviable international reputation. Contemporary Australian theatre intersects actively with local and global culture at all levels of society, adapting international influences to fit regional experiences, finding new ways to galvanise collective imagination. The theatre community has skills and visions that can be applied far beyond its present reach, and represents the best impulses of Australian innovation in thought, practice and technology.
A National Cultural Policy must recognise the complexity, depth and diversity of Australian culture. It must emphasise the right of every Australian to have access to his or her culture, to exercise his or her birthright to make and to speak. It must identify the barriers of class, education, race, place or economic status that impede the exercise of these rights, and seek to dismantle them. It must understand that culture is a living thing, dynamic and continually changing, and seek to be inclusive of all the languages, values and experiences that together constitute Australian culture.
Most of all, a National Cultural Policy must recognise that nurturing our culture is fundamental to nurturing our citizenship, not only of Australia, but of the wider world in which we live. In the 21st century, we are not only citizens of this country, but of the globe. The policy must cultivate practical methods of enriching our collective national imagination, so that each of us will become individually more empowered, more educated and more questioning members of a vital democracy. It must aim to encourage all Australians, individually and as a nation, to attain their true potential: as human beings, as cultural participants, and as citizens of a diverse, dynamic and challenging world.
Alison Croggon
This preamble prefaces the ATFOS submission to the Australian Government’s National Cultural Policy discussion paper.
Commissioned and endorsed by:
Jude Anderson, Artistic Director, Punctum
Stephen Armstrong, Chair of the Theatre Board, Australia Council
Alison Croggon, independent arts journalist
Susan Donnelly, Executive Director, Australian Major Performing Arts Group
Brenna Hobson, General Manager, Belvoir
Chris Kohn, Artistic Director, Arena Theatre Company
Alice Nash, Executive Producer, Back to Back Theatre
Alison Richards, Independent theatre artist and academic
Sonya Suares, General Manager, Red Stitch Actors Theatre
Written by Alison Croggon on 28-10-2011, 3 user comments
In defence of the rock critic
‘Your mileage may vary’, Georgia Claire’s recent piece on the worthlessness of rock criticism, gave the impression of an archaeologist stumbling across a snippet of text from some curious – if clearly uncivilised – tribe. (Which, in fairness, isn’t an inaccurate description of most rock critics.) How funny these people are, with their made-up words and grammar-bending syntax!
Her point, of course, was that a description of Sydney band The Laurels, and rock criticism at large, make no sense. On at least one level, she’s absolutely right. As an example of the English language, it’s simply not much cop. What exactly is a psychedelic juggernaut, if not a garishly painted road train? ... read more
Written by Myke Bartlett on 21-02-2011, 4 user comments
On a literary national myth
A post from Ireland.
Ireland’s academic ranking has taken a dive in the most recent OECD study on international student performance. Since 2000, the country’s students have dropped from 15th to 25th place in the OECD world ranking for maths, and from 9th to 13th in science. Ireland has never seen itself as particularly strong in maths, and the government has invested significant money in science knowing that it’s an area that needs improving. But it’s the drop in English that has been the most shocking: Irish students have fallen from 5th to 17th place. ... read more
Written by Louise Pine on 23-12-2010, 4 user comments
Politics, economics, cartooning
In ‘Bruce Petty drawing money’, the last essay from Overland 201 to go online, Robert Phiddian analyses politics and economics in the oeuvre of Australian cartoonist, Bruce Petty. (You’ll need to purchase a copy of 201 to see the accompanying images.)
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, let alone the economy. Bruce Petty’s trajectory has been different and very influential, especially at the Age, on a generation of cartoonists like Spooner, Leunig and Nicholson. He has fostered a more analytical, economically literate, but still staunchly oppositional attitude towards money and its acolytes on the pictorial parts of the nation’s editorial pages. It is a culture of scepticism that the editorial and financial writers might have striven harder to share, before the instant wisdom of the global financial crisis became fashionable.
Ever since he started at Rupert Murdoch’s crusading Mirror (1962) and Australian (1964) newspapers, Bruce Petty sought to draw the big issues and processes more than other cartoonists. His work at the early Australian was dominated by the directly political issues that characterised the 1960s and early 1970s, when there was a widely distributed and accepted sense of optimism that politics could involve planning and substantial achievement. The political spectrum supporting this attitude was broad and not even exclusively left-wing, running from Donald Horne’s right-wing contrarianism in The Lucky Country to the socialist and communist enthusiasms of Stephen Murray-Smith’s Overland. This time of hope, as Horne described it in another book, ended with the mayhem of the second Whitlam government and its dismissal in 1975, though the geopolitical driver for the change was the Oil Shock of 1973. Throughout these years, Petty was a prominent proponent of this progressive attitude, a daily cartoonist working in a newsroom, whose attention focused sharply on the daily news cycle.1
The collapse of Planet Whitlam was compounded for Petty by the way the once liberal Australian suddenly veered Right and edged him out. He contributed posters to ‘Maintain the Rage’ rallies, donated images to any number of good causes, and focused a lot of attention on animated movies.2 Instead of attempting to live in a lost Camelot, however, he got on with analysing the new, economically-driven politics. He was quick to spot the ascendant ideas delineated in political slogans like Malcolm Fraser’s ‘Life is not meant to be easy’(1971),3 Margaret Thatcher’s ‘And who is society? There is no such thing!’ (1987), and Bill Clinton’s ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ (1992). Before 1975, he had been swimming with the apparent tide of history, against a conservatism whose time was obviously up. Now, without any real ideological movement, he found himself a mordant critic of an ascendant and reductive economic libertarianism. The central theme of his cartooning became market-doubting in the decades of the rise of monetarism, and the main formal preoccupation became drawing the complex processes of money, influence and power. This searching satirical critique is apparent in books (The Money Book, 1983; The Absurd Machine, 1997), films (The Money Game, 1970; Global Haywire, 2008) and hundreds (if not thousands) of editorial cartoons.
Written by Editorial team on 23-12-2010, No comments
Theatre review: Peer Gynt
Peer Gynt | Four Larks Theatre | until Saturday 11 December
On Wednesday night I was lucky enough to share with friends in the experience that is the Four Larks Theatre company. Even a visit to their website gives a sense of how this self-funded young company masters atmosphere. Entering their space is like being stolen by storybook Gypsies.
Four Larks describe themselves as ‘a collective’ and this collab
Written by Clare Strahan on 10-12-2010, 5 user comments
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
These are Fighting Words
Last week the London chapter of the international writing-school revolution began with the opening of the Ministry of Stories. A few months ago, I went to Dublin and paid a visit to the Irish centre, Fighting Words. Set up by author Roddy Doyle and former director of Amnesty International Ireland, Sean Love, the centre had been open for eighteen months. Unlike the Ministry or the original at 826 Valencia, Fighting Words doesn’t run a pirate or a monster shop. Which is not to say they haven’t been focused on bringing kids into a magical world.
Sean Love’s smile is infectious. The grin spreads as he introduces me to the inner entrances of Fighting Words: two bookshelves which rotate to reveal secret doors, one adult, one child-sized. ‘It’s very Man from UNCLE’ he says, with obvious delight. ... read more
Written by Jennifer Mills on 25-11-2010, 1 user comment
Writing: community and culture
For my Overland Subscriberthon post this year, I wanted to raise and discuss the importance of writing community. Here at Overland, I have always felt a sense of community; a place where I can share my thoughts and engage in hearty political debate. A place where I can learn, make mistakes, reflect. We may be a small group, but there’s a community spirit, and we are all contributing to Melbourne’s political landscape and culture.
But what about novel writers? We are so isolated, in our little offices, typing away. I’ve been writing novels for six years now and I have to say, it does get pretty lonely. You procrastinate a lot. Surf the net. Watch the walls. That’s why I was ecstatic when my friend told me about National Novel Writing month. The basic principle is to start a new novel and update your word count progress throughout the month on the NaNo website. The total of each region, in my case, Melbourne, is ranked against other regions from around the world to determine the NaNo winner for 2010. You can work on your new novel anywhere you like, but for those writers craving a sense of community, organisations from cafés to corporate businesses have opened their doors and allowed writers to gather on their premises, network and write. Every day there is a NaNo gathering so it’s as simple as logging on and checking where to go to for the day and off you go. ... read more
Written by Koraly Dimitriadis on 24-11-2010, 3 user comments
Telling you what you don’t want to hear
When Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul, a number of academics held a forum, ‘In Defence of Academic Freedom’. By far, the most brilliant speech was by philosophy Professor Akeel Bilgrami. He explained his view, which I’d long held intuitively: that it is the responsibility of the intellectual to be unpopular.
I can find it quite understandable, indeed I find it honourable, if someone speaking and writing in America finds it important to stress much more the wrongs of the American government and its allies and clients, like Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia under Suharto, Chile under Pinochet... But if the same person was speaking or writing, say, in the Palestinian territories or in Arab newspapers, it would be far more effective and honourable if he were to criticize the Palestinian Authority or Arab regimes like Sadaam’s or Islamic regimes like Iran’s.... Edward Said showed exactly this honourable imbalance, criticizing Israel and the U.S. while speaking here and criticizing Arafat and the Palestinian Authority in the Arab press.
It is said that whenever Sakharov criticized the Soviet Union’s treatment of dissidents in the ’50s, he was chastised by his government for showing an imbalance and not saying anything against the treatment of blacks in the American South. That is precisely the kind of imbalance that courageous people are going to be accused of by McCarthyite elements in this country, and I hope that all of us will have the courage to continue being imbalanced in just this way. It is in some ways the duty of the intellectual to be imbalanced in this way. That is another way of saying that it is the duty of the intellectual to be unpopular. They should not be discouraged by such unpopularity. They should see it as an indirect acknowledgement of their courage.
Written by Michael Brull on 23-11-2010, 2 user comments
Poetry review: The Bee Hut
The Bee Hut
Dorothy Porter
Black Inc.
Whatever you think of her poetic style, Dorothy Porter was the contemporary godmother of narrative poetry in Australia. Having read and watched the Joanne Davis performance of The Monkey’s Mask, and having also thoroughly enjoyed What A Piece Of Work, I learned some important lessons about how to manipulate time and space using poetics in the writing of a verse novel. I was curious to read Porter’s collection The Bee Hut to find distinctions between the micro-narrative style that drives the plots of her novels and the standalone free verse of her other poetry. ... read more
Written by Tara Mokhtari on 16-11-2010, 3 user comments
Victoria, when are you going to support your arts?
This year I have harshly come to the realisation that our government doesn’t care about art, well, not unless you’re Tim Winton, Nicole Kidman or the Australian orchestra. To them, emerging artists are just the people on the sidelines who should get their act together and get a real job. We are the annoying buskers on Bourke Street outside Myer, the poet reading at shady pubs in front of ten people, the TAFE students who should be getting serious and studying at university. After all, isn’t university the place artists go to become ‘real’ artists? To learn all the rules there is to learn on how art should be created? Then all of us artists can keep producing and reproducing and regurgitating the same art again and again and Australian culture can stand still forever. Yes, that’s exactly what we need as a society: to be unchallenged. ... read more
Written by Koraly Dimitriadis on 10-11-2010, 18 user comments
Non-fiction review: art + soul
art + soul
Hetti Perkins
Pan Macmillan
The first thing you notice about this book is that it is beautiful. The sleeve on the cover balances a contemporary Aboriginal painting across the top, with a lovely landscape shot along the bottom; standing in between is Hetti and the title.
This beauty is continued throughout the pages with ample space given to many of the artworks exhibited. The texts itself is also well laid out, spaced so as not to overcrowd the images when they share the page. All in all, it gives austere to the artworks, allowing them to speak for themselves, to flourish with words that add a history of the artists and their relationship to the art world, to Hetti, and, importantly, Hetti’s own relationship to the artworks. ... read more
Written by Scott Foyster on 1-11-2010, No comments
Dylan, the Devil and Judas
While many have searched for religious themes in Dylan’s lyrics, what has often been overlooked is the astonishing amount of times Dylan has scripturally referred to Satan. Furthermore, the unsavoury characters of Judas and Cain have also made regular appearances. Satan is usually portrayed as the great deceiver, the man of peace masquerading as an angel of light, while Judas and Cain are invariably metaphors for betrayal and guilt.
i) The Devil
Dy
Written by Damian Balassone on 29-10-2010, 5 user comments
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