In the foyer of the Congress Center Hamburg, free bottles of Club-Mate, the high-caffeine herbal cola favoured by hackers, were being distributed from bikes, the riders threading their way between table upon table of black-clad guys and gals hunched over laptops: tacktacktacktack, furious fingers on shallow keyboards against a constant chatter of techno music.
Released in 1998, Rowan Woods’ The Boys (featuring David Wenham and Toni Collette) is one of the most important films ever made in Australia. An intense and claustrophobic study of working-class suburbia in inexorable limbo, The Boys depicts three brothers, one menacingly dominant, the others wretchedly submissive, spiralling toward the commission of a horrific crime that is only ever alluded to in the narrative.
Throughout the summer, while reading for the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets, and as a terrific heatwave bled fire and brimstone across the land, the sentence ‘Sometimes it’s just about an honest, well-crafted poem’ leapt over and over through my thoughts like a cool dolphin springing from waves in an apparition of a distant inland sea.
Read 'The 2012 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets'
On the Left there exists a different kind of German exceptionalism, if you like, in which the notion of Sonderweg (literally, ‘special path’ – the idea that a unique historical trajectory meant that Nazi Germany was a sure thing, a pre-determined fate) is repackaged to enable special German interpretations of all sorts, like that Germany is the absolute worst out of all the nations on earth, or that anti-Semitism has really always been an especially German beast.
If you google ‘queer Muslims’ you get over three million hits; ‘gay Muslims’, 121 million. Not all the resulting pages are positive or supportive, but many focus on attempts to reconcile same-sex attraction and Islam or on exposing the dangerous, sometimes deadly, struggle faced by many queer Muslims. Though it’s nascent, there is – in certain areas at least – a movement challenging the notion that homosexuality and Islam are incompatible.
I write this article with the news of Margaret Thatcher’s death in the background. The timing is not lost on me, as Downton Abbey is arguably the latest example of a screen genre that flourished during the Thatcher years: heritage cinema and drama.
Continue reading 'Downton Abbey and the Heritage Industry' 1
Alyena Mohummadally is the latest essayist to have her work developed as part of the Overland Cal Connections project – an effort that focuses on publishing work from authors of underrepresented backgrounds and communities. Alyena is founder of the Yahoo! Group Queer Muslims in Australia and is chair of the Australian GLBTIQ Multicultural Council Inc.
Continue reading 'Alyena Mohummadally on why it’s okay to be queer and Muslim' 2
‘But we are not historians, and this is not a history book.’ As with its putative subject, the convict outlaw Moondyne Joe, it’s hard to say in a short review what this book, in fact, is: a mixture of history, poetry, criticism, political analysis, memoir and literary esprit, it’s a work that consciously resists closure and definition.
Continue reading '‘History (is) a text demanding to be read’' 0
There are a lot of things I don’t get about Twitter and/or Facebook: hashtags (seriously, who uses them?), profile photos, how righteous a tweet can make us feel even as it fills us with self-doubt. There’s no tone and little room for nuance or context in these spaces, no grace for momentary lapses or mistakes, and outrages frequently ensue.
In January, I asked Stella Young, editor of Ramp Up, to define disability. I was facing drastic surgery, which would result in me wearing a stoma bag for at least three months. I wasn’t sure if wearing a stoma bag would make me a person with a disability.
I’d been writing about Burma for some years but it wasn’t until actually going there for the 2010 election and being with the people themselves that the full nature of their experience began to come clear.’
Because I am someone who writes I spend a lot of time on my own. Consequently, I sometimes get into strange states of mind. That’s my job.
While Spielberg’s tale will have viewers exiting the cinema in a complete and total patriotic coma, Tarantino’s will have audiences walking out dripping in the blood, gore and guts of American history.
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‘Who do we sing for?’ a stranger will ask me and I will reply, ‘We sing for the Wanderers.’