Overland literary journal

We sit in East Point Reserve and look at how the gidjaas, green ants, make globe-like homes out of the leaves — connected edges with fibrous tissue that I later learn is faithful silk. Safe inside. Why isn’t it safe outside? I pick up the plastic around this circular lake cause this is the way […]

SBS’s New Gold Mountain sets out to recover the history of the Gold Rush from the marginalised perspective of Chinese settlers but instead reinforces the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty. Although celebrated for its multilingual script and diverse representation, the mini-TV series ignores how the settlement of Chinese migrants and their recruitment into colonial capitalism consolidates the ongoing displacement of First Nations peoples.

Fembots, sexbots, killerbots, chatbots: all these and more are the subject of Tracey Spicer’s latest book Man Made: How the bias of the past is being built into the future. But while the book offers an overview of the problem just as AI dominates the news, its critical analysis falls short.

I ride to the city along the Upfield train line—and a creek, which I can't see and which isn't on Google Maps, but the frogs love it. It's an invisible wildlife refuge in Melbourne's inner north.

The year is 1998 and a spectre is haunting capitalism from ages six and up—the spectre of virtual and robotic kin. All the powers of the capitalist class have entered an unholy alliance to exploit this spectre: Tyco, Hasbro, and Mattel, or: Tickle Me Elmo, Furby, and Tamagotchi.

The debate about how our data is used is a valuable one, but a more substantial one can only be had once we stop seeing the internet as an immaterial flow of information and begin to see it as a vast material infrastructure, with equally vast resources demands and its own environmental impacts. We need to understand the construction of smart technology and the Internet of Things as coming from mines running on slave labour, lakes of toxic sludge, data centres with militarised security, and will possibly result in a second scramble for Africa.

While some aspects of her work can be challenging, including the English nationalism of Swastika Night, Katharione Burdekin's bold speculations were extraordinary for the period—as is the fact that she got them into print with major publishers, to appreciative reviews. As a writer on gender Burdekin is even more relevant in our troubled times. Her words, her ideas, retain their danger now.

My mum took her first job in 1980, when she was fourteen. In my childhood, she worked as a medical receptionist. For every hour she worked, she was almost certainly paid less than a man in a job of ‘comparable value’. For every curtailed pay check, there was a lower superannuation benefit, a lower amount left for savings at the end of each week and, inevitably, a lower amount to put towards a house deposit.

You have to do it badly. If it is poetry, even more so, because there is no because. If you write like you were the best in the world, you are the worst because you pretend too hard. Too harsh, too. Why do you want to be the best? Is that because you are a lack or there is a lack in you that you feel like filling up all the time? Even when you are named the best, does that mean anything?

We could have been given a visionary budget, emboldened by Labor’s recent electoral successes at both state and federal level, and the fact that the next election is still two years away. Instead, spooked by its own shadow and the bogeyman of inflation, Labor delivered a faded scrapbook of the Party’s old glories.

Passed in 2002, Federal Disability Discrimination Act requires public transport across Australia to be fully accessible by the end of 2022. Our trams, trains and buses are running late. At the current rate of progress, public transport will not be fully accessible until 2066 - over 40 years out of time.

Months before Zuckerberg’s big announcement in October 2021, Dave Karpf explained that virtual reality was the ‘rich white kid of technology‘: no matter how many times it failed to live up to expectations, it would always get another chance and more investment. Just as the VR hype has come and gone multiple times in the past, the metaverse looks to be following the same trend. I wonder how long until it rears its head with another set of inflated promises for how it will forever transform society.

The last Pieface in the state had closed its doors; not even a concession at a servo remained open. This is it, I thought, the golden age is at an end, it’s all drying up now, no one will ever prosper again. An echo rang out—a small pop as if someone had taken a pin to the thin membrane covering a void—the bubble had burst.