Progressive culture since 1954
Navid is chasing his dreams. Dreams that as a stateless Feyli Kurd he cannot achieve where he is, a Feyli Kurd who cannot acquire a National ID card, who cannot participate in sporting competitions. Living here is difficult for someone like Navid who has given his blood, sweat and tears to wrestling. He is a stateless person whose life changed suddenly, who can now no longer remain living where he is.
We need a diverse and flourishing media landscape, in which new content providers can make use of the incredible potential of the web and in which the historic role of journalism to speak truth to power is afforded protection and respect. Unfortunately, the proposed media code may take us in the opposite direction.
We can’t abstract pathogenicity from any discussion about disclosure in a queer context. HIV hysteria was born of a wilful blindness by the political class to the inner workings of the virus’ pathology in the early years of the epidemic. Despite the astonishing advancements in both treatment and prevention, its long shadow still hangs over the queer community – at its darkest over Black queer men.
COVID-19 is one crisis among many, along with those that invest the climate, democracy and capitalism. Even as it subsides, those others will remain and intensify. If COVID-19 can have any lasting, constructive impact, it will be in teaching the working classes how to handle a crisis. The pandemic’s most significant legacy is the lessons workers globally take from this experience.
As sabre-rattling escalates and increasingly hysterical claims of foreign influence are used as pretexts for military build-up – in Australia and elsewhere – John le Carré’s novels will not stay in the last century. They will remain as prescient and timely as ever, and only become more essential to our understanding of how secret power is wielded against the forces seeking a more just world.
Shows like Parks and Rec and Schitt’s Creek (or Rosehaven) represent the continuation of the pastoral fantasy in the context of social and political upheaval. The pastoral endures in the English imagination, the context where Williams excavated its grip, but the category is just as applicable elsewhere in an age of environmental catastrophe, political upheaval and economic immiseration.
What is the colour of the world? The bush flame? And how should I begin? With phantoms like portents a blowtorch on the roadhouse the pity blues dogs don’t let up bragging. In the aftertaste of mourning are bankrupt sermons ‘twit twit twit’
The mother and her two girls were naked in the members’ change room of the gymnasium. They had just taken a shower and their three blue towels were hanging on the hooks. The mother was brushing her hair. Evie was sitting on the wooden bench getting herself dressed. She pulled on a pair of pyjama pants, which were decorated with a single repeated print of a purple unicorn.
How do you theme a fiction special that was created and pulled together in the depths of a global pandemic and severe lockdown? You don’t. You find a collection of talented writers and let them do what they do best. Thanks to the support of a Creative Victoria grant, this fiction special features a very talented selection of writers whose stories offer us a brief reprieve from the world we’ve all inhabited this year.
Luster is smart, and funny, and very sad, and extremely good in its own right. In observing the refracted desires and self-critiques that guide Edie’s romantic trajectory, we can see one example of how race, age and privilege intersect to influence what it is that we want when we have sex.
By continuing to allow the police to march as a float, the Mardi Gras board continues to stand by their record of racial violence. In allowing the police to march, Mardi Gras tells every Aboriginal family who’s had someone they love killed by a cop or died in their custody that it’s the police who they prefer to celebrate. Mardi Gras tells me, a gay Aboriginal man, that the parade isn’t for me.
In grappling with the original, Final Fantasy VII Remake engages not only with the same environmental conflicts at the heart of the original game, but with the failures, mistakes and inactions of those who have come before. It becomes about one of the key aspects of the current climate crisis: reckoning with decades of inaction and understanding the effect that inaction could have on our future.
In the first half of 2020, Overland received a small grant to help the magazine provide writing and publishing opportunities during the pandemic lockdown, part of a broader scheme by Creative Victoria to save the arts sector when so many jobs and gigs completely disappeared for so many artists. ‘Poetry in Lockdown’ is one outcome of this—
What could a real collaborative process look like in a landscape where colonial injustices never ended, and just continued under different names? How could a non-indigenous filmmaking team walk into such an unequal playing field, and effectively give the power back to the communities who never ceded their lands? This is how.
Despite Morrison’s claims, Australia has made a binary choice. It could have been an independent country in the Asia-Pacific region with strong ties to its neighbours and the ability to forge truly independent foreign policy. Instead, it picked an imperial power in the US, expecting it to be a loyal ally based on nothing more than misplaced racial solidarity.
Galea’s recent alleged embrace of Christianity and nonviolence may be a healthier response to his incarceration than might otherwise be expected, but the rampant paranoia and resentment that fuelled his actions remains widespread among his ilk on the outside. The constant platforming of racist and xenophobic propagandists, both on the fringe and in the mainstream, will only reinforce these reactionary tendencies. As such, and if US politics is anything to go by, it seems likely that there will be more Galeas in future.
Ash came down off the escarpment. At first, I thought it was bugs—swarms of them—but the air didn’t clear either side. I rode my brother’s bike through it. There wasn’t that far to go and I took the long way, swung around corners to add blocks of space. Usually Lou wanted to go someplace no one else was, to the cubby house by the creek or the old train tunnels, but that day he’d called to say meet by the water. I could see him from a way off.
Lists are bad. Except this one – you can trust this list.
It is tempting to dismiss Evans as unhinged, but it would be a mistake to view his radicalisation trajectory in isolation. Since the onset of the pandemic, some quarters of the wellness industry have been taken in by conspiritualist ideas, including those of QAnon. Militant wellness – think singing bowls, praise for Trump and the use of weapons – is now a thing.
We can hold an idea in our minds, such as the statement ‘women are better at endings than they are at beginnings’, explore it, see what it offers, before letting it go. Just as we can hold desire before it scatters and reforms. We can take pleasure from a particular mode of submission until it no longer serves us. Endings well up from deep within, called up by who knows what, and arriving at who can guess what time.