Progressive culture since 1954
Eaten Fish is the pen name of 25-year-old Iranian Ali, who has been imprisoned on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea for three years. He documents the conditions of his incarceration through intricate artworks that tell the story of a place created by Australian law, surveilled by Australian law and yet full of trauma, abuse and violence.
‘Wait – why are we giving $7.5 million to bigots when they spew hate for free?’ On recent ‘balanced debate’ around the plebiscite and equal marriage.
Comedian Louis CK has a piece of standup where he says, for women, the greatest risk to their health and safety is men. He likens going home with a man as potentially dangerous as going home with a wild bear: ‘I hope this one’s nice,’ he says wryly, as he mimes hopping into a cab.
It remains a wearing truth that women are expected to exercise constant vigilance against the potential threat some men pose. It is almost laughable how ridiculous the vigilance required is. Almost.
In June 2016, an Australian on minimum wage earned $656.90 per week. That is $34,159 a year, before tax. According to the Australian Tax Office’s ‘simple tax calculator’, the tax owed would be $3030, leaving a take-home salary of $31,128. Let’s call it $600 a week.
It’s fair to say that many of us would struggle to make ends meet on that income – $600 a week does not go very far in modern Australia.
Jeremy Corbyn, the first radical socialist leader in the Labour Party’s history, was never going to have things easy. Elected against considerable resistance from the political establishment – but with 60 per cent of Labour members’ support amid a surge in party recruitment – his cards were marked from day one. Labour MPs let it be known that they would get rid of Corbyn by any means necessary. As it happens, the media has been their constant ally in the struggle.
But now this long campaign for equality has taken what I think is a self-defeating turn by making its main focus stopping the proposed plebiscite. And with Bill Shorten’s apparent decision to oppose a popular vote no matter what, that approach may kill not only the plebiscite, but with it any chance of marriage equality being legislated in this term of parliament.
While Zionism as an ideology and political project has been ideologically dominant among diaspora Jewry for the best part of a century, there are signs that there is at the very least an emerging ambivalence in Jewish communities about Zionism and the broader project of Jewish sovereignty. The appearance of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now that support the BDS movement is one sign of an ongoing sea-change in the Jewish community. Another such sign, interestingly, is a new work of alternative history by American Jewish writer Simone Zelitch called Judenstaat (‘Jewish State’).
I’ve had chefs throw hot pans at me. I’ve had customers throw glasses at me and flick their cigarettes at me. I’ve had guys at bars push their fingers up my arse and grab my tits while I was working. I have never reported it because I was afraid of losing my job. Instead, I have tried to laugh it off. I’m earning minimum wage, and speaking out has a cost, always.
Opponents to immigration often warn against accepting groups who do not ‘assimilate’ or ‘integrate’ into society, commonly using these two terms interchangeably. But in fact, the words have quite different meanings. While the likes of One Nation would accept the assimilation of all foreign cultural practices into an Australian hegemony, they remain vehemently opposed to ‘integration’.
As this edition of Overland goes to print, refugees and asylum seekers on Nauru have been protesting for 180 consecutive days about their 1153 days in detention. Twelve hundred adults, children and babies rammed into (repurposed) containers or suffocative tents in a camp where water is scarce and food rotten, where rape and sexual abuse is an everyday occurrence, where escape is sought through self-harm or suicide. Misery and pain goes unheeded; broken bones, infections, diseases and ailments are treated with, at best, Panadol.
It’s interesting that at this point in time there are calls being made to name the era we’re living in as the Anthropocene – the impact of humans is now observable in the fossil record, in our plastics and chicken bones. The period of The Island Will Sink is the ‘Praeteranthropocene’ – ‘human beings are no longer capable of remedying the negative impact they’ve made on the planet’.
But, she points out, it can also be those minority groups who are of the greatest interest to the Australian Government for purposes of surveillance. ‘It’s mostly Muslim people who are inflicted with increased surveillance in our post-September 11 world’, says Edney-Browne. The Australian public is frequently divided over whether or not this is okay.
Whether you’re an emerging writer or you’ve been around the traps for a while now, Overland is sure to have an opportunity for you.
The narrative that trigger warnings pose a threat to freedom of speech, driven by a rabid identity politics, a resurgence of ‘political correctness’, or simply infatalised, maladjusted students is not just banal and intellectually lazy, but positions students themselves as the antagonists who pose a threat to education.
Nirvana’s legacy isn’t the kind that exudes an anxiety of influence. Rather the opposite has occurred: Nevermind was the tipping point where the political and aesthetic ironies of rock music and rock culture met. If we are to believe the hype, it was the moment where rock music died one of its many terrible deaths. Upon closer scrutiny, the exact opposite occurred.
It was going to happen sooner or later. The shortlist for the Man Booker Prize has thrown into relief fears that were tentatively voiced in 2014, when, in the name of globalism, the competition was first opened to American authors: that a US-UK hegemony would cast its shadow over the literary world, sidelining smaller Commonwealth voices and severely curtailing any purchase on diversity.
At no point in Britain’s political history has the attempted removal of a party leader increased its membership and effectively transformed said party into a political and social movement. Between 25 June and 8 July, 120,000 new members joined Labour, taking its total membership above 500,000 for the first time since the late 1970s. In the two days after the leadership vote alone, more than 15,000 new members joined.
It was in 1936, at the age of twenty-one, that Judith Wright was given the job of writing ‘Quadrangles’, a social column for the student newspaper, Honi Soit.
Whereas the West sees the emergence of an Asian superpower as something unprecedented and potentially destabilising, China views her rise as a return to the natural order of things – to a time when she’s, once again, the world’s leading economic, technological and intellectual power.