Progressive culture since 1954
How can it be that a person of sixteen or seventeen – old enough to determine their own sexual identity, to marry (at times), to decide on a career, even to serve in the military or possibly be tried as an adult in criminal court – can find themselves without a voice in a national debate?
We need to remember the history of marriage even in the midst of making the argument for equal access. Otherwise we risk becoming inadvertently ahistorical and conservative, both in argument and politically. Looking to the history of marriage and to the history of queer liberation also helps to remind us that there are many ways to conceive of what constitutes a relationship, and many ways to express love outside of marriage, even outside of ‘relationship status’. And critically, this history helps us to imagine the vast possibilities for difference in the present and in the future.
A $122M non-binding postal vote to decide whether we can marry or not in the nation that forged one of the most progressive queer scenes in the world; whose culture of song, dance and public art completely transformed our society, let alone made the state millions – you must have noticed that, eh Malcolm, being such a good businessman; whose sexual liberation has been everybody’s liberation; whose AIDS policies were so successful they went on to be adopted worldwide and save millions of lives.
Literary audiences can’t help asking, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ It’s as if an idea is a magic bean: something precious from which stories grow. A thing that can be got, somewhere. Neil Gaiman says people don’t like it when he reveals, truthfully, that his ideas are made up in his head. ‘They look unhappy, as if I’m trying to slip a fast one past them.’
They are eating the photographs
Because
there is no bread
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.
I picked up The Honest History Book during the first wave of concerted right-wing attacks on Yassmin Abdel-Magied for her seven-word facebook post on Anzac Day, and its measured and analytical essays came as a welcome relief. The book traces the strange story of how a devastating global conflict became so central to Australian nationalism when, as Douglas Newton observes, ‘the Great War should rattle our souls, not rouse our national self-esteem’.
Overland and Victoria University are pleased to announce that the four judges of this year’s Victoria University Short Story Prize for New and Emerging Writers – author Frank Moorhouse, UQP editor Ian See, writer and academic Enza Gandalfo and Overland’s Rachael McGuirk – have reduced this year’s 800 entries to a shortlist of ten stories.
On the same day in April this year that I arrived at the Terra Livre Indigenous Camp in Brasilia, the various nations present decided to march on the National Congress. Each group gathered under its banners and flowed out into the city’s enormous central avenue. The Kayapo, famous warriors of the Xingu River, at the forefront of every campaign to protect the Amazon since the 1980s, went first.
With Donald Trump all but endorsing the recent fascist rally in Charlottesville, and liberals in the US and Australia suddenly coming around to the importance and legitimacy of antifascism, it’s worth taking a step back to look at what fascism is, where it comes from, and how to stop it.
The role of intellectual property law in the age of the information economy is a hugely complex topic, and parsing out the various roles and objectives of copyright (let alone intellectual property law more generally) is a monumental task. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to buy the line that protecting copyright (and resisting the liberalisation of the regime via fair use) is synonymous with the interests of artists.
So far the conservatives have out manoeuvred the marriage equality movement. Defeating them in the so-called plebiscite will finally end years of shadow boxing over what should be a simple decision, namely to amend the Marriage Act to remove the requirement that marriage be solely between a man and a woman.
You can oppose the torture of refugees with all your heart but the mentality that this shit is normal blankets everything in public life like acid snow, and you have to fight to keep your head above it. Like let’s all go to the beach or a sausage sizzle or whatever and pretend this is the lucky country while innocent people in detention are setting themselves on fire.
Artist Sofia Sabbagh on the volunteers helping track the environmental toll of Victoria’s logging practices.
The Overland Writers Residency, supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund, is an initiative aimed at addressing a lack of opportunities for under-represented writers. Following the success of Overland’s inaugural Writers’ Residency in 2016, this year’s residency will be open to Indigenous writers at any stage of their writing career. Applications close Sunday 24 September, 2017.
One way to read poetry in Australia is to see it as being in a constant state of conflict. For the most part, this is a cold war where poets argue with poets in very poetic ways – the outcry about Geoff Page’s Southerly blog probably counts as the outer limit of this activity, which manifests more often in email exchanges, reviews that are compliment sandwiches or gossipy asides. Sometimes this breaks out into the open, as we saw when John Kinsella took out a restraining order against Robert Adamson and Anthony Lawrence and which the Sydney Morning Herald covered in 2006.
US Coast Guard U-turned to Pier Thirty-nine
August DeMont co-produced daughter number one
Carol DeMont was her name