The final solution
There is no amount of legalese at one’s disposal that could possibly obscure the coded messages that so often come rising to the surface in the Australian Parliament.
Progressive culture since 1954
Shortlist for the 2018 VU Short Story Prize
While we’d like to thank all 863 entrants who worked hard to submit this year, the four judges for the 2018 competition – writer Sarah Schmidt, writer and editor Michelle Cahill, writer and VU academic Tom Clark, and writer and Overland fiction editor Jennifer Mills – have now decided on a shortlist of thirteen outstanding stories.
The fight for women’s refuge
The first women’s refuge in Melbourne opened in 1974. According to the Women’s Liberation Halfway House Collective (WLHHC), ‘the need for a Halfway House had been discussed for a long time in the Women’s Liberation Movement’, as the Women’s Liberation Centre ‘constantly received calls from women needing somewhere to stay for awhile, often in desperate circumstances.’ In April 1974, a meeting was called to ‘discuss the setting up of a halfway house… a halfway point for women between their old lives and new ones.’
The nihilism of inner-Sydney architecture
People are protective of their space and often suspicious of outsiders. People are cramped together in auspicious looking high-rises, disturbingly typical and askew. Outside of my inner-west bubble, I often talk to friends who have lived in Ashfield for years, a suburb that completely transformed and reshaped within a matter of months.
On writing while foreign
Often, when asked what I do for a living, I say I am a writer as well as a translator. It is not a word that I would use in my native language: the Italian ‘scrittore’ is far too grandiose. It implies that you have published at least one book, probably more, whereas the English word ‘writer’ covers a larger semantic field, encompassing people who write habitually for a public in various media domains, such as this journal.
A new red scare? On the campaign against Chinese influence
What, if anything, does McCarthyism have to do with racism? Consider what happened to the Council on African Affairs, founded in 1937 with a slightly different name, and renamed in 1941. The CAA was a volunteer organisation which published a journal called New Africa. It campaigned against colonialism and apartheid, and publicised the activities of the South African ANC, the party of Nelson Mandela.
On the fear of a ‘foreign invasion’
It’s symptomatic of where we’re at in Australia that the appearance of fascist agitator and Hitler-fan Blair Cottrell on Sky News – an interview that briefly turned ‘Nazi’ into a Twitter trending topic – wasn’t the most significant media boost offered to white nationalism in the last week.
July in fiction (plus one collective memoir)
An activist in the 1970s, Desmond spent years working and living with ‘gang women’ in New Zealand. Trust was an attempt to tell their stories ethically. It didn’t shy away from intersections of class, race, economic disempowerment and violence.
Her second book turns the lens on subject matter more personally hazardous, and no less ethically fraught.
Post-communist blues
Citizens of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries are not satisfied with the progress that has been made since 1989. Many feel that they have traded in the grey faceless bureaucratic oppression of the Communist Party for a new capitalist class who are offensively showy: every four-carat diamond and London flat pilfered through privatisation has become a personal insult to an unemployed Donbass miner or pension-dependent babushka in Yekaterinburg.
What happened to sci-fi?
Sci-fi has depoliticised. Spectacle has replaced critique. Most sci-fi today just isn’t about very much, nor does it have much feeling to it: the feeling of not knowing who you are, like Deckard and Rachel in Blade Runner; of longing for someone you’ve lost, like Kris Kelvin in Solaris; the feeling of fear for your life, as in Alien; of pure awe and wonder as in Close Encounters with the Third Kind.
Poets, we want your writing about the internet!
Overland is seeking poetry submissions for a special online edition – ‘Tribulations of the digital frontier’ – to be guest edited by long-time Overland volunteer, Mitchell Welch.
Mary Shelley: on body horror and biopics
Whether it be in terms of creators or fans, horror is not – nor has it ever been – the ‘boys club’ it is so commonly assumed to be. In Haifaa al-Mansour’s recently released biopic Mary Shelley, the author is told by her stepsister Claire Clairmont upon first reading her famous novel Frankenstein: ‘I’ve never read such a perfect encapsulation of what it feels to be abandoned.’ At its best, horror is all about outsiders, its focus emphatically upon the experience of otherness.
Racists on speaking tour: rethinking our response
A couple of weeks back, I went to hear Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern, two right-wing nationalist speakers who recently finished a tour of Australia and New Zealand, speak at Sydney’s International Convention Centre. My attendance was part study, part curiosity about their audience and influence.
Scoundrel time: from the Rosenbergs to Russiagate
For all the talk of Russia … Trumpism could not have been a more quintessentially American phenomenon: a faux populism stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster from a variety of the local resentments arising from a divided and broken country.
Yanny, Laurel or a thought experiment in empathy
The internet was divided recently when a short audio clip repeating a two-syllable word caused an outpouring of confusion. ‘Do you hear Yanny or Laurel?’ everyone asked. Within hours it became team Yanny versus team Laurel, both groups lambasting one another over Twitter and Facebook. I hear Laurel. I am a thirty-year-old deaf woman.
Bad readers
I began university in 1996, attending what could be considered an ‘elite’ US institution. It was not Ivy League, but it was regularly listed among the top thirty universities in the country. The fee for one year was just over $33,000, including room and board. My family had been comfortably middle class for most of my childhood, but my father had quit his job and taken another at much lower pay while I was in high school. I was only able to attend the university because I received direct scholarships, alongside a complex array of government-subsidised loans and grants.
Tea ceremony
Jab. ‘$679. Your original price.’
Jab. ‘$649. Your reduced price.’
Jab, jab. ‘$629. Your additional discount from your $20 gift card.’
I was pretty sure he was wrong. I thought he’d rung up $20, not $629. But the bill was a little too far away for me to see it clearly and he was making such a big thing about it in front of all those people that I just apologised, another middle-aged sans papiers among the digital natives. He folded my receipt back into the bag and smiled.