‘A river of people moving north’: sketches from the ‘migrant caravan’
Walk and wait, wait and walk. They only have one purpose on this trip and it’s to reach the United States. Their life, for the time being, centres on migration.
Progressive culture since 1954
Female genital appearance: what is normal?
Anatomical naming of the female genitals has historically been imprecise, vague and confused. For example, what the ancient Greeks termed the ‘nymphe’ (for the clitoris) would later be applied to the labia minora by the anatomist Vesalius, who thought that the clitoris was a biological abnormality and not a part of the vulva.
In the wake of a Leviathan: The Eastern Australian Current and the future of our oceans
The EAC is just one of many sleeping serpents stirred up by our warming world, a friendly force made unfamiliar. When we talk about climate change, this is its face.
The long road back to progressive politics: on Jeff Sparrow's Trigger Warnings
Trigger Warnings is a brave book, best read as a call for the left to re-examine its strategies during a period of immense danger, to take stock of its key resources and to align itself with the experience of ordinary people without lessening its focus on sexism, racism or homophobia.
The 14 rules For Eternal Fascism: Jordan Peterson and the far right
The extent to which Peterson’s Weltanschauung generally, and his bestselling self-help book 12 Rules for Life specifically, answers to Eco’s features of fascism is striking.
Mapping deaths in custody to dismantle carceral logic
How to write in the aftermath of Invasion Day? How to write about colonialism and the carceral logic that shapes this country? How to write about the cops – the everyday street cops, the cops on horses, the Kevlar-covered cops with their weapons – and the damage they do? How to write about the jails and the detention centres and the border logic and the black sites?
Podcast: The Bridge
This podcast documents important moments from the 2018 Art & Industry Festival that relate to the history and significance of the West Gate Bridge. It will take you to symposiums; intimate accounts from workers who survived the collapse; scenes from the recent production of The Bridge, a play written by the late Vicki Reynolds in 1990; and, finally, to a special performance of ‘Throw your arms around me’ by Mark Seymour, James Henry and local community singers (led by Jennifer Lund), largely sung in the Yuwaalaraay language.
Reflections on the psychotic archive
Archiving my psychotic experiences has been a powerful act of restitution and sense-making. For the mad have always been narrated by psychiatry; their creations collected, annotated and curated by institutions and by people who have never experienced madness themselves.
Whatever happened to the arts of peace?
In the mass media and cultural institutions, we have just marked the 100-year anniversary of Armistice by continuing to fixate on warfare – at the expense of our remarkable history in peace.
History from below: a reading list with Marcus Rediker
As Marcus prepared for his stint in Hawai’i, he shared online the books that he thought were essential for anyone interested in learning how to write history from below. Thinking they would make a great reading list, I wrote to Marcus and, with his permission, they are reproduced here. They also made me wonder: what books could be considered exemplars of Australian or New Zealand histories from below?
‘We are the bomb’: Sorry to Bother You and rebellion
The film is blatantly, beautifully all about class struggle.
The Riace model, climate change and the social imagination
In 1998, nearly thirty years after the discovery of these ancient shipwrecks, another boat left Greece for Italy and ran aground near Riace. This time its cargo was human beings: nearly two hundred Kurdish asylum seekers whose journey had begun in northern Iraq. They walked into the town along the highway, in single file, and the people of Riace did their best to welcome them.
Some changes to our editorial team
Overland is excited to announce some changes to our editorial team in 2019.
A crisis in communication: on social isolation
I’d been using the internet a lot. I wondered, was I addicted? Behavioural scientists have linked internet addiction with social isolation. The three subtypes of addiction are: online gaming, sexual preoccupations, and excessive emailing or texting involving a constant compulsion to message or check messages. Did I have any of these? I did check my messages a lot. They were always disappointing. There was no message, ever, that could be big enough to stop up the gap inside me.
For the love of the music
I saw the hashtag #metoo and listened closely to the stories of other women, but I also distanced myself from those public accounts. I didn’t want to admit that the hashtag is mine too. That I feel I do not have autonomy over my own body. That I feel I can’t stop others from violating my space.
Telling the untold stories: Alexis Wright on censorship
A world without stories. What would this world look like? Would we become even greater strangers to each other? How would I know who you are or how you felt, or what you thought, or what it is like to be you in a world that is in desperate need of creating greater world competency in our understanding of each other?
Sticky floors and Sticky Fingers
Perhaps we need to start thinking about the external influences that might be present at a live gig. We most definitely need to do this before we start talking about the attire or behaviour of women.
The biggest influence on crowds at festivals and intimate gigs is obviously the artists themselves.