Progressive culture since 1954
The words come from another time, but they spoke to the real significance of Corbyn’s appearance on Glastonbury’s mainstage. Shelly wrote The Masque of Anarchy to mark the occasion of the Peterloo Massacre. An occasion when, on another summer day 198 years prior, a rally of between 60,000 and 100,000 English workers was violently attacked by a local militia, while peacefully protesting for the right to elect their MPs.
Screening of Dead-End Drive-In
From 9.30pm, Saturday 12 August at The Astor, Melbourne
In the spring issue of 1972, Overland published the short story ‘Crabs’ by then little-known writer from Bacchus Marsh, Peter Carey. In 1986, ‘Crabs’ was made into the film, Dead End Drive-In. To celebrate the forty-fifth anniversary of the story, Overland has teamed up with the Melbourne International Film Festival.
Who, I wonder, will play Elon Musk in the inevitable biopic? Were such a film made tomorrow, it would be easy to imagine John Barrowman in the lead role. Beyond the obvious physical similarities – square-jawed and Hollywood B-list handsome – both are around fifty, and exude that slight exoticness that comes from having attained US citizenship after being born elsewhere (Musk in Pretoria, Barrowman in Glasgow).
Clicking from source to source, I’m not surprised to find the same detailed descriptions of her clothes over and over.
‘She is believed to be aged in her 20s wearing a black long sleeved top, blue denim shorts and white runners …’ I wonder what I am supposed to deduce from this information.
From 6pm, Monday 24 July
Readings Hawthorn
A new anthology reflecting on violence against women. Editor Jane Caro will launch the book alongside readings from and discussions with contributors Rebecca Lim and Overland editor Jacinda Woodhead.
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.
6.30pm, Thursday 17 August
The Wheeler Centre, Melbourne
Drawing on MIFF’s Sci-fi retrospective and looking at how cinema harnesses contemporary anxieties to show us where we might be headed, some of the best minds around dissect the darker corners of the future in this panel discussion about Dystopia on Film.
A complete* collection of Australian Prime Ministers, Dave Drayton’s P(oe)Ms is the neat, satisfying, wordplay that haters of poetry (and me) often forget is its benchmark. These kinds of engaging, playful works are increasingly coming from younger poets – politically and technologically on top of it, and very present. Or is that prescient? Anyway, P(oe)Ms is funny. Very.
The danger lies in seeing Trump or Brexit as an aberration, rather than a reaction to and by-product of liberalism. The received wisdom is that liberalism is somehow virtuous and inherently good. But this formulation makes it impossible to understand why politicians saying openly fascistic things are garnering wide support in supposedly principled liberal democracies.
Workers are providing free labour for Shires and private companies, and they face eight weeks suspension if they miss work. ‘It’s a form of slavery,’ Matthew Ryan explains. ‘We’re working hard for peanuts. People are hungry under the CDP changes … There’s less money to provide food for the kids. It’s starving our people … you might as well give us rations, like back in the old days.’
Instead of becoming the object of ridicule or humour, the laughing woman was an example of a new perspective in film that complicated the dominance of the male gaze. This happened when women laughed together. ‘Women’s laughter counteracts dominance when it constructs a counterknowledge, a counterknowledge that is collectively produced through female bonding across barriers of class and race.’
A few years back, News Corp was warning, almost every week, about antisemitism in Australia. Invariably, the claims were bogus: more about slating the Greens and the BDS movement than genuinely exposing bigotry. Today, with a small but significant coterie of genuine antisemites raising their heads, we find News Corps again in the thick of the action: not calling out the racists, mind you, but providing them with political cover.
‘We will determine who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.’
I remember hearing this soundbite from John Howard’s speech in 2001. I was thirteen at the time, but was already acutely aware of the subtext of the statement.
Angela Nagle has written an indispensable book that allows both the extremely online- and meme-illiterate to grasp the IRL implications of the online culture wars. From the rise of Trump as a lulzy agent of base enjoyment and unrestrained conspiracy, to the collapse of meaning, all are products of an online culture that privileges affect and transgression.
But what if a discussion of The Handmaid’s Tale would be better served by viewing it in the context not of the Trump era or larger, historical traumas, but ‘small’ daily terrors? What is most frightening about Atwood’s novel and this television adaptation is how it represents a world for women not unlike the one we are currently living in; a world that is both familiar and unfamiliar.
At the start of the 2013 school year I stood at the front of a school gymnasium and outed myself as transgender to 250 Year 10 students. I believed myself to be a pragmatist. I was about to commence a medical transition that would alter my voice and appearance. I had changed my name. Disclosing my transition to the students whom I saw every day was an inevitability.
Today the cabinet is meeting to consider whether to create a new ‘super-department’ along the lines of the British Home Office or the US Department of Homeland Security. The new portfolio would merge the Immigration department – already boasting its own paramilitary in the form of the Australian Border Force – with the Australian Federal Police and spy agency ASIO. And Immigration Minister Peter Dutton is the man who will oversee the new department.