Progressive culture since 1954
It is with some sadness that we announce that our brilliant fiction editor of six years, Jennifer Mills, is moving on to other projects.
As many of you would know, Jen is wonderful to work with – she’s one of Australia’s leading writers, a visionary editor, and a generous colleague and mentor.
Every year, Overland publishes several online editions showcasing fiction by new and emerging writers, or specially curated themed fiction editions. An opportunity exists for an emerging editor to work on one of these online fiction editions, to be published in April or May 2019.
Overland is looking to expand its team of fiction and poetry readers, and to start a team of nonfiction readers. These volunteer positions only require a time commitment of a few hours per month.
After six years of shaping Overland’s fiction, our brilliant and inspiring fiction editor Jennifer Mills will be finishing up her editorship, with the final issue of 2018. As such, Overland is seeking a new fiction editor for the print magazine.
Overland is seeking fiction submissions for a special online edition themed around ‘future sex’, to be edited by Michalia Arathimos. We are looking for stories that engage with what our changing sexualities look like, both now and in the future.
I’m one of the delegates in my workplace – I have been so for about a year. In that time, I’m proud to say, we’ve successfully increased union membership from 30% to 96%. How did we do this? By taking up political questions in the workplace that are relevant to broader society such as marriage equality, refugees and the racist demonisation of the South Sudanese community, as well as agitating and campaigning around issues at our workplace to improve our working conditions.
Because there’s a lawlessness online, and because there are cowboys, the idea of a digital frontier seems to be the one down-to-earth internet metaphor that just about functions.
Folks, welcome to our annual, week-long Subscriberthon! It’s a lovely time of year: there are so many marvellous prizes to be won! And a splendid magazine to support!
There’s an emphasis on self-empowerment within contemporary feminism which I think is hugely important. But I also think that the idea of self-empowerment can become tangled up in capitalism’s consumer culture, and social media-driven narcissism, in ways that can warp it into an aggressive individualism. The kind of thinking I’m referring to privileges the ‘right’ to do whatever one wants to do for themselves over anything resembling genuine and thoughtful care for other people.
‘The whole truth about the treatment of blacks in the Norwest hasn’t been written. It may never be written. Only a book written by a man who knows both peoples could express and number the horrible cruelties inflicted by savage, brutish dogs in the shape of white men on the helpless men and women and children in their power.’
A particular production of King Lear is in the headlines at the moment because a tabloid newspaper reported on the sexual harassment of the young actor playing Cordelia. The famous actor playing Lear is the alleged perpetrator. [...] It is not the purposes of this piece of writing to analyse that particular incident. Rather, it is to take focus on the body of Cordelia at this moment and to consider this body and Lear’s tragedy in the contemporary moment.
Readers may be familiar with the ‘Sokal squared’ hoax that was revealed a few weeks back. It basically involved a trio of US researchers publishing articles on deliberately outlandish topics – ‘rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks’, for example – in prestigious journals. The hoaxers claimed their actions were motivated by a desire to expose what they regard as an unhealthy fixation on ‘academic grievance studies.’
The visions of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon haunt me, more than a decade on. No glowing heroics, their battlefield a terrifying, futile sound-and-fury for ‘these who die as cattle’ (as in ‘Anthem for a Doomed Youth’). Sassoon’s ‘Counter-Attack’ is a disorienting frenzy of terror and violence, in a landscape ‘rotten with dead’. Owen’s hellish gas attacks in ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ linger vividly: ‘… the white eyes writhing … blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, obscene as cancer …’ Considering the body-destroying horror of our technological advances in weaponry – atom bombs, napalm, semi-automatic rifles – Owen’s words ring out like an accusation, a trauma collapsing time.
We are pleased to announce the shortlisted writers and artists for the 2018 Fair Australia Prize.
In 1918, after four years of slaughter, deprivation and hardship, the Central Powers of Austro-Hungary and Germany were rocked by strikes and mutinies. In February, a naval mutiny broke out at Kotor and sailors shot their officers; by October, the Austro-Hungarian army had collapsed from mass desertions and political upheaval. Soon afterwards a mutiny by German sailors at Kiel merged with other uprisings and quickly escalated into a full-scale rebellion against the imperial state, sparking the abdication of the German Kaiser and the proclamation of a workers’ republic on 9 November 1918.
1. Our fiction and poetry readers are humans. And in fact, we’re looking for more (to help us read through submissions and select the work that Overland goes on to publish. Interested? Read on.)
In contrast to other core concepts of emancipation such as freedom or equality, solidarity is quite difficult to grasp. This is because it is even more clearly a relationship, a doing, one difficult to fix down by an external standard. Solidarity happens between us. This is exactly what makes it so attractive: it creates connections.
The contradictions of my heritage would raise more questions than I felt comfortable discussing with a stranger. It’s considered bad manners to decline questions, yet apparently it’s reasonable for my identity to be an object of curiosity and scrutiny. These encounters were like a game of confessional dodgeball, with me trying to sidestep questions and steer the conversation away from my ‘exotic’ heritage.
liberate love
into dust
shifting, self-gearing