Overland literary journal

The Hands Off Melbourne’s Estates campaign's organisation, unity, and tactics defeated ten years ago a less extreme version of what Jacinta Allan’s government is implementing today. It’s worth asking how it did so, and whether shifts in the political terrain over the past decade mean such victories are now out of reach.

What we learn in these moments of eclipse is that democracy is a flimsy basis upon which to mount a defence of Israeli violence, or, as numerous world leaders put it at the time of the October attack by Hamas, “Israel’s right to defend itself”. In fact, the democracies that are so invested in accentuating Israel’s democratic credentials are the same democracies that sell billions of dollars of weapons to Israel so that they can kill tens of thousands of unarmed civilians, while starving tens of thousands more to death.

Sponsored by Trinity College at the University of Melbourne and supporters, the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, established in 2014 and now in its ninth year, recognises the talent of young Indigenous writers across Australia.

Because after autumn there are / other autumns, / we learn to eat the wind. / This is what we shall do / with all our anger.

There is an older chapter to the originating mythology of this saga that has been obscured. We write to register these ghosts in the architecture and alert a farther-afield readership to the latest wave of grassroots protest happening now.

La Trobe University has yet to speak out on this critical international human rights issue. Now is the time for La Trobe University to join the global movement advocating for justice for Palestinians.

Those gifts were other writers, thinkers, concepts, moments. Jameson served as an expansive mediator, setting up texts that promised to be an encounter between a moment or text and a diverse set of thinkers. One would learn plenty along the way in the encounter, certainly, but, as time went on, what was there to return was his style itself.

Jayson Gillham is the latest in a long line of artists punished for their solidarity with Palestinians amidst (and before) the current genocide. The repeated assertion that a “concert platform is not an appropriate stage for political comment” follows an ahistorical attitude common within institutions, audiences and the broader public that classical music is an artform without real meaning, politics and thus contemporary relevance.

In Yousef’s memory — but also in remembrance of my grandfather, and in honour of my parents, refugees across three continents — and in a spirit of hope without optimism, I call for the Australian government to create a humanitarian visa for Palestinians. I also call for Australia to fulfill its international obligations by withdrawing all support, direct and indirect, for Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory — starting with an arms embargo.

Even as the university refuses to name the genocide and continues to intimidate those who grieve and rage against it, its processes create policy fictions that disavow activism and rewrite violent facts on the ground.

Shortly after graduating from high school, Jack Goolbroom bought his first car, an old red Honda Civic, pocked with dents and dings more numerous than the acne scars spattering his pallid cheekbones. The red paint was sun-damaged, acid-washed to almost-pink on the roof, as if it had suffered third-degree burns in a housefire.

Masculinity is an important and controversial topic in gay discourse, and Invisible Boys should be celebrated as an excellent document of the phenomenon as lived in regional Australia. Yet I lamented the absence of an effeminate gay character in Sheppard’s macho universe. A character for whom painted nails might not have just been “a punk thing.

“Defend the unions, defend the CFMEU. Demand your union stand in solidarity with the CFMEU. Join the workers’ campaign to defend their union.” Ten things workers need to know about the CFMEU — with words by Sarah Missen and illustrations by Sam Wallman.