Published 27 August 200927 August 2009 · Main Posts what’s that i see on the horizon, folks? Maxine Beneba Clarke Have you looked around you in Melbourne lately? The stationary shelves are empty. Strange dreamy-eyed out-of-towners walk around newsagents with odd hopeful smiles on their faces, slipping exercise books and HB pencils under their jackets and running for all hell in their threadbare docs as the anti-theft sensors scream at them. The coffee houses are full (but only the cheap and non-franchise ones) with silent scribblers, crouched low over their tables. The shelves of secondhand bookstores are dust free for the first time in months (cause we all know Borders and that Angus place don’t stock any of the hard stuff these godsent desperates are pining for). Must be folks, that Overload 09 is almost here. Maxine Beneba Clarke Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian author and slam poet of Afro- Caribbean descent. Her short fiction collection Foreign Soil won the 2015 ABIA Award for Best Literary Fiction and the 2015 Indie Award for Best Debut Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. Her memoir, The Hate Race, her poetry collection Carrying the World, and her first children’s book, The Patchwork Bike, will be published by Hachette in late 2016. More by Maxine Beneba Clarke › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 28 March 20249 April 2024 · Main Posts Why we should value not only lived experience, but also lived expertise Sukhmani Khorana In the wake of this year’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, I want to extend the central idea of El Gibbs’s 2022 essay on 'lived expertise' and argue that in media accounts of racism, analytical expertise and lived experience ought to be valued together and even in the same body. 5 March 2024 · Main Posts Andrew Charlton’s school assignment Alex McKinnon Australia's Pivot to India exists for three reasons: so that when Andrew Charlton is interviewed on the radio or introduced on Q+A, his bio includes the phrase "he has written a book about Indian-Australian relations"; to fend off accusations that he is another Kristina Keneally engaging in electoral colonialism in western Sydney; and to help the Albanese government strengthen economic and military ties with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
