Published 29 November 201026 March 2012 · Main Posts Push this button Stephanie Convery It is one thing to describe this reality, another to explain it without falling into simplisitic slogans. A few sat goggle-eyed, before the traffic that was leaping forward on the right along for the ride but with little to no idea what was about to happen. ‘Apple pie exists to create sweet memories, not regurgitate old ones!’ The military thought this was great stuff— ‘Stay a little to the side!’ They’d heard about our proposed sedition: a form of collective memory intent on taking the fight a big step further. I pull my professional face into order. A speech. A postcard to the next Left, a matter of some delicacy. The nakedly commercial and haphazard nature of the literary enterprise is clear. Where will this take us? Access to such a rich store of information that is continuously changing and evolving through ongoing debate lowered the barriers to participation, opportunity too, in the tsunami of material the seeds for non-abstracted, compassionate, grass-roots politics. Where will this take us? Politics has a tendency of being refracted. As a country we are profoundly deluded— whose views does it represent? They locked us out, remember? We expect more than this from our government. The old monkey suit doesn’t fit like it used to & we need to go beyond thinking that the struggle for liberation follows a linear path. Cultural creativity comes in all shapes and sizes. The real work of transformation is being born in our households, in sharehouses, in neighbourhood projects. Overland was launched in 1954— an extraordinary career and you need to nurture those glimmering ideas the source of our dissension. Writing can capture the evanescent spirit of an age in a way few other mediums can by an alchemy never quite explained— its arms outstretched in majesty, immediate, vivid, authentic, animated to voyage on a discovery of self-awareness. It’s a good thing you’re around. Each line of this piece is a fragment taken verbatim from OL 198, 199 or 200. With thanks (and apologies) to Mungo McCallum, Raewyn Connell, Lizzie O’Shea, Miriam Sved, Simon Sellars, Brian Walters, Phillip Tang, Kevin Foster, Cate Kennedy, Michael Hyde, Sean Scalmer & Jackie Dickinson, Tad Tietze, Carmel Bird, John McLaren, Jeff Sparrow, Michelle Carmody, Sophie Cunningham, Marion Rankine, Bruce Mutard, Clive Hamilton and Chris Graham. Stephanie Convery Stephanie Convery is the deputy culture editor of Guardian Australia and the former deputy editor of Overland. On Twitter, she is @gingerandhoney. More by Stephanie Convery › 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 16 August 202416 August 2024 · Poetry pork lullaby Panda Wong but an alive pig / roots in the soil /turning it over / with its snout / softening the ground / is this a hymn 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.