Overland literary journal > Articles by: Alison Croggon

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Alison Croggon

Alison Croggon is a Melbourne writer whose work includes poetry, novels, opera libretti and criticism. Her work has won or been shortlisted for many awards. Her most recent book is New and Selected Poems 1991–2017.

Articles by Alison Croggon:

Published in Overland Issue 237 Summer 2019

On failure

Alison Croggon

Back in 2013, I began an epic novel. For the next three and a half years, I consistently worked on this project. Its working title changed at least three times, before I finally settled on Dreamers.

Published in Overland Issue 235 Winter 2019

On art

Alison Croggon

Art is a magnificent illusion of possibility. It expresses the best of us, as well as the worst: it encompasses everything we are.

Published in Overland Issue 234 Autumn 2019

On categories

Alison Croggon

All living things are categorised, in order to make the dazzling, teeming variety of life comprehensible. Scientific taxonomies run from the general to the particular: human beings, for example, are in the domain of the Eukaryote, the kingdom of Animalia, the phylum of Chordata, the class of Mammalia, the order of Primates, the family of Hominidae and the genus of Homo, hence our species name, Homo sapiens – ‘wise man’.

Published in Overland Issue 233 Summer 2018

On the #MeToo movement

Alison Croggon

The #MeToo movement was founded more than a decade ago by a black woman, Tarana Burke, as a way of helping survivors of sexual violence in low-wealth black communities in the United States. Since then it has become shorthand for so many things, many of them far removed from the grassroots approach to healing advocated by Burke. I have watched as it became a lightning rod for anger. I have watched the inevitable backlash gather force. I have watched it turn into a weapon used against women by men.

Published in Overland Issue 232 Spring 2018

On memory

Alison Croggon

One of my earliest memories, dating from before I was four years old, is of lying down in a darkened room. I can hear footsteps inside my ear canal. Thump. Thump. Thump. Finally I sit up, and a tiny witch on a broomstick flies out of my ear. I am not in the least surprised. I knew she was in there.

Published in Overland Issue 231 Winter 2018

On seeing

Alison Croggon

When I first began to do public appearances like poetry readings, not wearing glasses was actually useful, because I couldn’t see the audience. Being looked at by many people terrified me; I suspect that part of me believes that visibility is profoundly perilous. I still find public appearances difficult and exhausting, as if the gaze is a vampiric thing that sucks out all my energy, but being able to see people looking at me doesn’t frighten me anymore.

Published in Overland Issue 230 Autumn 2018

On water

Alison Croggon

Whenever I have moved closer to town, I have missed the cleaner air and the instant sweep of a cool change. Most of all, I like that heart-expanding sense of a horizon clean of buildings, which persists even when you can’t see the water.

25 January 20181 March 2018

Now the sky is empty

Alison Croggon

I first read this poem, which prefaces Ursula Le Guin’s classic fantasy story A Wizard of Earthsea, when I was twelve years old. As with all her writing it has stayed with me for my whole life, gaining depth, translucency and wisdom. And now, after hearing of her death, I’m reading it again, with a new dimension of sorrow and joy. It helps and it doesn’t help. Her flight remains vivid, but now the sky is empty.

Published in Overland Issue 229 Summer 2017

On power

Alison Croggon

In a world marked by pain and damage, it’s difficult to put down our shields. Most of us have them; I have several. Usually we are born with them, but sometimes we make them. We hold these shields in front of our faces, to protect ourselves from the pain of others.

Published in Overland Issue 228 Spring 2017

On reason

Alison Croggon

Both of these vocations are popularly supposed to be the antithesis of rationality: the fantasist/poet lives with her head in the clouds, oblivious to the ‘real world’. And it is true that when I was a teenager daydreams were my lifeline, my escape from an emotional universe that at the time felt unremittingly bleak. But even then, reason and the obduracy of reality mattered to me a great deal.

Published in Overland Issue 227 Winter 2017

On acts of solidarity

Alison Croggon

What makes me burn are those times when I should have been kind and wasn’t, when a gesture might have made a difference and I didn’t make it. Perhaps it would have made no difference, but that’s not the point. I know that in those moments I betrayed something fundamental in the contract of human relationship.

Published in Overland Issue 226 Autumn 2017

On losing John Berger

Alison Croggon

For you, everything holds the same unending miracle of being. You listen to stones and to children; you are as fascinated by the making of soup as by the complexities of art. Every thing is holy.

Published in Overland Issue 225 Summer 2016

On invisibility

Alison Croggon

For me, invisibility has always been a desirable state. I suspect this desire is one of the reasons I was attracted to writing from an early age: it was a way I could assert myself without being seen. Or, perhaps, my early desire to write reinforced my own conviction of invisibility. It seemed miraculous that words I thought and wrote down could communicate even in my absence. It still does.

Published in Overland Issue 224 Spring 2016

On the black dog

Alison Croggon

As a high-functioning depressive, I’m good at keeping its muzzle on. But it gets its teeth in every now and then, and its bite is poison. There are toothmarks I don’t look at, because on that day I can hobble around and get things done. Some mornings I wake up and see them bleeding, see the flesh blackening around ancient wounds. Then I wonder how I can deal with anything at all. On those days, all I can see is that black dog. It’s got its teeth in everything.

Published in Overland Issue 223 Winter 2016

On the fleeting light

Alison Croggon

How do you trace the deaths of hope? Is it when you read that, after years of warnings, the Great Barrier Reef is dying? When you finally understand that no amount of evidence will change the fixed convictions of a bigot? When, in the parade of democratic debate, journalists expose once again the criminality of vast corporations – bribery, corruption, wanton environmental and social destruction – and after a dutiful flurry of outrage everything subsides back into ‘business as usual’?

Published in Overland Issue 222 Autumn 2016

On art as therapy

Alison Croggon

I’ve long held a visceral hostility towards what I’ve called the ‘muesli theory’ of art. This theory maintains that art should be consumed because it’s good for you. Aside from anything else, the idea that art is good for you takes all the fun out of it. It gives art an air of lugubrious obligation that is completely at odds with the involuntary suspension of the self that is art’s most beautiful side effect.

Published in Overland Issue 221 Summer 2015

On rude words

Alison Croggon

It’s so easy to casually strip people of their humanity. We read the anodyne language of respectable bigotry in the news every day – and yet nobody complains of its obscenity. But let loose a stray reference to a human body part or sexual practice and suddenly the moral police are up in arms, defending the borders of ‘civil discourse’.

4 November 201513 January 2016

Tired of being a woman writer

Alison Croggon

All my life, I’ve been a pretend man. I thought I was a person, like the other seven billion people on the planet, and although I’ve always been aware that being a person of a female persuasion is sometimes tricky, I also thought that my sex was irrelevant to my personhood, especially if I wasn’t personally present to affirm it.

Published in Overland Issue 220 Spring 2015

On gateway drugs

Alison Croggon

Sure, everyone says children’s books are benign, but make no mistake: reading is a gateway drug. I was doing poems by the age of five. At ten I had read every book in the house. Every cent of my pocket money went to support my habit. I fooled around with writing a novel, but back then I still had some sense of self-preservation. I threw it out and stuck with poems. Everyone said poems did no harm.

Published in Overland Issue 219 Winter 2015

On the intellectual life of a nation

Alison Croggon

It’s not that it’s easy being an artist anywhere. Materially speaking, it might even be easier to be an artist in Australia, where the standard of living remains high. And France hasn’t escaped the worldwide trend for savage cuts to arts budgets. I’m talking about something more subtle; an assumption, seldom spoken but manifest in countless mundane ways in daily life, that art is a crucial part of the intellectual life of a nation.

12 May 201530 June 2015

Naming the damage

Alison Croggon

I have always tried to write without fear or shame. I wanted to be like Dorothy Hewett and walk naked through the world. And even so. 30 years. This maybe shocks me most of all.

Published in Overland Issue 218 Autumn 2015

Trigger warning

Alison Croggon

It’s very common. It happens to millions of women. It’s hard to talk about because you feel culpable. It must have been your fault – you are the slut those men said you were. Or you feel the shame of being made a victim. I never wanted to be made a victim. I am a victim. I am not a victim. It took me a long time to work out that I had agency in relation to men. I was raised to please a man. My mother told me I should take care never to appear more intelligent than a man.

Published in Overland Issue 217 Summer 2014

On writer’s block

Alison Croggon

If you Google ‘writer’s block’, the miracle that is the internet serves you 81 million responses in 0.35 seconds. You can identify which of the ‘10 Types of Writer’s Block’ might be plaguing you, and then attack it with ‘5 Tips for Punching Writer’s Block in the Face’ or ‘7 Strategies to Outsmart Writer’s Block’.

10 November 201426 November 2014

How to write a cat

Alison Croggon

Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland continues the theme of a certain sinisterness (is a pattern emerging here?) or, at least, an ambiguous nature. The cat ‘looks good-natured,’ as Alice thinks when she first encounters it. But it has ‘very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.’

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014

On intimate otherness

Alison Croggon

One morning in January, I woke up and thought: ‘Today, I absolutely must get a kitten.’ I don’t know what I’d been dreaming. It was one of those thoughts that comes out of the blue, with no idle trail of kitten-musings to warn me that felinophilia would strike me on that particular day. I rose with purpose and vim and made phone calls.

Published in Overland Issue 215 Winter 2014

On the value of art

Alison Croggon

The worst sin any artist can commit is to refuse to be bought. In the crude rhetoric of self-interest that dominates contemporary politics, this sin has potentially become blacker still. If you argue, as Rupert Murdoch does, that the market is a transcendent moral force, then any artist who refuses its values exhibits the worst form of moral turpitude.

Published in Overland Issue 214 Autumn 2014

On reading time and memory

Alison Croggon

I can’t remember learning how to read. I could read and write before I went to school, reportedly because I demanded to know how. There were books in the house, and presumably I saw my parents reading and, like all small children, wanted to emulate my elders.

Published in Overland Issue 213 Summer 2013

On moving house

Alison Croggon

Besides being exhausting and stressful, moving house is strangely introspective.

Published in Overland Issue 212 Spring 2013

Why art?

Alison Croggon

When Campbell Newman won the 2012 Queensland election in a landslide that all but annihilated the ALP, one of his first policy announcements was to abolish the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. This saved a mere $244 000. Newman followed the announcement with more major cuts, ripping $20 million from the arts budget, particularly from education programs.

Published in Overland Issue 211 Winter 2013

On being homeless

Alison Croggon

I have been homeless twice, both times with small children. Both times I had nowhere to live for more than a month, and was offered a roof by friends. Because I had somewhere to go, it didn’t occur to me to think of myself as one of the ‘homeless’. I was just me, in trouble.

10 April 20132 June 2013

‘History (is) a text demanding to be read’

Alison Croggon

‘But we are not historians, and this is not a history book.’ As with its putative subject, the convict outlaw Moondyne Joe, it’s hard to say in a short review what this book, in fact, is: a mixture of history, poetry, criticism, political analysis, memoir and literary esprit, it’s a work that consciously resists closure and definition.

Published in Overland Issue 210 Autumn 2013

On mingled sorrow and joy

Alison Croggon

The release of The Hobbit over Christmas prompted me to re-watch Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. From the beginning, I thought the real genius of these films is in their spectacular design; it’s what has allowed me to gloss over their myriad faults, most of which can’t be laid at the feet of Tolkien.

8 March 20132 June 2013

Liquid nitrogen

Alison Croggon

‘The message of Bild,’ says Enzensberger, after considering earlier Fascist publications, ‘is that no conceivable message exists any more; its sole content is the liquidisation of all content.’

6 February 2013

The private letters of poets

Alison Croggon

‘I really have nothing to say about poetry in general (except that mine tries to counterfeit the communication of those who communicate by silence). And these poems are mostly private letters. R.S.’

18 December 201218 December 2012

Last of 2012: Giving up poetry

Alison Croggon

I have given up poetry, at last count, about three times.

Published in Overland Issue 209 Summer 2012

On not having a career

Alison Croggon

I often find it mildly hilarious when I read articles that talk of writing creatively as a ‘career’. This is purely personal: after three decades of making a precarious living through various kinds of writing, it’s impossible for me to look back over my own ‘career’ with anything but rueful amusement. But exhortations for the ‘author’ to become a ‘brand’ don’t make me laugh. They fill me with revulsion.

11 October 201211 October 2012

‘And what an ear’: on Manson’s Mallarmé

Alison Croggon

There is the initial seduction of the dizzyingly synaesthetic language: a sense peculiar to Mallarmé of a cold, chaste perfume that seems, on the one hand, to be almost suffocating in its density, and on the other to be as motionless and odourless as a fretwork of stone.

12 September 201212 September 2012

Poetry: ‘Is it possible for language to be truthful?’

Alison Croggon

It’s an attractive idea, especially for poets: that poetry, far from being the marginalised wordplay of a powerless minority, in fact exists at the very heart of political power. In Stay on Message, Tom Clark makes this very case, echoing, although he doesn’t cite it anywhere, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s argument in his famous essay ‘A Defence of Poetry’ that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’.

Published in Overland Issue 208 Spring 2012

Re-reading Austen

Alison Croggon

I’m reading Jane Austen again. As a habitual re-reader to the point of vice, Austen is one of the authors to whom I have returned more often than I can count.

31 July 201231 July 2012

Poetry: A slow art that asks the big questions

Alison Croggon

Poetry is a slow art. Between Kate Fagan’s first full-length collection, The Long Moment, and her second, First Light, is a gap of a decade, punctuated only by a couple of chapbooks. It has been well worth the wait.

29 June 201229 June 2012

Poetry: Ladylike

Alison Croggon

Kate Lilley prefaces her anticipated second collection of poems, Ladylike, with an epigraph from American feminist academic Lauren Berlant: ‘Everyone knows what the female complaint is.’ It’s taken from Berlant’s book, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, which investigates women’s mass culture in America over the past two hundred years, arguing that it returns again and again to a ‘discourse of disappointment’ that is nourished by its own broken promises.

28 May 201228 May 2012

Poetry: Heteronymic collections

Alison Croggon

26 April 201226 April 2012

Poetry: Ian Hamilton Finlay, ‘avant gardener’

Alison Croggon

The Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay is one of the most influential artists of the late twentieth century. Controversial, obdurate, famously irascible, he inscribed himself in Scottish culture as the eternal outsider, a poet in exile in his own land, constantly at war with an age that he claimed had lost an essential piety.

Published in Overland Issue 206 Autumn 2012

Mayakovsky

Alison Croggon

Commissioned by Victorian Opera, to be staged in 2013, with score by Michael Smetanin.

22 March 201228 March 2012

Poetry: After Rimbaud

Alison Croggon

In the Letter of Poetics at the end of Happiness: After Rimbaud, Sean Bonney claims provocatively: ‘It is impossible to fully grasp Rimbaud’s work … if you have not studied through and understood the whole of Marx’s Capital. And this is why no English-speaking poet has ever understood Rimbaud’.

Published in Overland Issue 205 Summer 2011

Alison Croggon on reading in bed

Alison Croggon

From Montaigne to Nabokov to Emerson, writers have extolled the pleasures of reading in bed. And why not? Reading in bed rolls two of life’s enjoyments into a single uber-pleasure, without the need for the military organisational abilities – not to say the waterproof books – that go with reading in the bath.

7 November 201128 March 2012

Alison Croggon: Overland and me

Alison Croggon

Before Overland approached me to write a regular column, I had never written one. Easy, thought I: a mere 800 words every quarter. I write stuff all the time: in the past year I’ve written hundreds of blog posts, reviews, sundry works of opinion journalism, talks, novels, theatre texts and poems. How could a column be any more difficult than any of those?

28 October 201126 March 2012

An important preamble

Alison Croggon

Recently, the Office for the Arts launched a discussion paper for the development of a new National Cultural Policy: Consultation began on a National Cultural Policy in 2009, and has involved the arts and culture sector, creative industries, the public at large and government. This has informed the development of this discussion paper, which outlines […]

Published in Overland Issue 204 Spring 2011

On gardening

Alison Croggon

I come from a long line of gardeners. Back in Cornwall, Croggons are big in gardens: my grandmother was often visited by people who wished to admire her exotics and my Uncle William spent years restoring a historic garden at Creed Rectory in Grampound. My parents merely have to stick things in the ground for them to sprout and bloom. For a few years, my father even made his living with a franchise for Jim’s Mowing.

Published in Overland Issue 202 Autumn 2011

On childhood

Alison Croggon

‘Some people will tell you that none of these things happened. They’ll say they were just a dream that the three of us shared. But they did happen.’ – Heaven Eyes, David Almond I have two vivid childhood memories of things that can’t be true. They both date from before I was four years old.

25 November 201020 July 2012

Art, use and politics

Alison Croggon

Recently, there’s been much interesting discussion bouncing about Overland about whether literature can – or should be – ‘political’. And it’s not long before such questions transform into an argument about the use – or the necessary uselessness – of art. The various interlocutors seem to have found cautious middle ground in the agreement that […]

Published in Overland Issue Print Issue 200 Spring 2010

How Australian is it?

Alison Croggon

Deep in the DNA of imagination – in what Jorge Luis Borges called ‘the voluntary dream which is artistic creation’ – it makes little sense to define art by nationality. That assumes that nationality is the primary marker by which human beings know themselves, fencing the endlessly multiple possibilities of being into a marquee defined by political, historical and geographical boundaries.