I do not wish to defend Australian universities as they exist. But I do wish to defend the principle of public tertiary education as a good – not a product, but a good – that should be available to everyone.

On 19 March 2014, the NSW Liberal government announced its decision to sell all social housing in Millers Point on the private market. In total, this amounts to 293 properties. The announcement was made by Pru Goward, then Minister for Family and Community Services. Goward described the sell-off as a decision made ‘for the benefit of the entire social housing system.’ For every property sold in Millers Point, the government has argued, another three social housing properties (or another five – the figure seems to fluctuate) can be built elsewhere.

There is a nascent organising campaign underway in this country – and elsewhere in the world – to try to ensure that writers are paid fairly for their skills and labour. I don’t disagree with this campaign – I support it wholeheartedly. What I do disagree with is a narrow, instrumentalist understanding of who a writer is and what value or purpose writing can serve.

One of the artworks currently on show at the Biennale of Sydney is Bosbolobosboco #6, by Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson. It was made in collaboration with the Sydney-based group Refugee Art Project, which since its founding in 2010 has run art classes inside detention centres and organised exhibitions and publications for artworks made by asylum seekers. Safdar Ahmed, a founding member of Refugee Art Project, describes Bosbolobosboco #6 as ‘a biomorphic sculpture which resembles a living entity, comprised seemingly of skin or bone.

In the distant days of high school art history lessons, I learnt about the practice of patronage in medieval Europe. A wealthy duke would hand over a bag of florins to the local master craftsman who would then labour to produce a suitably religious artefact, such as an altarpiece in triptych panelling or an elaborate silver chalice.

Hey everyone. Subscribe to Overland. Between the smugness of Fairfax and the demagoguery of News Ltd, there’s barely a line of newsprint worth reading in this country anyway. (Now that they’ve sacked their journalists and editors, I think both companies are simply programming robots to file copy).

Jennifer Lee (Overland 207) writes, ‘I expect many readers disagree with what I say about weight and fat, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong’. The implication is that she’s right, and that disagreement speaks in the voice of the oppressor. It is one of many reasons why I find Lee’s article – and identity politics more generally – to be a narrow and unhelpful frame for discussion.

Possibly I’m misremembering, but somewhere tucked into the small corpus of published writing by the late JD Salinger is the line ‘The wise man lives without reputation.’ Like a lot of Salinger’s work, this exudes a certain perfumed mysticism, pungent but never quite attributable, befitting an author who devoted himself to kriya yoga, gurus and reading the Bhagavad Gita.

I know women of the Left who have been raped. And who were they raped by? By men of the Left – their partners, lovers, friends. Did these cases ever reach court? No, to my knowledge they were never even reported to the police. Why not? Well, political objections to police and their function in […]

Hours, it took us, to build a fence the width of the gallery, running from wall to wall and topped with two strands of barbed wire that we had stubbornly and stupidly unwound with our bare hands, balancing on ladders, fixing the whole thing into place with industrial staples.

A chart hung above the chalkboard in Mrs Brandie’s classroom, written in the patient, legible hand of a primary school teacher. Black marker on white card, two columns: name, weight – Anwyn Crawford, 34 kg.

It's an old habit of Cave's to refer to himself in royal terms, and he's living proof that if you believe in your own cant for long enough, other people might eventually start believing it too.