The Journal

256 Spring 2024

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Overland 256 is the third issue in a suite of four special editions dedicated to commemorating 70 years of Overland. Inside its pages you'll find: Daniel Browning on the politics of memory, Antonia Pont on impatience, Sarah Wehbe on Palestinian fury and joy, and a special editorial by our departing poetry editor Toby Fitch. There's also new short fiction from Rowan MacDonald, Bethany Lalor and Amalia Stone, and new poetry from Josie Suzanne, Tim Loveday, Lulu Houdini and more.

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Overland literary journal > Articles by: Ben Brooker

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Ben Brooker

Ben Brooker is a writer, editor, and critic based on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation. His work has been featured by Overland, Australian Book Review, The Saturday Paper, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, and others in Australia and overseas.

Articles by Ben Brooker:

17 March 202517 March 2025 · Reviews

A new wartime economy: Ulrike Herrmann’s The End of Capitalism

Ben Brooker

The End of Capitalism is an important counterpoint to the technocentrist’s dream of an unbridled capitalism powered by the sun and the wind — not to mention an argosy of unproven green tech — rather than the remains of prehistoric plants and animals.

4 December 20244 December 2024 · Reviews

From the loom to the street: AGSA’s Radical Textiles

Ben Brooker

What strikes you as you wander through the galleries is not only the overtly political messaging of many of the works on display, but also the way that textile and fabric art makes visible the slow, quietly defiant labour of its creation, and gives form to the idea of solidarity across individuals and groups as a kind of weaving together.

2 November 20232 November 2023 · Reviews

A journey into male supremacy: Robin Summons’ Victim

Ben Brooker

Victim doesn’t make explicit the link between attacks such as those by Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian — themselves connected in a causal chain of male supremacist influence — and the prtoganist’s murderous rage towards a woman. Instead, it highlights the role played by pedigreed, authoritative-sounding commentators in fuelling anger at a perceived assault on ‘the masculine spirit’.

21 August 202322 August 2023 · Consumerism

Consumerist realism

Ben Brooker

The refusal to ‘sell out’ may have guaranteed a lifetime of ‘impotent marginality’ but at least it acknowledged that something real was at stake, the unambiguous articulation of which really mattered. At a time when the climate emergency ought to have supercharged our antipathy towards overconsumption, it has instead been headed off by so-called ‘conscious consumerism’, a movement predicated not on buying less but buying differently.

22 June 202327 June 2023 · Culture war

Look who’s stepping into Jordan Peterson’s ark

Ben Brooker

At face value it is odd, then, that Jordan Peterson’s new venture, The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), should boast an acronym designed to invoke the story of Noah while simultaneously railing against ‘the false idol of apocalyptic ideology.’ Look closer, however, and the contradiction resolves itself in a familiar, albeit familiarly veiled, way. The apocalypse is indeed here, only it isn’t global heating that poses an existential risk to humanity but the usual culture war suspects.

11 May 202315 May 2023 · Labor

The sunset of socialism—or, what is Labor for?

Ben Brooker

We could have been given a visionary budget, emboldened by Labor’s recent electoral successes at both state and federal level, and the fact that the next election is still two years away. Instead, spooked by its own shadow and the bogeyman of inflation, Labor delivered a faded scrapbook of the Party’s old glories.

24 March 202314 April 2023 · War

Conga line to Armageddon: the rush to get us into a war with China

Ben Brooker

It shouldn’t need spelling out that Australia could not win a war with China in any sense that matters, even with the backing of the US and its allies. At best, such a victory would be a Pyrrhic one. At worst, we would be so utterly humiliated as to not even know what kind of defeat had been inflicted upon us.

14 February 202322 February 2023 · Drugs

An uncertain trip: the rescheduling of psilocybin and MDMA

Ben Brooker

The reaction to the rescheduling of psilocybin and MDMA has been mixed, with wary optimism predominating. On the one hand, it feels like another small but significant retreat from the moral panic-fuelled ‘war on drugs’, and may even lead to a new paradigm for the treatment of mental health disorders. But the rescheduling leaves many questions unanswered.

12 December 202213 December 2022 · Music

The Spotifyification of music

Ben Brooker

By giving the most insipid music the biggest platform—not because it’s what listeners want, but because it’s one of the ways they can most easily fatten their profit margins—Spotify is reducing music to a kind of aural wallpaper, and marginalising if not erasing the work of actual musicians in the process.

30 October 20223 November 2022 · Activism

On Soupgate and the limits of spectacle-based activism

Ben Brooker

Ultimately, I wonder if actions that simply raise awareness, no matter how superficially edgy, are actually more centrist than radical, causing minimal disruption to the carbon-captured political and economic status quo, and leaving untouched the machineries of the global fossil fuel order. In this sense, Soupgate feels less like a revival of the revolutionary politics Andreas Malm calls for than a part of their ongoing demise.

4 August 202217 August 2022 · Drugs

Evaluating the Pollan effect

Ben Brooker

The answer to the demonisation of drugs, which has caused incalculable harm and so far deprived us of a more complete understanding of their risks and benefits, is not evangelism. Rather, the revival of interest in the kinds of compounds extolled in How to Change Your Mind presents us with a unique opportunity to reevaluate our relationship with them wholesale, good and bad.

1 March 202211 April 2022 · Drugs

Bongs, booze, and blackmail: on the hauntology of drugs

Ben Brooker

Neither the photograph of Tame nor the tabloid media’s response to it truly belong to the present. We might say that, just as Derrida felt the post-Cold War order remained haunted by the death of communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union, so too do the ghosts of another, dying war—that, at least nominally, on drugs—go on stalking the present moment.

15 November 202120 December 2021 · Drugs

Monsters under the bed: drugs, stigma and the AFP

Ben Brooker

For those who are affected, substance use disorders can be shattering. But increasing shame and stigma, as the AFP’s outmoded and irresponsible campaign does, will only discourage people from seeking help when they need it, and harden the hearts of others towards them.

28 October 202122 November 2021 · Climate change

Godot Goes to Glasgow: Australia’s absurdist climate plan

Ben Brooker

‘The Australian Way’ is a ghost document, sutured from the blood-drained remnants of actual policy and haunted by the unmistakable stench of a once and future PR man shitting himself not over the unfolding climate catastrophe but the threat of carbon tariffs and his political standing at home and abroad.

16 September 202119 October 2021 · Coronavirus

Policing a health crisis: protest after the pandemic

Ben Brooker

From public housing tower lockdowns to the deployment of generals to leadership positions and soldiers to the streets, to the imposition of nighttime curfews that do little if any practical good, the Covid-19 pandemic has provided state and national governments with even more opportunities to look tough in the face of what is in essence, like climate change, a crisis of health rather than law and order.

7 June 202112 July 2021 · Reviews

12 rules to forget your troubles: Jordan Peterson’s Beyond Order

Ben Brooker

Peterson’s insistence that your own life must be beyond reproach before you can begin to take action to address social injustice is not a prescription for self-improvement so much as political apathy, or at least an acceptance of the status quo. If that isn’t conservative ideology, I don’t know what is.

25 March 20216 May 2021 · Reviews

The world according to Adam Curtis

Ben Brooker

In essence, Can’t Get You Out of My Head argues that the twentieth and now the early twenty-first century are haunted by the ghosts of the ideological and revolutionary dead. As the Soviet Union collapsed, its dissolution heralded as the ‘end of history’, the dreams of the revolutionaries lived on not as shaping forces but merely spectral presences, phantasmal reminders of a time when alternatives appeared possible.

23 November 202021 January 2021 · Coronavirus

Pizza, power and privilege: South Australia’s second lockdown

Ben Brooker

Over and over again, this pandemic has offered a simple lesson that we have refused to absorb: that precarious work with low pay and few, if any, protections is a blight on individuals and societies. Like our punitive welfare system, it distorts and dehumanises, makes individuals acutely vulnerable to health and financial stressors of all kinds, and is a disease vector.

14 September 202013 October 2020 · Politics

The death cult of Tony Abbott

Ben Brooker

Abbott's revealed more than what we already know about modern conservatism – namely that, in its relentless attacks on health, education, and welfare, as well as its racialised approaches to immigration and foreign policy, it does not hold that all lives are equally worthy. It showed his capitulation to a kind of brutal economism more often associated with Randian capitalist radicalism than the religious right.

17 August 202016 September 2020 · Policing

Security theatre in an age of anxiety

Ben Brooker

The truth is, there remains much capital – both political and monetary – to be made from security theatre and ‘law and order’ policy, particularly at a time of acute public anxiety around the social and economic consequences of COVID-19.

21 April 202018 May 2020 · Coronavirus

Wanting to believe in drunken elephants

Ben Brooker

It may be easier, and more desirable in times of crisis, to focus on tall tales of nature rebounding in our absence than to truly reckon with our place in the global ecosystem. But reckon we must if we are to avoid, on the one hand, magical thinking, and on the other, environmental misanthropy.

9 October 20196 November 2019 · Climate politics

Going unquietly: Extinction Rebellion and a spring of protest

Ben Brooker

Processing the media and political response to this week’s Extinction Rebellion protests, you could be forgiven for concluding that many of our journalists and politicians have never heard of the American civil rights movement or Gandhi’s satyagraha, which inspired its methods of non-violent resistance.

22 July 201921 August 2019 · Reviews

How to deal with the logicbros: Ben Burgis’ Give Them an Argument

Ben Brooker

Anyone of a leftist disposition who spends long enough on the internet will sooner or later encounter the online figure that has come to be known as logicbro. There he is (for he’s almost always a he), accusing you of being ‘factually incorrect’, urging you to ‘get your facts straight’, and asserting that you are ‘emotionally driven and therefore prone to making sloppy mistakes’.

23 April 201917 May 2019 · Nationalism

Rebuilding the ANZAC cathedral: more ludicrous spending for national validation

Ben Brooker

The Memorial redevelopment completes the transformation of the Anzac myth from one earlier generations would have recognised –a muted, reflective phenomenon, for all its ahistoricism – into the triumphalist spectacle it has become today.

14 February 20194 April 2019 · alt-right

The 14 rules For Eternal Fascism: Jordan Peterson and the far right

Ben Brooker

The extent to which Peterson’s Weltanschauung generally, and his bestselling self-help book 12 Rules for Life specifically, answers to Eco’s features of fascism is striking.

3 September 201812 October 2018 · Climate change

Climate change was so last year: writers’ festivals and the great derangement

Ben Brooker

Nevertheless – contrary to Overington’s sneering claim that at literary festivals it’s ‘panel after panel on climate change’ – I was initially struck by the dearth of discussion on the subject at this year’s Adelaide Writers’ Week, despite its theme of ‘change’ and the presence of authors, such as Clive Hamilton, who have written extensively on the subject. After all, if writers’ festivals are to be platforms for, in the words of a recent Sydney Writers’ Festival statement, ‘urgent, necessary and sometimes difficult’ conversations, then clearly climate change must be the litmus test.

17 July 20188 August 2018 · Main Posts

Mean mad white men: the allure of Jordan Peterson

Ben Brooker

Peterson is urbane and respectable, emblematic of what British writer Olivia Laing has called ‘the endless malice of the polite right’. ‘Just crazy enough’, in Jon Ronson’s phrase, to ensure media interest, but sufficiently intellectual-sounding to attract an audience for whom a brazen bigot like Yiannopoulos would be on the nose.

6 June 201813 July 2018 · Vegetarianism

Disgusting entities: on the moralising meat-eaters

Ben Brooker

To continue to eat meat depends not on our biology but on our commitment to an idea that, if pushed, most of us would reject: that the spoliation of the natural world and the suffering of animals are less important than the gustatory pleasure we take in eating meat and dairy.

24 April 20184 June 2018 · Nationalism

100 years of Anzac: ludicrous spending for nationalist validation

Ben Brooker

Every dollar of the $88 million the Department of Defence is contributing towards the Monash Centre is a dollar not spent on, say, bettering the material and mental lives of Australian veterans, 325 of whom suicided between 2001 and 2015 (almost six times as many as Australian Defence Force personnel have been killed in conflict since 2001).

Published in Overland Issue 230 Autumn 2018 · Climate grief

‘I’m afraid something might be coming’

Ben Brooker

In 2013, American psychiatrist and climate change activist Dr Lise Van Susteren coined the term ‘pre-traumatic stress disorder’ (though the honour should properly go to satire website The Onion, which in 2006 featured an article on a condition with the same name) to describe stress reactions related to possible rather than past events. According to Van Susteren, the two conditions are phenomenologically alike, but in pre-traumatic stress disorder ‘we have in our minds images of the future that reflect what scientists are telling us; images of people and animals suffering because of dumb choices we are making today.’

30 November 201722 December 2017 · Music

Everybody’s heading for the exit

Ben Brooker

Emerging in the wake of a British music scene divided along sharp political lines – the Clash identified as leftists, the Sex Pistols as anarchists, while the Jam (by way of differentiation rather than conviction) initially aligned themselves with conservatism – Morrissey cut a thrillingly protean figure. It was precisely his cultivated opacity, in matters of gender and sexuality especially, that appealed to the kinds of outsiders he made the subjects of so many of his lyrics.

19 July 20174 September 2017 · Capitalism

The billionaire class won’t save us

Ben Brooker

Who, I wonder, will play Elon Musk in the inevitable biopic? Were such a film made tomorrow, it would be easy to imagine John Barrowman in the lead role. Beyond the obvious physical similarities – square-jawed and Hollywood B-list handsome – both are around fifty, and exude that slight exoticness that comes from having attained US citizenship after being born elsewhere (Musk in Pretoria, Barrowman in Glasgow).

21 June 201718 July 2017 · Main Posts

On politicising tragedy

Ben Brooker

What these examples demonstrate is that, far from reflecting a politically neutral position, the accusation of politicising something is in itself political, a kind of ‘nothing to see here’ that obfuscates rather than clarifies the true nature of the issue at stake. Not unlike ‘political correctness’ – a term that took off at about the same time – its main utility as a pejorative lies in its virtual meaninglessness, giving its users a way of avoiding a problem they’d rather not confront.

26 April 20175 June 2017 · Reviews

The hypocrisy of meat eaters: on MONA and animal cruelty

Ben Brooker

The use of animals in performance art is nothing new. Nitsch himself has been performing iterations of 150.Action since the 1960s, the heyday of the short-lived but influential Viennese Actionist movement, whose works were grounded in nakedness, violence and destruction, and which often breached obscenity laws and provoked widespread moral outrage. Recent examples are just as easy to point at.

13 April 20175 May 2017 · The media

Saving beautiful babies

Ben Brooker

For the first time in Trump’s presidency, large swathes of the liberal press applauded a man they had expended many thousands of spoken and written words denouncing as a neo-fascist bigot and buffoon. The missile strike, according to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, marked the moment ‘Donald Trump became president of the United States’. Even more absurd examples abounded.

23 January 201722 February 2017 · Nationalism

Meating diversity: a progressive charade

Ben Brooker

This is what Klein would call a ‘race toward weightlessness’, a key tenet of contemporary corporatism, which holds that the real work of companies is marketing, not manufacturing – that they are in the business of creating images rather than things. Howie’s claim that ‘lamb is the nation’s favourite meat’ is demonstrably false, but it is the idea itself that matters, framed as it is by language that is both inclusive (‘lamb stands for unity’) and nationalistic (‘Australia is the greatest country on earth’).

14 September 201610 October 2016 · Television

A chop to multiculturalism

Ben Brooker

Controversial advertisements for lamb have been a feature of our media landscape for some time, presaging Australia Day and the coming of spring with their familiar nationalistic bluster. It was the first ad, back in 2005, presented by former AFL player Sam Kekovich, which set the mould: irreverent, knowingly hectoring, casually racist and homophobic. The ad also traded on the curious, enduring invention that lamb has traditionally been the culinary centerpiece of Australia Day celebrations – and, therefore, to refrain from it is unpatriotic.

9 August 20162 September 2016 · The media

Bill Leak: the bigger picture

Ben Brooker

No doubt pictorial representations of people of colour by white men are uniquely charged and problematic, indivisible from long histories of derogatory stereotyping such as blackface. And then there is the way a political cartoon can distil an idea, making it a medium ideally suited to the rapid, self-effacing churn of an increasingly social media-driven news landscape.

18 July 201617 August 2016 · The internet

Precarious lives and public grief

Ben Brooker

Under what conditions, other than renown, is it possible for the media to provoke displays of global empathy or mourning for people we have never met? The question is an especially fraught one at a time when mainstream media has lost much of its authority, and the prevalence of social media platforms has created new ways in which public grief can be expressed and policed.

20 June 201619 July 2016 · Housing

Black America out of sight, out of mind

Ben Brooker

Two dramas recently showing in Australian cinemas, 99 Homes and Time Out of Mind, vividly chronicle life in post-GFC America. Each, in its own way, is an essay on the decline of the American dream as it pertains to one of its core tenets: home ownership. But where, I found myself wondering after the credits had rolled, was Black America in all this?

13 May 20165 July 2016 · Art

You can have submarines instead

Ben Brooker

Come 2030 – or 2040, or 2050 – when the region’s geopolitical environment will look very different than it does today, what will the submarines actually be used for? Who will be in our sights? The Chinese? Terrorists? Nobody asks; nobody says; in truth, nobody knows. This is the basis on which billions of dollars of federal money is shovelled into the raging furnace of the military-industrial machine. Conversely, our painters, writers, editors, and directors must endlessly, and minutely, articulate everything they do in the increasingly forlorn hope of securing even a small amount of funding from an ever diminishing pool.

26 April 201610 May 2016 · Electioneering

Pants on fire!

Ben Brooker

It would take a special sort of demagogue to argue against the essence of Thomas Jefferson’s famous assertion that ‘an enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic’ but we might also reasonably wonder what the upshot of Fray’s ideal of political accountability by fact-check is. Are politicians any more truthful, or even careful, as a result? (There is, in fact, some evidence that the more politicians lie, the better they poll).

Published in Overland Issue 222 Autumn 2016 · Activism

Production lines of flesh & bone

Ben Brooker

What does the exploitation of animals have to do with anything except the exploitation of animals? As Carol J Adams observes in The Sexual Politics of Meat, vegetarians appear to be saying one thing only: ‘Don’t eat meat’. But is it possible that there is more to be said?

7 December 20159 February 2016 · Reflection

Rewatching Children of Men

Ben Brooker

Everywhere you look – from Donald Trump railing against Mexican immigrants as ‘rapists’ and ‘criminals’, to Australia’s own bipartisan and uniquely draconian system of offshore detention – Cuarón’s bleak, cinéma-vérité vision of a perpetually grey-skied Britain that denies entry to refugees and dehumanises those already there, seems to have been mistaken for a how-to guide rather than a cautionary tale.

16 November 201516 December 2015 · The internet

On being slow to speak

Ben Brooker

The bullets had scarcely stopped flying in Paris before the pressure was on. There were the profile pictures filtered with le Tricolore or changed to show the user on holiday in Paris; the memes with cartoons by Charlie Hebdo illustrator Joann Sfar or words by Martin Luther King Jr; the condemnations of religious fundamentalism and pleas for tolerance on behalf of the peaceful majority of the world’s Muslims. The counter narrative went hand-in-hand: what about Beirut, we were asked with varying degrees of sanctimoniousness, where Islamic State militants had killed 41 people the day before the Paris attacks?

22 July 201527 August 2015 · Culture

Belief as a prison

Ben Brooker

In a recent edition of his podcast Waking Up, Sam Harris differentiated religions and cults in this way: ‘Every religion is a kind of cult – it just has more subscribers.’ A million members will get you a religion, a hundred (or, in the case of Heaven’s Gate, just forty) a cult, with all the stigmatic baggage that label brings.

24 April 201511 May 2015 · Reflection

Remembering the Armenian genocide

Ben Brooker

And yet, as a 2014 letter from Foreign Minister Julie Bishop to her then Turkish counterpart Ahmet Davutoglu made clear, Australia continues to talk down the atrocities of a century ago. 'The Australian government,' Bishop wrote, 'does not … recognise these events as genocide.'

17 March 20151 April 2015 · Main Posts

From detox to whooping cough

Ben Brooker

The incidence in California of pertussis (whooping cough), a disease that had almost been eliminated since its 1950s peak thanks to successive vaccines, is now approaching the proportions of a full-blown outbreak. Just six Americans died from the disease in 1995; last year, more than a thousand cases were recorded in California alone. Nation-wide, measles rates are at a twenty-year high.

2 March 201512 March 2015 · Reviews

Bittersweet symphony: on Adam Curtis’ latest documentary

Ben Brooker

Curtis’s verdict on foreign military intervention in Afghanistan adheres to one of the few received narratives he is happy to go along with, namely that such interventions, dating back to the first Anglo-Afghan war (1839-42), inevitably end in bloody defeat for the occupiers.

13 November 201421 November 2014 · Politics

The Melbourne Cup is not the problem

Ben Brooker

Australians are, as a rule, a selective people when it comes to the wellbeing of animals.

24 September 20146 October 2014 · Writing

Self versus Orwell

Ben Brooker

The reputation of George Orwell, still one of the most widely read and admired twentieth century writers in English more than half a century after his death, hardly needs protecting. It was, then, interesting to see the self-appointed guardians of the flame line up to defend his honour when it was impugned last month by novelist and journalist Will Self in an article for the BBC.

4 September 201423 September 2014 · Politics

Lest we forget that history repeats

Ben Brooker

Irwin draws them in close. ‘It’s not lest we forget,’ he tells them, ‘it’s lest we remember. That’s what all this is about – the memorials, the Cenotaph, the two minutes’ silence. Because there is no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.’

29 July 20148 September 2015 · Reflection

Watching the bombs

Ben Brooker

Like almost everything about the latest Israeli assault on Gaza that has, as of this writing, claimed around a thousand Palestinian lives, what is happening today on Sderot’s hilltops is not without precedent. Five years ago, a report on Danish television showed a group of Israelis watching shells falling on the Gaza Strip during Operation Cast Lead. A young Israeli woman, Keren Levy, was interviewed. ‘I think they should just clear off all the city [Gaza],’ Levy told the reporter, ‘just take it off the ground. Yes, I’m a little bit fascist.’

30 May 20146 June 2014 · Reflection

The moral imagination and the public sphere

Ben Brooker

In The Presidential Papers Norman Mailer wrote: ‘In the middle classes, the remark, “He made a lot of money,” ends the conversation. If you persist, if you try to point out that that money was made by digging through his grandmother’s grave to look for oil, you are met with a middle-class shrug.’

16 May 201428 May 2014 · Writing

Bad writing and criticism: a response to Alison Croggon

Ben Brooker

There was a time in my life when I felt that I’d read everything I wanted to read about the state of criticism. The year was 2010, and the source of this remarkable though temporary delusion was Rónán McDonald’s short book The Death of the Critic.