Overland literary journal » Jacinda Woodhead

An era of throwaway arts

Jacinda Woodhead — Fri, 16 Aug 2019 05:00:50 +0000

On the same day that the Morrison government announced they were giving $500 million to defence so they can buy bigger guns (part of a $3 billion increase to the department), I learned that Overland was not invited to renew its four-year funding from federal arts body the Australia Council.

Read this!

Jacinda Woodhead — Thu, 18 Aug 2016 04:18:49 +0000

Still mulling over ideas for your Fair Australia Prize entry? Judges Carina Garland, Sam Wallman and Jacinda Woodhead have come up with a reading/watching list that may help.

The fight for funding

Jacinda Woodhead — Thu, 19 May 2016 01:25:31 +0000

Literature is especially endangered right now: the arts have been underfunded by successive governments, and literature has always received, in the words of Stephen Murray-Smith, the least ‘superphosphate’.

We, a nation of torturers

Jacinda Woodhead — Fri, 06 May 2016 04:19:15 +0000

But Australia has a long history of ugly racism – against Indigenous Australians, against Chinese, Afghans, Greeks, Italians, Vietnamese, Sudanese – it’s something the political class has fed and bred for many decades. Richard Marles may claim that ‘offshore processing has been the single most important policy that any Australian government has made’, but Labor was very proud of the White Australia policy as well.

On New Matilda and independent left-wing media

Jacinda Woodhead — Fri, 11 Dec 2015 01:57:41 +0000

Left-wing publications often punch above their weight. They publish on big topics – corruption and hypocrisy, war and oppression – and often have even greater agendas; at the very least, they want people to be less comfortable with the status quo. Because of their democratic desires, they’re often a space where many different writers – people who are publishing their first piece or don’t consider themselves writers at all – can write and be heard.

The real racket

Jacinda Woodhead — Sun, 18 Oct 2015 23:33:55 +0000

We live in an age of paradoxes: a time when Australia tries to conceal its mistreatment of refugees through various nefarious methods – for example, criminalising the disclosure of child abuse in the Nauruan detention system – even as it trumpets its concern for violence against women, which is, according to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, ‘unAustralian’. Yet, in the case of ‘Abyan’ – the refugee on Nauru flown to Australia for a termination following a rape on the island and then deported before the procedure could even occur – violence is the direct result of Australian government policy.

Serial without grain

Jacinda Woodhead — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 22:34:59 +0000

What is the point of retelling a true story? It’s a question I keep returning to when listening to Serial, the new WBEZ/This American Life podcast, which is being downloaded 1.2 million times per episode and for which there’s now a meet-up group, and a bunch of pop culture sites with podcasts dissecting the podcast.

Notes from the Pay the Writers meeting

Jacinda Woodhead — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 01:16:19 +0000

As anyone who’s ever been involved in a campaign knows, it’s hard to predict at the outset what shape it will take, what things it will have the power to change or how many people are going to turn up to meetings, particularly the first one.

Tell him he’s dreaming: Geoff Shaw and abortion

Jacinda Woodhead — Fri, 09 May 2014 04:05:18 +0000

When, during his run for office in 2010, a local paper asked Geoff Shaw to reveal his ‘secrets’ – things people in the area might be surprised to learn about him – he replied, ‘I’m a third Dan blackbelt in karate … I play footy for the Frankston District Tiger Sharks. I play the bagpipes and the drums. I love Phil Collins. I’ve seen him live.’ And so on.

Against forgetting

Jacinda Woodhead — Tue, 08 Oct 2013 00:52:50 +0000

The responsibility for tracking down a family of five who got on a boat in July and hasn’t been heard from since has, to my surprise, fallen to me. This is because I live with someone who is Tamil and know somebody who works with refugees. Those who might have more information, who may be familiar with the missing, are, typically in a position too perilous to make inquiries that place them in government spotlights. More generally, most of us don’t where to start looking for a boat lost on a vast ocean.

‘Yes, you lied to me all these years’

Jacinda Woodhead — Tue, 16 Jul 2013 01:39:42 +0000

It felt like everybody tuned in to the internet to hear the verdict of a trial about a boy stalked across gated streets, and shot in the rain outside his father’s house. The murder happened hundreds of thousands of kilometres away from where I live, in a state to which I’ve never been, in a country that attempts to shape the world in its image.

Writers and repression in Sri Lanka

Jacinda Woodhead — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 02:48:24 +0000

Listening to 3RRR’s Aural text on Wednesday, I heard alicia sometimes mention the four-week residency opportunity in Sri Lanka that Writers Victoria is currently promoting. ‘Why not take a month off to write?’ is how it’s being sold. We hear a lot about Sri Lanka, the island slightly smaller in landmass than Tasmania that sits to the west of Malaysia, though mostly what we hear is that it’s a source of The Boats.

When is a dongle just a dongle?

Jacinda Woodhead — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 02:54:07 +0000

There are a lot of things I don’t get about Twitter and/or Facebook: hashtags (seriously, who uses them?), profile photos, how righteous a tweet can make us feel even as it fills us with self-doubt. There’s no tone and little room for nuance or context in these spaces, no grace for momentary lapses or mistakes, and outrages frequently ensue.

The war in Queensland

Jacinda Woodhead — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 04:05:42 +0000

When Victorian senator John Madigan trained his raygun-of-righteousness on the rate of ‘gender-selective’ abortion in Australia last week, the response was, largely, bewilderment: there is no evidence that the practice even occurs in Australia.

The terrorism lurk

Jacinda Woodhead — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 21:39:16 +0000

Besides, who can say with certainty that downloading academic papers has not crossed that terrorist line?