Jinghua Qian and Maddee Clark use a visit to the Footscray Coles ‘ethnic food aisle’ to discuss how ethnicity is imagined, managed and remade in Australia.

Underfoot is a series of virtual multimedia tours uncovering the secret histories of Footscray. Two old friends, both long-time Footscray residents, bring an intimate lens to local history as they travel through the archives looking for people like them: queers, migrants, radicals, and artists. Here, creators Liz Crash and Jinghua Qian discuss the ethos and […]

Over the last few months, we’ve seen the beginnings of an anti-racist reckoning in Australia’s media, arts and entertainment sector, nourished by the Bla(c)k Lives Matter movement. I am sceptical that it will lead to any real change in Australia. Diversity and inclusion initiatives are usually a way for a company’s management to abdicate responsibility to a junior colleague who doesn’t have authority to challenge structural racism. Maybe there’ll be a couple more of us in the room. But what happens when we get there?

Though the last two decades have seen several important legal milestones for LGBT rights – including the 1997 rescinding of the ‘hooliganism’ charge often used against sexual minorities, the depathologization of the ‘mental disorder’ of homosexuality in 2001, and quietly progressive court rulings on homophobic textbooks – most advocates estimate marriage equality is still many years away.

We invited four Australian poets to reflect on race in the world today and, specifically, on the ways that racism manifests in the intellectual and literary fields, particularly in poetry, where thought and representation are crystallised and magnified.

Most of the responses to the Cardiff petition follow a familiar liberal template for discussion on bans and boycotts. Whether the topic is Germaine Greer’s misogyny towards trans women, Chris Brown’s history of partner violence, Geert Wilders’ denial of the Holocaust, the Sydney Biennale’s links with the detention industry or Israeli universities’ role in the occupation of Palestine, it’s a template that pits vilification against free speech, asking: what is bad enough to justify a ban or boycott? What do you have to say or do to deserve silencing?

When my gaysian brothers seethe at profiles on dating or hook-up apps that state ‘no Asians’, or the glibly cutting ‘no rice no curry’, I sympathise with their hurt and anger. I know that seeing these statements over and over again will make even the most confident men doubt not only their sexual desirability but the possibility of finding camaraderie in the gay community.

I set out to write about Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism, a new book by Melbourne University academic Professor Sheila Jeffreys, in which she contends that ‘transgenderism’ is based upon sex stereotyping, is a setback for feminism, and harmful to society and trans people themselves. I find I have little to say in response to Jeffrey’s arguments because all of them are based on the idea that women are not really women if they are trans.

There is a false opposition drawn in many conversations between what is supposedly traditional or ‘core’ Left thinking and these tricky new-fangled ideas about privilege and intersectionality. But the best parts of the Left have always been founded on self-determination, on oppressed peoples’ naming of struggles and speaking truth to power. Nothing about this is new. It’s not additional or peripheral.

Debates on anthropogenic climate change still argue over its existence and successful refugee policy is measured in terms of deterrence, not protection. Overland starts somewhere else. And then moves forward with a refreshing direction. It encourages those conversations the left so desperately needs to have, that keep getting sidelined or postponed in response to another event, another catastrophe. It challenges the idea that the ideological and aesthetic must be in competition with writing that provokes and delights.

I have the name and the face. And if it’s enough to make a stranger shout ni hao at me from across the street, then maybe it should be enough for me too. Sometimes I like a good comeback, something like ‘A-ya, dui bu qi, wo de zhong wen bu shi tai hao, xiang ni zen me cong ming de ren da gai ye hui shuo yin wen ba?’, which means ‘Oh dear, my Chinese isn’t too good, but a genius like you probably also speaks English, right?’