Overland literary journal > Articles by: Stephen Wright

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Stephen Wright

Stephen Wright currently lives on unceded Anaiwan country. He is the author of A Second Life (Brio) and various essays.

Articles by Stephen Wright:

12 July 202412 July 2024 · Children

“The greatest single aid in removing inequality”: radical politics and the neoliberalisation of Australian childhood

Stephen Wright

The field of contemporary Australian early education, now dominated by privatised child care is one of surveillance and policing, compliance, extreme regulation, deliberate construction of neoliberal subjectivities — children as a type of property — and reductive understandings of what play, and children, are for.

21 February 202422 February 2024 · Music

Love, disaster and the songs of Taylor Swift

Stephen Wright

It's appropriate that Taylor Swift flew into Australia a few days after Valentine's Day. Without wishing to erase any queer readings of Swift’s work, the pluralities of love she sometimes speaks to and her capacity for nostalgia, it seems to me that the somewhat monolithic shadow of romantic love tends to fall over all of them and structure her whole project.

15 December 202319 February 2024 · Children

‘We have listened to the community’: hating and imprisoning children in twenty-first-century Australia

Stephen Wright

Contemporary discussions about the lives and care and education of children in Australia are so cooked, so impoverished and hedged about with assumptions of control and paranoia, that writing an essay like this about childhood, about what it means to be a child in modern Australia, feels like I’m presenting evidence of alien life.

21 October 202025 November 2020 · conspiracism

Everything is evidence: the persistence of QAnon

Stephen Wright

Capitalism in crisis, faced with the inevitable consequences of its own internal contradictions, is the perfect nutrient for fascist ideas, for desperate terrors and paranoias that create demons and project them into the world.

8 September 20207 October 2020 · Obituary

The death of David Graeber

Stephen Wright

For the past fifteen years I’ve been more engaged with the violence of capitalism than ever, and I realised that David Graeber was part of the company of people I think of as being my own personal squad of invisibly-present comrades. Graeber was living, now, doing the work, thinking about it, talking about it, writing about the things I was thinking.

6 July 20204 August 2020 · Reflection

Militant care in a time of atrocity

Stephen Wright

If caring is insurrectionary, and insurrection is a multiplicity of interrelated acts of care, it follows that insurrection is built out of care itself and an understanding of its revolutionary and transgressive potential. Care is therefore always militant.

30 April 202028 May 2020 · Capitalism

What COVID-19 tells us about capitalism

Stephen Wright

COVID-19 has made it apparent that some things are of no use whatsoever: the Olympics; cruise ships; millionaire sportspeople playing games to profit billionaires; blockbuster movie releases; mass tourism and a hundred-and-one other baubles and fripperies associated with a valorised bourgeois existence..

22 November 201911 March 2020 · Climate catastrophe

On burning forests

Stephen Wright

This is the second time I’ve been part of a climate emergency. The first was in 2017 when the town of Lismore in Widjabul country in northern New South Wales was hit by catastrophic floods. It was a flood that couldn’t happen.

27 August 201826 September 2018 · Writing

Incandescent to apocalyptic: impressions from QPF

Stephen Wright

In a scintillating talk organised by Express Media, the Dharug/Bundjalung poet Evelyn Araluen speaks of the production of literature as historically being a dangerous place for Aboriginal people. I heard her say this around the time I was reading Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive, Penny van Toorn’s Writing Always Arrives Naked and Gomeroi writer Alison Whittaker’s beautiful Lemons in the Chicken Wire.

22 November 20175 February 2018 · Music

How rock gods think: the politics of Nick Cave and Thom Yorke

Stephen Wright

If rock music amplifies capitalism’s misogyny, racism and male entitlement, it’s not surprising that rock star politics are often built out of those things.

Published in Overland Issue 225 Summer 2016 · Fair Australia Prize

Essay winner: On setting yourself on fire

Stephen Wright

In early 2013, a couple of weeks before the Tibetan New Year, Tsering Tashi a 22-year-old man from Amchok, an obscure rural Tibetan town, soaked himself in petrol and set himself on fire. He had wrapped his body in wire to ensure it burned more intensely.

14 October 20165 November 2016 · Politics

Dylan’s Nobel: the true birthright of the male artist

Stephen Wright

Dylan has been a critical artist in the history of rock and roll without a doubt. But rock and roll has very much been a male-dominated enterprise. At the recent elite Desert Trip Festival of ancient rock and roll icons in California, every single performer was male. What Dylan’s Nobel perhaps shows us is that mainstream rock and roll has more in common with the production of literature than we might think.

12 January 201622 March 2016 · Reflection

Planet earth is blue

Stephen Wright

It is an unusual artist who will take their own death and turn it into a performance piece. It’s an act of someone who is either unusually narcissistic, or very ruthless, and in David Bowie’s case I’m inclined to go with the latter. The Guardian’s music editor cautiously asked last night whether Bowie’s last album, Blackstar, released on his birthday four days ago, possibly referenced his own impending death, which just goes to show that music critics are often as thick as they come. If a black star isn’t an obvious enough symbol of death (as well as a possible musical reference to the Clash’s strange track ‘Death is a Star’), then an album written and recorded by a man who was dying, released as close to the day of his death as he could manage, on what he knew would be his last birthday, is probably a clue.

Published in Overland Issue 221 Summer 2015 · Column

On male fear

Stephen Wright

The Victorian government’s Royal Commission into Family Violence is currently under way, but no-one who works in the sector is expecting it to produce any new insights. ‘Domestic and family violence’ is, overwhelmingly, violence against women and children by men.

25 November 201513 January 2016 · Reflection

Spectral

Stephen Wright

An adult psychosis in this reading of Bond is not, as it is often represented, a florid display of hallucinations and delusions. The psychotic episode is actually the last ditch attempt to cure oneself of a psychosis, to come up with a master narrative: it was always the fault of the CIA; I am a mighty wizard who can speak to Jesus; television communicates mystical truths to me. Or in Bond’s case: Nothing was my fault; I have been manipulated by an all-seeing secret organisation whose tentacles are everywhere.

Published in Overland Issue 220 Spring 2015 · Fair Australia Prize

‘The most fucking intense, crazy, rock ’n’ roll thing you could be writing about’

Stephen Wright

As Antjie Krog pointed out in Country of My Skull, her account of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to hear the innumerable intimate stories of violence to which ordinary people have been exposed is to feel like you are living in a double world. The material processes of society continue as though they didn’t exist. In fact, they create the very violence on which they subsist.

Published in Overland Issue 219 Winter 2015 · Politics

On backyard cricket

Stephen Wright

Australia appears to have become a nation governed by people who proudly engage in legalised child abuse, torture and neglect. Both the ALP and the Coalition conspired to make that happen, and we now have the brain-bending spectacle of a Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse ruthlessly laying bare the predatory practices of nearly every significant institution in the country that has ever had care of a child, while the institution of government continues to blatantly torture the children it has care of on Nauru and elsewhere.

Published in Overland Issue 218 Autumn 2015 · Reflection

On different children

Stephen Wright

One of the illuminating understandings that come with parenting a different child is how effectively childhood has been de-politicised, and how narrow and arid our perceptions of childhood are – and, by extension, how narrow and arid our perceptions of ourselves are.

Published in Overland Issue 217 Summer 2014 ·

On binary states

Stephen Wright

When people who have experienced violence in childhood come to see me for the first time in my counselling practice, they bring stories to tell, stories that take the form of puzzles. Each story is a description of a crime, a story that makes no sense. It is like watching someone find evidence of a crime and mistaking it for a message, or wondering if they are the one who is guilty.

21 October 201410 November 2014 · Politics

The problem with men

Stephen Wright

It seemed to me that violence against women and children was everywhere, in every street. Eventually of course, I managed to pull myself together. I realised that male violence IS everywhere. It’s one of the cornerstones of Western culture.

Published in Overland Issue 216 Spring 2014 · Reading

On ghosts

Stephen Wright

David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King appeared trailing clouds of hagiography when published in 2011. References to his suicide were frequent but circumspect, usually alluding to his use of anti-depressant medication, of which Foster Wallace himself was reportedly too ashamed to speak.

Published in Overland Issue 215 Winter 2014 · Writing

On being in someone else’s skin

Stephen Wright

I was up late reading Kathy Acker – the dead, unredeemable, beautiful Kathy Acker, the only writer who makes me feel that writing is the most important thing in the world, the most savagely political thing there is.

Published in Overland Issue 214 Autumn 2014 · Writing

On being funnier

Stephen Wright

I often wish I were funnier, even though I can be reasonably quick off the cuff. Friend: Oh my God! Someone poisoned ninety elephants in Zimbabwe! Me: Sounds like a pachyderm lies to me. But that practice of humour isn’t really funny.

10 December 201319 December 2013 · Reviews

Monstrous women and the monstrous work of Linda Dement

Stephen Wright

The Australian artist Linda Dement has been making multimedia art since the 1980s, back when a Photoshop was a place where you got your film developed and ‘cyberspace’ was an obscure science-fiction term used by a nerdy American writer.

Published in Overland Issue 213 Summer 2013 · Writing

On building a dream space

Stephen Wright

For some time I’d wanted to build a new writing space that would also double as a bedroom. But to build a bedroom, one has to construct a space that is conducive to dreaming. That is, after all, what bedrooms are for, just as kitchens are primarily designed to facilitate the sharing of food. In his great book The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard says that the purpose of an entire house should be to support the dreamer.

11 November 201325 November 2013 · Writing

A defence of print

Stephen Wright

Last century I used to write letters to my friends, long unwittingly revealing perorations usually composed over several weeks. They contained late-night ruminations, drunken soliloquies, jokes, drawings, descriptions of domestic activities, music, books, and momentary events drawn out and offered up for reflection. It was like blogging to one person.

24 September 201330 September 2013 · Writing

Thirteen years of Proust

Stephen Wright

The writer is making a huge demand of a reader – that he or she give a book the attention that the writer gave to its creation. This can be a standing invitation to a writer’s narcissism of course, and it often seems to me that one of the characteristics of contemporary mainstream literature written in English is its furtive and not-so-furtive narcissism.

Published in Overland Issue 212 Spring 2013 · Reflection

On modern-day slavery

Stephen Wright

According to the website slaveryfootprint.org, my lifestyle requires twenty full-time slaves to support it. These are not imaginary slaves but actual persons who work in other countries to produce the conditions of affluence under which I live.

20 August 20132 September 2013 · Politics

Why politicians hate you

Stephen Wright

Politics has become something of a career move for a self-manufactured professional class. There aren’t a lot of plumbers or factory hands in politics. For the elites who see politics as a good career move the question remains: What is it about politics that attracts them? When one looks at the premiers of our various states, none of them appear to be paragons of sanity. In truth, they all seem like very disturbing people.

6 August 201319 August 2013 · Culture

Women gamers, queer gamers and the trolls who hate them

Stephen Wright

Whether it’s Tomb Raider or Game of Thrones, male geek culture has a lot of trouble incorporating feminist and queer narratives. Women in games are often magical helpers for men or pieces of sexualised meat – and they are always hot. Very often in male geek narratives, the woman becomes the McGuffin.

8 July 201315 July 2013 · Polemics

Bill Gates vs polio

Stephen Wright

The story of Bill Gates’ use of his ill-gotten billions to fight poverty and disease is an instructive illustration of how capitalism has colonised the inner world of what used to be considered virtues – generosity, kindness, compassion and so on.

Published in Overland Issue 211 Winter 2013 · Reflection

A private delirium

Stephen Wright

Every addicted reader has a secret story about why they read and how they started and what reading meant to them as a child, a secret often disguised in adulthood as some odd and frankly unbelievable story about being carried away on the wings of imagination.

3 June 201311 June 2013 · Politics

Debating DSM-5

Stephen Wright

The DSM-5’s publication has generated something of a backlash, as professionals and non-professionals – using an internet that wasn’t available when DSM-4 appeared – articulate what everyone has known for yonks: that the DSM is unreliable, unsafe and promotes models of mental health that look positively Orwellian.

17 May 20132 June 2013 · Reading

Tortured women, guilty men and dead children

Stephen Wright

The Danish TV series The Killing and the Danish-Swedish collaboration The Bridge both feature a lot of the conventions of Swedish noir: women detectives, the sadistic murder of women, dead or traumatised children, political corruption, numerous plot twists, and a preoccupation with the mental states of women and the paternal identities of men.

2 May 20132 May 2013 · Writing

Pity the emerging writer – or not

Stephen Wright

There are so many implications built into the term ‘emerging writer’, many of them patronising and designed to reinforce a hierarchy of power. There’s a kind of infantilising regard built into the idea.

17 April 20132 June 2013 · Culture

Reasons to hate football and Manchester United

Stephen Wright

Eric Cantona, who can probably make a strong claim to being Manchester United’s finest ever player, once said, ‘I have never, and will never, find the difference between the pass from Pele to Carlos Alberto in the World Cup of 1970 and the poetry of the young Rimbaud.’

2 April 20132 June 2013 · Writing

The writer’s mind

Stephen Wright

Because I am someone who writes I spend a lot of time on my own. Consequently, I sometimes get into strange states of mind. That’s my job.

12 March 20132 April 2013 · Culture

Men’s rights and male hysterias

Stephen Wright

One of the signs that feminism might be getting traction in places it hasn’t before is the rise of the idea of a men’s movement that advocates for ‘men’s rights.’ It’s a strange and sad idea as we shall see, but often not well understood or acknowledged.

28 February 20132 June 2013 · Culture

The Catholic Church′s production of sexually abusive men

Stephen Wright

It always seemed to me that my teacher disliked me so much that even thinking about me drove her into a shrieking vindictive fury, a fury that she was more than happy to vent on my parents by informing them that I was retarded. It was a depressing and nearly unbearable experience at the age of four to wake each morning, and have to go to school to be shouted at, beaten, and told that I was born inherently evil and could only be redeemed if I did what God told me.

14 February 201315 February 2013 · Main Posts

Valentine’s Day and the creepy idea of romantic love

Stephen Wright

Like writers who think that fiction is above politics, those of us who fall in love tend to ignore the sinister agendas hidden behind romantic love’s misty facade.

4 February 2013 · Reviews

Zero Dark Thirty’s blessed America

Stephen Wright

The Hurt Locker was, in essence, a feelgood film. Audiences could leave the cinema thinking they had seen the reality of the Iraq War, when in fact they had seen no such thing. The Hurt Locker was a film of reassurance. The viewer had their sensibilities very lightly traumatised – occasional bits of sadism serving that purpose well – just enough to feel as though they had witnessed something emotionally meaningful.

9 January 20139 January 2013 · Politics

American children are more important than other children

Stephen Wright

Here are some photos of Barack Obama with American children. He has good rapport with children doesn’t he?

18 December 201218 December 2012 · Main Posts

Last of 2012: What to worry about in 2013

Stephen Wright

I can’t really give you a ‘Best Of’ for 2012 that’s really meaningful because I don’t get around much on the net. I’m not on Twitter or Facebook. I use my mobile phone, which is an ancient model by phone standards, maybe once a week to send a text, usually along the lines of ‘Does anyone know where the remote is?’ or ‘Where’s the ute?’ Finding lost things, that’s become my purpose in life.

12 December 2012 · Writing

A Christmas entertainment: an imaginary biography of George Orwell

Stephen Wright

When the special importation of streptomycin ameliorated George Orwell’s tuberculosis in 1947 he finally gave up smoking and moved back to Buckinghamshire with his new wife Sonia, and his adopted son Richard. His lungs continued to trouble him for the rest of his life, but his death in late 1978 was due to a heart attack.

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29 November 201229 November 2012 · Culture

Skyfall and Bond’s psychotic misogyny

Stephen Wright

When the Queen met James Bond during the Olympics, it was broadcast live as a real world event. This suggests that the British believe that either Bond is real or that the Queen is imaginary.

21 November 201221 November 2012 · Main Posts

Australia: the children’s gulag

Stephen Wright

I wanted to pick up on Michael Brull's recent post at Overland on the proposed Royal Commission into child sexual abuse. I think there are likely to be a number of structural and systemic issues likely to dog the Commission and its aftermath, and they are worth looking at.

30 October 201230 October 2012 · Culture

3D: entertainment for fascists

Stephen Wright

Why do 3D films even exist? They’re not even really 3D. The depth of field is flattened out so that things up close have the thickness of a sheet of paper and things distant look like trompe l’oeil. The scale of a 3D film is often so concussive that it rapidly escalates into levels of mind-numbing tedium you didn’t know existed.

16 October 201216 October 2012 · Main Posts

Literature, violence and the batshit-crazy Booker

Stephen Wright

I'd like very much like to believe that the world of professional literary activity – the book launches, the writers' festivals, the agents shopping novels around, the review culture, the prizes and so on – gives us something to help us make sense of a reality where life is worth little, where the evil and cruel thrive, where children are crushed by Predator drones, women are treated like trashable objects, where atrocity and injustice are often feted and the planet is about to boil like a kettle. But I can't because it doesn't.

11 October 201211 October 2012 · Writing

A short violent history of parapraxis

Stephen Wright

The Great Brain sits in his rooms waiting for suffering humanity to knock at his door, rooms bizarrely decorated with bullet-holes and Victoriana (Holmes) or various antiquities and objets d’art (Freud). When the confused stranger arrives carrying some deranged and barely credible story, the mighty detective, puffing away on pipe or cigar proceeds to point out revealing details of the stranger’s life and person purely on the basis of a perfunctory greeting.

26 September 2012 · Politics

The angry Left

Stephen Wright

For a long time I used to go to bed early ... Hold on. Oh, sorry. That’s Proust. For a long time I used to really struggle with the kind of anger evoked in me by the cruelty and catastrophic destructiveness of the neo-capitalist enterprise.

14 September 201214 September 2012 · Politics

Obama’s Hellfires

Stephen Wright

In Obama’s first months of office I saw him as a cautious moderate probably overwhelmed by the multiple incessant and contradictory demands of actually being President of the United States. He didn’t seem to be anywhere as deranged as Bush Jr, as obviously duplicitous as Clinton, as mendacious as Bush Sr or as completely off the planet as Reagan.

8 September 20128 September 2012 · Politics

Thinking about Zeena and Zainab al-Hilli

Stephen Wright

Mostly I’ve been thinking about four-year-old Zeena al-Hilli, who was found in a car in the French Alps, hiding under the bodies of her murdered family, where she had apparently been for about eight hours, and her seven-year-old sister, Zainab, who was shot and left for dead. But Zeena and Zainab’s story also brought to mind the history of Australian abandoned and traumatised children – of whom there are very large numbers.

30 August 201231 August 2012 · Writing

What are writers good for?

Stephen Wright

Well it’s not like it’s self-evident. I mean if all the plumbers in the world vanished into a parallel universe, things would literally go to shit very quickly. Removing all the fiction writers from this plane of existence and relocating them to, say, the Dungeon Dimensions would probably make very little difference to anyone.

17 August 201217 August 2012 · Politics

Why you will vote for Elvis

Stephen Wright

The bit of me that’s still ambitious dreams of picking up my guitar and going to Graceland. Once I got there I’d park myself next to Elvis’ tomb and belt out an obscure punk song – The Inner City Unit’s ‘The Bones of Elvis’.

3 August 20124 August 2012 · Reading

The tottering space where adults and children meet

Stephen Wright

Sometime in May there was a short blog post on children’s literature at Meanjin. One of the premises of the blog was that there is ‘a huge, and largely under populated branch of children’s books that are written specifically for adults ... just as Pixar realised the potential in populating their kids’ movies with scenes adults would enjoy.’

19 July 201219 July 2012 · Reading

Secondhand bookshops

Stephen Wright

If I ever embarked on a PhD thesis, I’d choose to write it on the forces that propel me into rummaging among old books. All the footnotes in the thesis would be of books I had found in secondhand bookshops over the years. I would also invent critical texts and authors, such as Alexandro James Miguel O’Halloran’s The Mysterious Events in the Bookshop on Igor-Stravinsky Place and WJ De Poot’s remarkable four-volume study of the invention of footnotes, not to mention Julie-Marie Pogle’s magisterial A Catalogue of Post-War Shelving in the Stacks of the Bodleian Librar.

5 July 20125 July 2012 · Reading

Don’t kill your darlings

Stephen Wright

The source of the phrase ‘kill your darlings’ is the English writer Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who actually said more pointedly ‘murder your darlings’ in a lecture he gave at Cambridge University nearly a century ago. Quiller-Couch was the inspiration for the character of Rat in The Wind in the Willows.

22 June 2012 · Politics

Misogyny

Stephen Wright

The core work of the project I’m paid to run is intervening with men with a history of violence and abusive behaviour. The main work of this is done in groups, or, as termed in the literature, ‘men’s behaviour change groups’. The work is done in groups because it’s important to let gender speak, to keep the elephant in the centre of the room as it were.

7 June 20127 June 2012 · Writing

Science fiction (woo ooh ooh)

Stephen Wright

It’s not really much of a mind-flip to imagine a sci-fi novel winning the Booker. After all, science-fiction writers have something of a history of craving mainstream literary recognition.

23 May 201223 May 2012 · Reviews

Us and Them

Stephen Wright

I live on the edge of a temperate rainforest. In the city the daylight hours are filled with noise, and at night things fade into silence. In the rainforest everything is reversed. During the day the forest is as silent as the grave. At night it erupts with noise.

27 April 20121 August 2013 · Writing

Why I write

Stephen Wright

My writing had reached an impasse. I realised that if I wished to write about the people I loved in any kind of truthful way, they would have to be dead. I no longer wanted to be continually thrown back into my interior life where all my desires are heaped up like bones in an elephants’ graveyard.

26 April 201224 May 2012 · Reading

Orwell’s apples

Stephen Wright

I first read Orwell at school, and when I bailed out of home at seventeen I acquired an omnibus of his novels and a complete set of the newspaper columns As I Please. I still have my old copy of Inside the Whale, a book that I purchased with my first professional pay cheque, that contains several of my favourite Orwell essays including ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’, an essay that might be the best thing on Shakespeare I’ve ever read.

12 April 201212 April 2012 · Main Posts

After the riots

Stephen Wright

My first thought on reading After the Riots, the newly published UK government report on the riots of 2011, was that it was written by The Onion. It could certainly use as a subheading the title of one of John Cage’s brief essays, ‘How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)’.

30 March 20122 April 2012 · Main Posts

The embalmer’s art

Stephen Wright

In New Inquiry recently Anton Steinpilz drew attention to Walter Benn Michaels’ concept of the neoliberal novel. It’s a neat term to describe the fiction of the past fifty years or whatever, fiction that dresses itself up in a variety of wacky outfits but obediently subscribes to a set of structural norms that I'm sure I don't need to describe to you.

24 February 201228 March 2012 · Main Posts

The Blyton’d, Potter’d childhood

Stephen Wright

When I last worked with young children, I put to them, for discussion, that I didn't really enjoy reading children's books that said that it was up to children to save the rainforest or about small furry animals that had lost their mothers. Neither was I particularly excited by invisible possums who visited casinos or stories about how important it was for children to share or to have good manners.

23 December 201128 March 2012 · Main Posts

All about happiness, tra-la-la

Stephen Wright

Discussing happiness can make a lot of people miserable. If I have a definition of happiness that insists that it be subscribed to by others, or holds that an inability to be happy is a sign of moral failure, I have probably just invented a somewhat insidious form of fascism.

16 November 201128 March 2012 · Main Posts

Universities in ruins

Stephen Wright

Peter Cook once said that nobody had actually read Don Quixote, and though Cervantes might have written it, even he couldn’t be bothered reading it as well. When I heard Cook say this, it relieved me of a great responsibility, that of reading Don Quixote.

7 October 201120 August 2013 · Main Posts

Saint Steve Jobs

Stephen Wright

I can’t be the only person who on seeing the mindboggling hysteria over the death of Steve Jobs found himself insistently murmuring ‘Foxconn, Foxconn’, over and over as if they were uttering a protective mantra. If I hear one more person gratefully sigh that Jobs was a genius, while lovingly fondling their iPhone, I’ll probably […]

1 August 201121 January 2013 · Main Posts

Utoya and the fascist mind

Stephen Wright

Until Boris Kelly popped up on the weekend with his usual lucid description of things, I was starting to wonder if Utoya would pass uncommented by the Overland blog. The Overland blog is often punctuated by some odd silences (nothing to date on SlutWalks or the implosion of the Murdoch empire), and any conversation in […]

9 May 20111 June 2012 · Main Posts

Ding-dong, the witch is dead

Stephen Wright

It started with television images that resembled a macabre outtake from a Hollywood blockbuster and it seems to have ended like one too. Ten years ago it was the planes hitting the towers, like a trailer from an upcoming Die Hard film, and last week it was the crowds celebrating outside the White House mirroring […]

13 April 20111 June 2012 · Main Posts

Grief, stolen children and SIEV 221

Stephen Wright

The controversy over the burial of the dead of SIEV 221 still seems to have the aura of an event that everyone agrees not to speak of ever again. Some things in life, Scott Morrison’s outrage at the SIEV 221 funerals being one of them, are just too creepy to keep talking about. For a […]

21 March 20111 June 2012 · Main Posts

The revenger’s comedy

Stephen Wright

In early January, on a random scrap of paper on my desk, I wrote: ‘I just want it said, if there is any need to say it, that it seems blindingly obvious to me that Kevin Rudd is already wondering if he can do to Julia Gillard what she did to him; shaft her and […]

9 March 20111 June 2012 · Reviews

Politics and Religion in the New Century

Stephen Wright

Politics and Religion in the New Century Philip Quadrio and Carrol Besseling (eds) Sydney University Press Any critical engagement with the politics of religious discourse that begins by acknowledging Al Swearangen and Joe Strummer has to be worth more than a second look. At least I’ve made the assumption that is the Joe Strummer and […]

25 February 20111 June 2012 · Main Posts

A cure for stuttering

Stephen Wright

It’s true I think, as Adam Phillips remarked in one of his later essays, that we continually speak each other’s unspoken thoughts. We are not as discrete as we appear to be. There are many things in our lives that get spoken over and over, that we can’t stop speaking of, that are, in a […]

8 February 20111 June 2012 · Main Posts

The paddocks of amnesia

Stephen Wright

On Australia Day night the moon rose very late. On nights like that the sky is revealed as an event that the word ‘spectacular’ doesn’t do justice. The Milky Way with the Magellanic Clouds hanging off it gives the sky a profound depth. In daylight the farthest you can see is three-and-a-half minutes no matter […]

25 January 20111 June 2012 · Main Posts

The politics of paranoia

Stephen Wright

In his scathing review of George W. Bush’s account of his Presidency, Decision Points, at the LRB, Eliot Weinberger suggests that the most likely Republican candidate for the US presidency in 2012, is Jeb Bush. The fact that we might find ourselves heaving a covert sigh of relief at this news, that at least Jeb […]

3 September 20106 September 2010 · Main Posts

Father’s Day

Stephen Wright

Storms around Nimbin often come from the south-west, rolling in from behind Nimbin Rocks with a sound like that of some weird, mysterious train. From the verandah, where I’m sitting, the thunder in the mountains seems like the echo of events taking place in another country. When I think about some of the things that […]

23 August 2010 · Main Posts

On clowns, Macbeth, not voting and activism and such

Stephen Wright

My favourite cafe, where I spent the election morning, is fortunately located in Nimbin, where I live. There are many reasons to like it; it’s super-relaxed, humble, has great food, is the only cafe I know that can make decent tea, has good reading material, drawing materials, children are regarded as real people, and so […]

28 July 201028 July 2010 · Main Posts

The passing of Generation Kill

Stephen Wright

Julian Assange said dryly, on the release of what he called the Afghan War Diaries, that war is just one damn thing after another, which is a somewhat polite way of putting it, and makes him sound a bit like Biggles. Perhaps ‘one fucking atrocity after another’ would have been more to the point. The […]

21 July 2010 · Main Posts

On atrocities and equivocal jokes

Stephen Wright

So anyway, as I was passing through Brisbane last week at the end of a long journey, I caught up with a friend of mine who reads my blogs. Brisbane always seems to me to be a city where a great catastrophe has at some time taken place, a catastrophe that no one wants to […]

6 July 20106 July 2010 · Main Posts

The routing of the Left

Stephen Wright

‘Grown ups are what’s left when skool is finished.’ – Nigel Molesworth Whatever battles the Left have fought over the last hundred years, and they have been many, there is one area where it has been utterly routed, abandoned the field and shows no sign of returning. It’s odd because there are not many instances […]

18 June 201019 June 2010 · Main Posts

On banana-cream pies

Stephen Wright

Kurt Vonnegut famously said that fiction is so much hot air, and that fiction writers’ opposition to the Vietnam War proved this. ‘We dropped on our complacent society’, he said at a PEN meeting in the early 70s, ‘the literary equivalent of a hydrogen bomb. I will now report to you the power of such […]

9 June 2010 · Main Posts

War = Dead children

Stephen Wright

One of the things about working with very young children for a long time is that when another 21st-century catastrophe is revealed to us, the first thing one tends to visualise is the actual concrete effect on children. And the thing about these catastrophes – wars, economic meltdowns, terrorist attacks, illegal occupations and so on […]

27 May 201027 May 2010 · Main Posts

Muttering to ourselves in the dark: on writers and madness

Stephen Wright

A few weeks ago, following a link posted on a comments board at Overland, I encountered an essay by the US writer Robert Cohen, ostensibly on literary style. As far as I can tell Cohen seems to be trying to get his head around what style is, and particularly ideas of ‘middle’ and ‘late’ style, […]

18 May 2010 · Main Posts

The only songs that matter

Stephen Wright

When the Overland editors posted an off-the-cuff list of songs for a soundtrack for the revolution a couple of weeks ago, the comments board, which usually moves between the sedate and the lively, went berserk. Music videos were posted by the score, ranging from the Dead Kennedys’ ‘Nazi Punks Fuck Off’ to Melanie’s ‘Psychotherapy’. Maybe […]

11 May 201012 May 2010 · Main Posts

The WikiLeaks war

Stephen Wright

In early April, when WikiLeaks released the video of two US Apache gunships machine-gunning civilians in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad in July 2007, anybody who watched it would have perhaps been moved by two things. Firstly, the appalling, terrifying, gut-wrenching tension in watching the endless circling of the two Apache’s as they agitate […]

5 May 20106 May 2010 · Main Posts

Of books and reading and timey-wimey stuff – pt 2

Stephen Wright

Fiction begs the question of itself, as does reading. The recent debates about the future of reading and so on seem to have thrown us back to some zero-point where we could begin to consider what reading might be, and therefore who the reader is and what she might be doing when she reads. And […]

28 April 20101 May 2010 · Main Posts

Of books and reading and timey-wimey stuff – pt 1

Stephen Wright

The interesting thing about a novel is, that like the Tardis, it’s much bigger on the inside than on the outside. Books look linear, and we are often tricked, as readers and writers, into making them linear. Novels muck about with time, and time is never as straightforward as it appears. Currently there looks to […]

15 April 201019 April 2010 · Main Posts

The dreams of children

Stephen Wright

I usually write my blog sitting at my desk in my study. This time I’m sitting on a rickety bed in a miserable motel in Cairns, watching Deadwood, a hard-drinkin’ cable-TV epic about the legendary Dakota frontier town where men were men, and women took their clothes off. Or perhaps it would be more accurate […]

7 April 20107 April 2010 · Main Posts

A language of dissent

Stephen Wright

‘Courage’, says Tony Judt in a brilliant and far-reaching interview in the late-March issue of the London Review of Books, ‘is always missing in politicians….[for them] it isn’t a useful attribute.’ Courage is what we get, or need to have when it becomes difficult to say something that could be truthfully said or done, but […]

30 March 201031 March 2010 · Main Posts

On not being able to care

Stephen Wright

For a couple of days I’ve been immersed in Jacqueline Rose’s volume of essays, On Not Being Able To Sleep, and mostly reading it at night when, as it happens, I haven’t been able to sleep. Jacqueline Rose is a Professor of English at some exalted establishment in the UK, and has written compellingly and […]

23 March 201023 March 2010 · Main Posts

The marginal and the imaginary

Stephen Wright

For years I have been writing a book of essays in my head. I used to keep a written list of their titles on my desk, but otherwise made no other notes: The Happiness of Bees, The Name of the Machine Is Money, Why Socks Lie, Sentences Spoken By Grass, Dead Matches On A Stove […]

15 March 201016 March 2010 · Main Posts

The elephant in the room

Stephen Wright

So lets get to it. I live outside the village of Nimbin, in northern New South Wales, on a property that overlooks Nimbin Rocks, a 40 million year-old geological formation that is a sacred site for the Bundjalung nation and was once a burial ground for the Clever Men of the Widjyabal people. Fortunately – […]