Last year a friend invited me to what I thought was going to be a lecture by the outspoken feminist Professor Sheila Jeffreys titled: ‘Prostitution in St. Kilda, How The Law Has Failed Sex Workers.’

I wanna tell you a story. A story of a house and its history. A story of its building. Its problems. Issues. I wanna tell you a story of its rebuilding. Of the promises made. Of the restructuring and the re-checking. Of the new paint job that cost $10 000. Of the new kitchen and […]

Andrew Bolt is not happy with what I wrote in response to the suicide of Josefa Rauluni. He says I’m either a ‘liar’ or ‘simply ignorant’. I wrote that our politicians and corporate media peddled hatred and fear against asylum seekers, which created the conditions that caused Rauluni’s death. I made up a megaphone speech, […]

The first thing that sticks out about Garma are the tents. Rows and rows of them set up in designated areas: artists, volunteers, cultural tourists, paying attendees, academics, forum participants – all the way across the other side of the bungal ground to the Yolgnu camp. It’s a mini-city that exists for five days all […]

Whatever happened to queer activism? Where once it was aggressively and staunchly for human rights, consciousness-raising and real social reform, it seems now to be dominated by a drive towards the inoffensive and the inconsequential. The contrast of the Stonewall activists (in the most combative sense of the term) – ‘low class’ drag queens, hustlers […]

A friend of mine, let’s call her K, has a son who just turned fourteen. She’s fairly committed to the idea of raising him as a relatively decent human being and, being a fairly active person online, she recently asked her blog for help finding books and DVDs and the like on how to be […]

Once upon a time, in the not too distant past, education was the means to which anyone could transform their lives. In the near future if you want your child to attend university they will need to attend a private school or one of the few selective high schools in the country. If your child […]

Many years ago, I worked as a community worker in a drop-in centre. One day, a wonderful young man – who struggled physically and mentally in life – collapsed. A violent incident had shattered his fragile sense of peace and security in the world. Two female colleagues and I went to tell his parents he […]

That’s a clip from a Fear of a Brown Planet live show. In Overland 200, Jacinda Woodhead investigates the FOBP hip-hop workshops in Footscray, Melbourne.

The Western Australian Government’s proposal to develop, along with Woodside Petroleum, a $30billion liquefied natural gas plant at Walmadany (James Price Point), north of Broome, is a startling example of how capitalism and colonialism can converge to ensure cultural and ecological destruction. Walmadany is no mere speck on the map. It is certainly no ‘unremarkable […]

Talk of banning the burqa is twisting some civil rights knickers again. This time in South Australia. What I find interesting is that people (on all sides of this debate) seem to think legislating against something that makes large groups of society uncomfortable is outrageously novel. But it happens all the time. By law, I […]

I believe fundamentally in the importance of the unions. But I’m not a union member. In my first week as a fifteen year old check-out chick, I signed up as a member of the SDA. As a casual working the registers at Christmas time, it was only because of the the union presence in the […]

One of our esteemed Overland bloggers, Trish Bolton, has an opinion piece about sexual harassment in the workplace in today’s Age, ‘Women are no longer prepared to put up and shut up’: HE CORNERED me at the back of the shop, stood over me and ripped open my vest, swearing when he saw I was […]

It is 2004, going on to 2005. I’m thinking about ‘identity’, and thinking about the person who in 2000 wrote: To me, sexuality has been so important for my journey to enlightenment. That’s not to assume that enlightenment is an end thing, it’s a continual process. It’s a continual reassertion of the self, or reawakening […]