By 1895, in Australia a ‘battler’ was someone trying to live off betting on horse races despite always losing, and from the late 1800s through to the 1950s, it referred to a female sex worker who went about her business without a pimp. For Moore, then, ‘the battler was a person at the very lowest end of society, who struggled to eke out a very basic existence’.

I spent a morning at the former ‘comfort women’s’ weekly demonstration outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul one Wednesday during the northern summer of 2008, and have never been sure how to write about the experience.

That's a grand old age no matter how you look at it, but when I think about the fact that she was born in 1920, and has lived through such massive changes in the world, those defining moments of the twentieth century – the Great Depression, a World War, the sexual revolution and even the advent of the internet, all in one lifetime – well, it begins to make clichéd phrases like ‘a living link to history’ resonate anew.

Richard Holmes describes biography as a 'handshake across time', an 'act of human solidarity and in its own way an act of recognition and of love.' The RM books were motivated by a similar sentiment. Re-excavating the physical traces of labour history was, as we said in the introduction, an effort to 'provide a bridge between the struggles of the past and the people of the present'.

Anzac Day celebrates forgetting. Its revival, the transformation of a ceremony nearly extinct in the 1980s into today’s turbocharged festival, coincides with the excision from national consciousness of the most important aspects of the Great War.

The Protectors: a journey through whitefella past Stephen Gray Allen & Unwin For much of John Howard’s reign as Prime Minister debate on Australian history took a polarised view: the Black Armband History versus the White Revisionist’s History. The culmination of which was John Howard’s refusal to apologise to the Stolen Generation. With Kevin Rudd’s […]

In his op-ed for the Washington Post, Goldstone made the remarkable claim that if he had known during his investigations ‘what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document’. This was supported by two primary claims in support. The first: ‘While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in […]

The royal family is an institutional codification of your worthlessness. No matter how you slice and dice it, an aristocracy, by definition, rests on the brute fact that they are royal and you are common, and that, therefore, their DNA entitles them to privileges and honours from which you will always and forever be excluded. […]

Richard Goldstone’s recent op ed in the Washington Post has caused a flood of discussion of what we call the Goldstone Report. I think there are three issues relating to the report and its current fallout worth considering. In this post, I will address the bias of Goldstone and the report. In the next, I […]

Californian writer and academic Aaron Bady continues our series of regular cross-posts from international writers or journals with similar political or aesthetic sensibilities to Overland. See more of Aaron Bady’s work at zunguzungu, where this piece was originally published. Ignorance and the moral fabric of the American state Last November, Hillary Clinton responded to WikiLeaks’ […]

If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal. – Emma Goldman NSW voters can be forgiven for taking an axe to the ALP government that held state power for sixteen years. Last Saturday’s election gave voters the opportunity they had been waiting for and the ALP was dumped with enough conviction to keep them out […]

‘The Holocaust started with words.’ Perhaps Ron Merkel, lead counsel for the nine Aborigines suing Andrew Bolt under the Racial Discrimination Act, would have been better to use a more local example. The policy that allowed the government to ‘assume full control and custody of the child of any aborigine’ (the Aborigines Protection Amending Act […]

All Along the Watchtower Michael Hyde Vulgar Press Michael Hyde’s All Along the Watchtower is a recent Australian example of the trend of memoirs by 60s activists, which has also seen the publication of Tariq Ali’s Street-fighting Years (1987, 2005), Luisa Passerini’s Autobiography of a Generation (translation published 2004) and Tom Hayden’s Rebel: A Personal […]

There is a fissure in the Left at present; in Australia, it’s playing out on the pages of Crikey, liberal blog Larvatus Prodeo and Benjamin Solah’s Blood and Barricades. The Left is divided between western intervention in the Libyan uprisings, or not. About a UN-endorsed no-fly zone over Libya, or not. About whether such interventions […]

I’m a woman; here are some things I’m thinking about today: 1. Mary Poppins and that feminist sub-plot:   2. The war being waged on women and their reproductive rights (which, in many countries, like the vote, were won long ago): • In ‘Lucky girl’, Bridget Potter recounts what she went through to get an […]

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 […]