In Overland 201, writer and academic Julie Stephens writes a controversial examination on the neoliberalisation of female labour: There used to be a billboard in Melbourne that advertised milk by depicting young, large-breasted women cavorting on a trampoline. The radical graffiti activist group Buga-Up painted the words ‘Women are not cows’ in large letters across […]

A few years ago I was doing some analysis of blogging as part of a PhD examining different forms of alternative media amid claims that the internet would lead to a reinvigorated public sphere. In that analysis I was critical of blogs, arguing they were spaces where like people had like conversations that usually ended […]

One of my most cherished friends is an angry feminist. Of all the people I know personally, she has probably had more influence on the way I understand the world, and particularly issues relating to gender, than anyone else. She could well be surprised to learn of this. We’ve argued about these issues many, many […]

There are lots of reasons why people choose to have kids, but for many women in Tanzania, the word ‘choice’ may not be the most appropriate one. No one is arguing that the birthrate here isn’t high. The Daily News, one of Tanzania’s newspapers, recently listed the country as having one of the 10 youngest […]

Back in May I attended a panel discussion at the Sydney Writers’ Festival entitled, ‘No Country for Young Women’ which sought to answer the question: ‘Can a young women thrive in our newly retro Mad Men world?’ The panel consisted of Kirstin Tranter, Emily Maguire and Karen Hitchcock and was chaired by Susan (Lionheart) Maushart. […]

On Radji Beach Ian W Shaw Macmillan The plight of the Second World War nurses who fled Singapore and wound up in Japanese prison camps is not unknown. A number of nurses have written accounts of their horrendous experiences in the camps, the most well known being White Coolie by Betty Jeffrey. The film Paradise […]

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 […]

In Overland 197, Anwyn Crawford contributed a devastating critique of Nick Cave, one of the most-discussed articles we’ve published in the past year or so. For Overland 200, she’s written a much-needed intervention tackling some of the major issues in contemporary feminism. It begins like this: A chart hung above the chalkboard in Mrs Brandie’s […]

GetUp! has a new ad about Tony Abbott and his archaism:

Unmarried parents now account for one in three births, compared with about 10 per cent of births in 1980 and just 5 per cent in 1960. ‘Families tend to blend as single-parent households now the most common.’ The other day a friend was bringing me up to speed on a mutual friend, an older woman […]

The ascendancy of Julia Gillard to the office of PM has feminists going gaga. ‘OMG! A female PM’, has been the uncritical response I’ve been hearing of Julia Gillard’s slaying of Kevin Rudd from feminists everywhere. We’ve all heard reports of women rushing to screens to watch Julia’s first speech, feminist workplaces ringing with tears […]

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 […]

Suddenly the world is awash in burqa suspicion and vitriol. In the past fortnight, headlines have been dominated by bans and proposed bans in Belgium, France and Denmark (home to only three women who wear the burqa), to our own shores, and the boorish postulating of Cory Bernardi: In my mind, the burka has no […]

For the last few weeks, we’ve learned, over and over again, why the burqa must be banned. A visible face is, apparently, central to Western modernity (which is why, one imagines, that new-fangled device known as the telephone will never catch on). Besides, outlawing the burqa is a feminist cause – to preserve women’s right […]

Two weeks ago I promised myself I wouldn’t blog till I finished the current draft of my novel. I’ve tried really hard to push this blog piece down but it keeps resurfacing in my mind, tormenting me, and so I realised the only way to get back to finishing my novel is to write the […]

In 2009, a choreographer from the television programme So you think you can dance said his routine involved ‘a bit of a peep show’ explaining, ‘They’re such hot looking girls, why wouldn’t I portray them as sex kittens?’ I then pulled the face that causes my teenaged daughter to exclaim, ‘I hate watching television with […]