Last month I received a legal letter accusing me of defamation. Someone who was very close to me for many years – but now is not – had read a piece of short fiction I had published and decided a minor character was about them. Like every writer ever born, I have gleaned sentences, character traits and events, and I’ve hodgepodged it all together to try and convey an emotional truth. It’s what we do, right? Never once had I considered defamation.

Everyone except the most flagrantly freeloading of publications, it seems, agrees that something needs to be done about the parlous state of writers’ pay – but what, exactly?

A major newspaper emails me via a literary journal to ask if they can publish one of my stories. I am afraid that in these straitened times all we could offer you in exchange for publication rights to the short story would be a quid pro quo arrangement in terms of publicity. They’re waving ‘exposure’ at me like it’s a cheque.

Larissa Behrendt is a writer, barrister and law professor, and celebrated Australian personality, passionate about the rights of Indigenous Australians and the development of Australian culture. In 2009, she was the NAIDOC Indigenous Person of the Year and in 2011 voted NSW Australian of the Year. Talented across several genres, Behrendt’s bibliography includes many articles […]

Elizabeth Kadetsky continues our series of regular cross-posts from international writers or journals with similar political or aesthetic sensibilities to Overland. Elizabeth Kadetsky’s short stories have been chosen for a Puschart Prize, Best New American Voices and Best American Short Stories notable stories of 2009, and her personal essays have appeared in the New York […]

This is the first of what will become regular cross-posts from international writers or journals with similar political or aesthetic sensibilities to Overland. Over the last few years, the Overland blog has built a small but flourishing community of writers debating politics and culture from a largely Australian perspective. The new cross-posts aim to build […]

Glenn Milne, regularly published pontificating about his numerous anonymous sources, lowered the bar of journalistic standards yet again yesterday when he filed An ALP insider’s open letter to Julia Gillard at ABC’s Drum. The piece consists of an introduction by Milne, followed by an unsigned open letter to Julia Gillard from an anonymous Labor party […]

Laurie Clancy’s death this July is a great loss to Australia’s literary community, and a particular cause of sorrow to Overland. Although Laurie was b inclination attached to Overland, a chance combination of circumstances led to his inclusion in the Meanjin team for one of the annual cricket matches that enacted the rivalry between the […]

1.0 In 1967 TJ Clark, latterly ensconced in brilliance and tenure at Berkeley, was a PhD student at the Courtauld and a part-time acolyte of Guy Debord. Together with Donald Nicholson-Smith, Charles Radcliffe, and Christopher Gray he wrote ‘The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution’ in which he avers, bracingly: Most […]

I can’t let the death last week of Australian writer Jessica Anderson go unremarked. Why? Because although she twice won the Miles Franklin Award (1978 and 1980) and her novel Tirra Lirra by the River has been on high school reading lists, Anderson was for most of her long life marginalised, a misfit, a sensitive […]

As the red sun dipped into the azure ocean, the last words from Wordstorm 2010 were carried away by the cool sea breeze as it blew into the Botanical Gardens. Wordstorm, The NT Writers’ Festival, was put to bed and it will be two years before it returns to Darwin, as next year it will […]

Perhaps it is because I don’t get out much, or perhaps I am just reckless, but by the time I returned home on Sunday after four glorious days brain-binging at the writer’s festival, all I could do was fling a signed copy of Josh Neufeld’s A.D: New Orleans After the Deluge at my beloved before […]