Overland literary journal

A novel ending

Brunette Lenkic — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 03:21:04 +0000

I have finally finished shredding my novel. It had been the work of many days, feeding it into the machine sheet by sheet and watching the pages re-emerge as linguine. It’s not surprising the story was bad. I wrote it soon after my husband died, leaving me with three young children, so the raw ingredients by weight were exhaustion, desperation, false hope and uncertain talent. It was a testament to one thing only: the discipline of writing every day.

Final results of the 2017 Judith Wright Poetry Prize

Editorial team — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 02:03:42 +0000

The final results of the 2017 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize, as well as notes on the shortlist and a list of Highly Commended poems from this year’s competition.

Rage, rage against the factory closure

Godfrey Moase — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 04:30:07 +0000

On 1 May 2017, May Day – International Workers’ Day – Australian dairy giant Murray Goulburn announced that they were shutting factories across Victoria and Tasmania, slashing jobs and devastating communities. Faye and Julie, two National Union of Workers delegates working at the Edith Creek site in North-West Tasmania, shared their responses to the closure.

Whodunnit to whom? A case for language preservation

Tina Cartwright — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 01:40:37 +0000

Dyirbal is now spoken by just twenty-nine speakers. Languages in decline have their own complexities. In their book Vanishing Voices: The extinction of the world’s languages, Daniel Nettle and Susan Domain explain how Dyirbal previously contained very specific terms which are now lost. Many terms for ‘big’ existed, depending on what was being described. A big eel required a different term to a big turkey, different again was a big tree.

Will the Victorian Socialists shake up Victoria’s election year?

Liam Byrne — Wed, 21 Feb 2018 05:19:14 +0000

In the Victorian state elections of December 1908, the Victorian Socialist Party (VSP) – then the largest radical party in Australia – threw down the electoral gauntlet to the Australian Labor Party by running candidates in two inner-city Melbourne seats.

Beyond fees: a case for a waged education

Jemimah Tarasov — Wed, 21 Feb 2018 03:41:21 +0000

In Australia, working- and middle-class students who cannot obtain financial familial support must both study and work a shitty part- or full-time job. Government youth allowance payments are deliberately difficult to obtain and excessively bureaucratic. Certainly, they are not provided on the presumption that to study is to perform valuable labour.

Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize: the 2017 shortlist

Editorial team — Wed, 21 Feb 2018 00:52:16 +0000

The 2017 judges – Nic Low, Ryan O’Neill and Jennifer Mills – have finished their blind judging and deliberation, and decided on a shortlist of thirteen brilliant stories that approach the theme in original ways.

Writers, we want your ‘false documents’!

Editorial team — Tue, 20 Feb 2018 06:34:13 +0000

Overland is seeking fiction submissions for a special online fiction edition themed around ‘False documents’ – that is, fiction disguised as or in the guise of ‘real’ textual artefacts – to be guest edited by Dave Drayton.

Raised by wolves: new survivalist heroines in fiction

Katie Dobbs — Tue, 20 Feb 2018 01:10:00 +0000

In recent years there has been an increasingly apocalyptic flavour to literary fiction, an upsurge in narratives of radical self-reliance in the face of economic, environmental or civil collapse. Given the end-times polarisation of the political climate, the trend is perhaps unsurprising, but in 2017 three debut novels specifically featured teenage heroines schooled in survivalist practices by their fathers.

‘Words are cheap’: ten years on, Mparntwe fears another Stolen Generation

Amy Thomas — Sun, 18 Feb 2018 23:32:28 +0000

The Intervention’s promise to improve the lives of children and young people in remote Aboriginal communities has resulted in exactly the opposite, and now children are being taken away at a rate higher than during the Stolen Generations. The Intervention era has produced a three-fold increase in children in out-of-home-care in the NT.

Ode to the bin chicken

Cameron Muir — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 01:40:34 +0000

The ancient Egyptians venerated the ibis. Followers of ibis cults would visit temples and purchase mummified ibises for use in votive offerings. The ibis was a sacred bird associated with creation and fertility and knowledge and learning. The ibis cults became so wildly popular that priests began breeding and rearing the birds onsite, specially for mummification.

How human are you? On dystopia

Charlotte Pordage — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 01:00:38 +0000

Political theorist Hannah Arendt, in her 1963 book On Revolution, surmises that hypocrisy is the worst of all vices since it destroys integrity, the only thing that allows the individual to reclaim their incorruptible self: ‘Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil, but only the hypocrite is rotten to the core.’

Judith Wright Poetry Prize: the 2017 shortlist

Editorial team — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 22:51:16 +0000

The 2017 judges, poet Ali Cobby Eckermann and Overland poetry editor Toby Fitch, have finished blind judging the competition and, after deliberation, have selected a shortlist of nine poems.

On sickness as present tense

Paul K Stalenhoef — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 02:36:38 +0000

The problem with illness is that it robs you of pleasure. Young people are supposed to live in the moment, take risks, be spontaneous. But life in a hospital is a boring and cruel simulacra of life, with the minutiae of your body ticking like a machine being the best and only thing to focus on. In other words, you become self-obsessed, but not with gaining pleasure, more in avoiding pain.

Roger Waters and the politics of solidarity

Michael Lazarus — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 02:37:58 +0000

We, hundreds of thousands of us, supporters of BDS and human rights throughout history all over the world join together in memory of Sharpeville and Wounded Knee and Lidice and Budapest and Ferguson and Standing Rock and Gaza and raise our fists in protest. We hurl our glasses into the fire of your arrogant unconcern, and smash our bracelets on the rock of your implacable indifference.