209 Summer 2012

Crisis and time, Riot Grrrls and Russia, JD Salinger’s toilet, indefinite detention, the looting of Darwin, radical theatre, counter-hegemonic writing, how writers survive, and more.

Issue Contents

Regulars

On not having a career

Alison Croggon

Features

Overlooking tragedy

Isabelle Skaburskis

Streets of wherever

Giovanni Tiso

Living the life within

Polly Bennett

Balancing the books

Maria ODwyer

Political writers in the neoliberal age

Rjurik Davidson

Scenes from a radical theatre

David Carlin

Descended upon by looters

Sophie Cunningham

‘You can’t dream’

Lizzie O'Shea

Salinger’s Toilet

Fiona Capp

Me and Pussy Riot

Everett True

The pessimism of time

Nina Power

Fiction

The day the world stayed the same

Melissa Fagan

Killing Floor

John Turner

Frank O’Hara’s Animals

Tara Cartland

Poetry

Pillage

John Kinsella

Recrossing the Styx

Berndt Sellheim

transit of venus

Marty Hiatt

The Ear Especially

Corey Wakeling

Types

Jal Nicholl

Winter war

Maria Takolander

Glazed Peyote Crème Brûlée

Paul Chicharo

Obit

Fiona Wright

Making Love (to a man)

Michael Farrell

Cento

Claire Nashar

Editorial

editorial

Jeff Sparrow

Short Story Prize

Judges’ report

Jennifer Mills

Browse the issue:

Regulars

Published in Overland Issue 209 Summer 2012 · Writing

On not having a career

Alison Croggon

I often find it mildly hilarious when I read articles that talk of writing creatively as a ‘career’. This is purely personal: after three decades of making a precarious living through various kinds of writing, it’s impossible for me to look back over my own ‘career’ with anything but rueful amusement. But exhortations for the ‘author’ to become a ‘brand’ don’t make me laugh. They fill me with revulsion.

Features

Published in Overland Issue 209 Summer 2012 · Politics

Overlooking tragedy

Isabelle Skaburskis

Unlike sex trafficking today, white slavery – the abduction of American or European girls to be sold as sex slaves in foreign markets – was largely a myth.

Published in Overland Issue 209 Summer 2012 · Culture

Streets of wherever

Giovanni Tiso

Set pieces in foreign locations have always been a hallmark of the spy film genre, but in the current crop of Anglo-American franchises they have reached new levels of baroque virtuosity. The modern cinematic secret service agent is at home anywhere, speaks all languages, walks over everything; he’s a silent drone, a lethal tourist.

Published in Overland Issue 209 Summer 2012 · Culture

Living the life within

Polly Bennett

‘Just fucking do it,’ my friend said. At least, that was the gist. She’d just joined roller derby. I was contemplating boxing. I took her advice.

Published in Overland Issue 209 Summer 2012 · Writing

Balancing the books

Maria ODwyer

In my former job as a book publicist, there was an inevitable stomach-churn that accompanied working with an ‘unknown’. Not because they weren’t good writers, mind you, but because, in a world saturated with content, opinion and information, it was difficult to make the public care about someone who wasn’t already a household name.

Published in Overland Issue 209 Summer 2012 · Writing

Political writers in the neoliberal age

Rjurik Davidson

The notion is, of course, a product of modernity. As Terry Eagleton outlines in The Function of Criticism, the idea of the public sphere was forged in the struggle against the absolutist state. Salons, clubs and coffee houses, broadsheets, pamphlets, the novel itself – all of these were born as the middle classes carved out a space against the aristocratic notions of hereditary hierarchy.

Published in Overland Issue 209 Summer 2012 · Writing

Scenes from a radical theatre

David Carlin

Imagine. You are young and have not yet forgotten that anything is possible. There is something bigger to believe in than your career prospects and your résumé, your future super dividends (as if you have any), your individual rung on the clichéd and fundamentally absurd ladder of fame and fortune.

Published in Overland Issue 209 Summer 2012 · Politics

Descended upon by looters

Sophie Cunningham

There is a photo taken at the end of 1974 of a man sitting outside the remains of his shop on the Stuart Highway, Darwin, holding a shotgun to keep thieves away. It was a few days after Cyclone Tracy had wiped out close to 90 per cent of the town in what remains Australia’s greatest urban catastrophe.

Published in Overland Issue 209 Summer 2012 · Politics

‘You can’t dream’

Lizzie O'Shea

I come to dread the phone calls. But, even when I am not there to take them, the messages haunt me. An ominous flashing light on my phone, a few buttons pressed; her ghostly voice, barely audible, in my ear. ‘Elizabeth Lawyer, this is R. Please be calling me.’

Published in Overland Issue 209 Summer 2012 · Writing

Salinger’s Toilet

Fiona Capp

Six months after the death of JD Salinger in 2010, the toilet from his former home in Cornish, New Hampshire, went up for sale on eBay for one million American dollars. The advertisement claimed that the toilet was ‘uncleaned and in its original condition’. It also speculated that Salinger might have dreamed up and even written some of his unpublished work while sitting on this ‘throne’.

Published in Overland Issue 209 Summer 2012 · Culture

Me and Pussy Riot

Everett True

It’s about the romance, partly. What could be more romantic than the sight of three women – mothers of small children – on trial in a small glass box, flanked by police officers and a massive dog, surrounded by the state apparatus of Russia, with the remnants of the Iron Curtain knitting together to prove just as impenetrable as before?

Published in Overland Issue 209 Summer 2012 · Politics

The pessimism of time

Nina Power

Where are we, today? On the one hand: austerity measures, the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash and the attempt to dismantle whatever residual features of the welfare state remain. On the other: mass resistance in the form of occupations, strikes, riots, protests, a revival of interest in Marx, feminism, anti-racist and anti-fascist ideas and actions, and widespread cynicism about electoral politics.

Fiction