‘For thirty years the country [Sri Lanka] went through a kind of hell and endured untold economic and cultural deprivation. Now, with things looking up, we need all the friendly input we can get from well-meaning outsiders.

Into the void of the last AFL off-season leapt a young woman who called herself ‘The small girl, with a big voice’.1 The echoes of that voice – its Facebook- , Blogger- , Twitter- and ultimately 60 Minutes-fuelled reverberations – dominated the off-season and continue to be felt. This was, in the words of Richmond director Peggy Haines, ‘a crisis of a proportion that hadn’t been contemplated’.2

Because I’ve lived in Queensland my entire life, I’m allowed to say that the weather up here can be a mother-fucker sometimes. Our summers might give us golden mangoes and a legitimate reason to walk around in jocks, but the same heat can knock you flat in the middle of a working day.

On 4 November 2010, the lavishly produced docudrama I, Spry: The Rise and Fall of a Master Spy was screened nationally on ABC television. Considerable controversy swirled around the program. In the Sydney Morning Herald, Gerard Henderson rejected as ‘mere hyperbole’ the insinuation that Sir Charles Spry, ASIO’s director-general from 1950 to 1970, used ‘the weapons of the communists against Australian citizens’.

Ever shall my fame increase, renewed by the praises of posterity. – Horace According to Bob Dylan, ‘death is not the end’. Although the line comes from a terrible song, there’s no better summation of the age-old gamble of art – that you can survive your own death.

Forty years ago, Simone de Beauvoir wrote controversially about the ‘conspiracy of silence’ that afflicts old age. In her view, the old were ‘outcasts’, nursing homes were ‘houses of death’ and ageing a ‘disagreeable’ subject. Today, not much has changed – despite new technology, complex knowledge and a growing population base to consult, many elders are still viewed (and treated with) contempt.

‘Are you interested in being involved with a courageous project to reform every political system on earth – and through that reform move the world to a more humane state?’ Sometime in December 2006, a former Melbourne University maths student, still hanging around the common room, posted the question to the students’ society network. His rather alarming message explained that the organisers proposed to launch their campaign in two months but were being overwhelmed by a media cascade with more than 51 000 (!) page hits on Google and stories in the Washington Post and so on.

During February’s Meanland: Reading in a time of change panel, literary critic Peter Craven argued that the future of books might depend on our ears.

In her article ‘Driven to distraction’ (Overland 199), Cate Kennedy critiques contemporary internet culture from the perspective of the creative writer. While not opposed to the internet as such, Kennedy seeks to demonstrate that Web 2.0 technologies and the activities they facilitate (such as social networking, blogging and video-sharing) are rendering us permanently impatient, disinhibited yet isolated and unable to concentrate.

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 it.

If it is possible to assess the current state of Australian literature through a reading of four novels published in late September and October 2010 – three first novels, Notorious by Roberta Lowing, Night Street by Kristel Thornell and Utopian Man by Lisa Lang, and one second novel, Bereft by Chris Womersley – then I’d say Australian fiction is haunted, preoccupied with the past.

Forty-three-year-old Gilda Civitico and I are sipping tea and talking about craft in the open-plan rear extension of the modest brick home she shares with her partner, electrical engineer Andrew Peel, and their two young daughters.

‘Colonisation,’ Césaire argued, ‘dehumanises even the most civilised man; … colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; … the coloniser, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal.’

Last year I had a meeting with two officers of the Australia Council. The Australia Council – or OzCo, as nearly everyone in the cultural industries calls it – is the federal government’s arts funding and advisory body. The meeting was with two of the council’s digital and new media team, who were keen to explain the latest digital arts initiative, Arts Content for a Digital Era.

C2H5OH, or ethyl alcohol, is a clear, colourless, volatile and flammable oxygenated hydrocarbon produced by the fermentation of sugar that is used, among other things, in the preparation of beverages. It is also one of the oldest and most efficacious of psychoactive drugs – and we love it.

Flicking through an old issue of Overland (edition 182) I came across an essay by Malcolm Knox entitled ‘Pushing Against the Real World: The Case for “Original” Australian Fiction’. It sparked my interest – I was grappling with similar ideas at the time – especially by mentioning a paper delivered by Mark Davis in 2005 in which he argued that the ‘Australian literary novel’ is suffering a slow and inevitable demise.