Contents

Regulars

Jeff Sparrow – Editorial
Christos Tsiolkas – Torch Song

Overland Lecture

Ramona Koval
In Praise of the Common Reader

Features

Liz Conor
Howard’s Desert Storm

Mary-Ellen Stringer
The Sky as Common Ground

Kevin Foster
A Sociable Paradise

Tom O’Lincoln
Hearts Starve as Well as Bodies

Shane Cahill
‘This Fascist Mob’

Jeff Sparrow
Theatre of War

Nicole Moore
Art Makes the World: Mona Brand, 1915-2007

Fiction

Jennifer Robertson
The Hotel Lobby

Kaye Watson
The Effortlessness of Being

Jeremy Fisher
Winter Afternoon

Poetry

David Prater
Travelling Types

John Kinsella
Elegy For (unavailable online)

Will Fraser
Shackled
A Genuine Fact

Greg McLaren
Neath Colliery: a found poem

Ali Alizadeh
Culture and Its Terrors

Murray Alfredson
Angus dei

Jonathan Hadwen
Cops on Horses

MTC Cronin
Being Interviewed in The Scottish Book Collector

Paul Hetherington
At Home

Kerry Scuffins
Advance Australian Fear

Tatjana Lukic
waiting for a change

Kevin Gillam
dismantling the

Trans. Stuart Cooke
What Spain Was

Reviews

Kerry Leves
Looking Out at the Lights: New Poetry

Lucy Sussex
Goths and Vandals

Louise Swinn
Unpicking the Universe

Jamie Cooke
Switched Off: Australia’s Media

Barry Dickins
The First Poet of His People

Lyndall Ryan
In Quite a State

Nathan Hollier
Ruling Passions