Progressive culture since 1954
On our first day, a salesman had arrived to check that all the products he provided to the store were in order. He walked around with my boss, discussing how ice creams should be displayed if she wanted them to sell. We listened in. ‘The blacks can’t read, so they go for the colourful, cheap ice creams. Make sure you have them placed here,’ he said. Catching our expressions, he laughed. ‘You’ll catch on to the language around here, girls, don’t worry.’
People are protective of their space and often suspicious of outsiders. People are cramped together in auspicious looking high-rises, disturbingly typical and askew. Outside of my inner-west bubble, I often talk to friends who have lived in Ashfield for years, a suburb that completely transformed and reshaped within a matter of months.
While we’d like to thank all 863 entrants who worked hard to submit this year, the four judges for the 2018 competition – writer Sarah Schmidt, writer and editor Michelle Cahill, writer and VU academic Tom Clark, and writer and Overland fiction editor Jennifer Mills – have now decided on a shortlist of thirteen outstanding stories.
There is no amount of legalese at one’s disposal that could possibly obscure the coded messages that so often come rising to the surface in the Australian Parliament.
The first women’s refuge in Melbourne opened in 1974. According to the Women’s Liberation Halfway House Collective (WLHHC), ‘the need for a Halfway House had been discussed for a long time in the Women’s Liberation Movement’, as the Women’s Liberation Centre ‘constantly received calls from women needing somewhere to stay for awhile, often in desperate circumstances.’ In April 1974, a meeting was called to ‘discuss the setting up of a halfway house… a halfway point for women between their old lives and new ones.’