What our readers, contributors & editors loved (or didn't love) in 2018
We asked Overland contributors, volunteers, staff and editors to share their highs and lows of 2018.
Progressive culture since 1954
From boomer to millennial bust
‘New York Millennial can’t afford to move to DC before her job in Congress starts’ read a recent headline in VICE for an article on how Congressmember-Elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez couldn’t yet afford to move to Washington DC, as the rents in the city are so high.
Not a week goes by without a media report revealing how difficult it is for young people to afford a house; simultaneously, we’re inundated by articles on disgustingly wealthy baby-boomers.
A left case against borders: a response to, among others, Angela Nagle
Nagle claims that the liberal-left position on immigration reflects its elite detachment from the concerns of ordinary people: the American workers whose livelihoods are threatened by an influx of cheap labour.
In the act of eating: food culture in late capitalism
Somehow over the last decade, food has become supreme arbiter – moving around the cultural landscape and absorbing our biggest fears and desires, before transforming everything into a café-ready salve. What’s strange about food culture’s claim to authenticity is not so much the baroque propositions – slow food, local food, homemade food – only that the stuff we eat has taken on such a potent, transformative quality in the first place.
Travelling a darling river
We came from Melbourne up over the Great Dividing Range to be atop the Barrier Range. Then onward to a river camp in the corner country of northwest New South Wales. The idea was to travel once more to the desert, starting at Broken Hill, then camp, explore, immerse ourselves and stay awhile, not just hop from roadside postcard photoshoot to national pretty park, not to blithely pass through.