Progressive culture since 1954
Overland and Victoria University are pleased to announce that the three judges of the Victoria University Short Story Prize for New and Emerging Writers – writer Nam Le, writer and Victoria University academic Natalie Kon-yu and Overland editor Jacinda Woodhead – have finally decided on a shortlist of twelve stories.
I might need counselling, I’m not sure. But I do know that I have a future that I can be grateful for, thanks to hard-won abortion rights. For any woman (one in three, I read), who will encounter the vertiginous experience of an ‘unplanned pregnancy’ and who will consider abortion (or already has), I feel for you. I want you to know that there is a large community of women who have suffered the same problems, and that we live in a world that makes it hard to exercise autonomy over our bodies.
One assignment took me into the Special Collection, where I was shown about by two of the librarians, Guy Aron and Sam Gibbard, gracious, quietly enthusiastic men. The books in their care are fantastic beasts. If I abandon the homunculus metaphor for a moment, the RMIT University Library Special Collection is the bibliographic equivalent of one of those abyssal habitats found at the bottom of the Pacific or Atlantic. It’s strangely lit, and quiet.
Consider the most powerful arguments in favour of defunding and deregulating the tertiary sector. A university education is an investment in oneself: it grants new skills and knowledge that will make one more employable and boost one’s future earnings. As such, it is only fair that students are made to bear all or most of the costs of this investment, because they will be the beneficiaries. Further, look at the statistics regarding those accessing higher education: the privileged are overrepresented across our universities, and in our relatively prestigious Group of Eight institutions in particular.
To extol drone, one must be prepared to embrace contradiction, because as a concept it is riddled with them. To begin with, there are various complications of meaning. The word ‘drone’ commonly evokes the pejorative idea of extended monotony – for instance, we complain when politicians drone on and on. Lately, it has taken on a more nefarious meaning as a type of unpiloted aircraft often used for objectionable military purposes.
Naturally, nobody with a reasonable amount of literary education can fault the main argument of these estimable critics: that the quotidian is celebrated while the masters are silently passed over. Not so different was it in the time of Thomas Browne. And it may be helpful to remember that no less an eminence than André Gide rejected the manuscript of Swann’s Way. The history of literature is replete with such mistakes and missed opportunities.
Historically, ‘post-punk’ has been described as a predominately white, male, middle-class musical scene. While the reality was really very different – female-fronted bands such as Delta V and Au Pairs not only participated in the subculture, but used it as a platform for gender commentary – it has mostly been the male performers – Joy Division, Wire, Gang of Four – who’ve received the bulk of critical attention.
It’s always late when he comes to bed. So late it’s not really late anymore and is more accurately called early. He’s cooked and washed up and tidied the house. Put on a load of washing after spending an hour watching whatever brain-numbingly stupid reality television show I’ve picked for the evening.
Looking again at the history of film it becomes clear that the positive progression for viewership depended not solely on the industry’s technological developments. More vital was the dynamic caused by the distinct roles of the companies that produced the physical media, and the organisations that archived them. The studios put out the films, and they were collected by art galleries, national archives, libraries, video stores, and private individuals. (Video stores were in on the game, of course, but at least our minimum-wage Tarantinos were on our side.) Archives attempted to grasp the ephemeral medium. And in securing it, they set it free.
We live in an age of paradoxes: a time when Australia tries to conceal its mistreatment of refugees through various nefarious methods – for example, criminalising the disclosure of child abuse in the Nauruan detention system – even as it trumpets its concern for violence against women, which is, according to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, ‘unAustralian’. Yet, in the case of ‘Abyan’ – the refugee on Nauru flown to Australia for a termination following a rape on the island and then deported before the procedure could even occur – violence is the direct result of Australian government policy.
It’s often said that the American neoconservative Bill Kristol never met a war he didn’t like. Certainly, Kristol played a key role in promoting the US attack on Iraq in 2003 – and since then he’s been advocating new military interventions just about everywhere.
By now, most of us should be fully aware of the arrival of refugees on European shores, and by extension, Australia. The descriptors used for these movements of large masses of people across land and sea are often described in fluid terms: a surge, a flood, a wave, a flow; a rising tide that is about to break open the dams and threaten the biodiversity of our precious ecosystems. This language isn’t just tremendously invalidating and dehumanising: when scores of migrants are either locked up in detention centres or dying at sea, it helps to gloss over the fact of their mere existence.
There’s something awfully bourgeois about the medium of theatre. Divided into the various endlessly self-devised categories, it is an artform that almost prides itself on its inaccessibility to the working class. Tickets are more expensive than a cinema for most large productions, and underground productions are on a ‘who-you-know’ basis, where anyone outside the circle of independent theatre is unlikely to even know that a show is being performed.