The excellence criterion

Type
Essay
Category
Culture
Politics

Why would the MPACs need more funding? After all, they are already among the best-funded cultural organisations in the country. Opera Australia is the single largest recipient of Australia Council funding, receiving $20.5 million in 2014, plus another $4.2 million from the New South and Victorian governments. All up, Opera Australia receives more government funding than the 145 small-to-medium organisations put together.

But such an imbalance is par for the course in performing arts funding.

Eltham image
14762799952_7c5a1075df_z
Type
Announcement
Category
Writing

Writers, we want your fiction!

Overland is looking for fiction for a special anti-/dis-/un-Australian issue to be edited by Ben Walter and published in April 2016. Entries for the special issue close 11.59pm, Sunday 31 January.

dictionary
Type
Column
Category
Culture

Two Ls where there should be one

It’s a slippery slope: one day you swap -ise for -ize and call something ‘awesome’; the next you’re draped in stars and stripes and riding a mechanical bull into the golden arches of hell, where you swear before Donald Trump with one hand on Webster’s dictionary.

221-cover-800px
Type
Editorial

Overland 221

The end of 2015 is an unusual time politically – a period when the International Brigades are invoked as justification to bomb Syria, even as transgender rights are finally central to debates about identity. Are we on the precipice of transformation or in the eye of the storm? These are the questions elicited by the writings in this edition, such as in Sam Wallman’s reportage about refuge and its refusal in Europe, which calls to mind Dorothy Hewett’s ‘Exodus’.

VU judges' report
Type
Short Story Prize
Category
Judges' report

Victoria University Short Story Prize: judges’ report

Submissions for the 2015 Overland Victoria University Short Story Prize were assessed blind. More than five hundred entries were equally divided between the judges, who returned after several weeks with a longlist of twenty-eight stories. This longlist was then reduced, over a number of rereads and discussions, to a shortlist of twelve diverse and ambitious stories, and finally to two runners-up and a winning story.

cfmeu
Type
Article
Category
Activism
Labour rights

Black bans and blackmail

Having workers’ representatives monitoring safety matters. Last month, when a concrete slab crushed two men to death on an East Perth worksite, it transpired that the CFMEU had been refused entry to the site sixteen times. As the national security crusaders tell us: if you’re doing nothing wrong, then you’ve got nothing to hide.

Yet it’s one rule for the employers and it’s another for everyone else.

kami
Type
Reflection
Category
Reading

The last word

Some of Overland‘s 2015 editorial team – Stephanie Convery, Toby Fitch, Jennifer Mills, Giovanni Tiso and Jacinda Woodhead – on what they’ve been reading, listening to, playing, etc.

Pentridge_Prison_Cells
Type
Article
Category
Racism
The law

Nobody cares

Ms Dhu came into contact with lots of people while in custody. Four nurses, two doctors and eleven police officers of varying ranks all had interactions with her before the final time she was brought to the hospital, already in cardiac arrest. All these people related to her in their capacities as carers of a sort – health practitioners or custodial officers. For three days, Ms Dhu tried to get the attention of someone who would care for her. The only person who did was the triage nurse on her first visit to hospital. After that, nobody did.

McCluresCoverJan1901
Type
Reflection
Category
Politics
Publishing

On New Matilda and independent left-wing media

Left-wing publications often punch above their weight. They publish on big topics – corruption and hypocrisy, war and oppression – and often have even greater agendas; at the very least, they want people to be less comfortable with the status quo. Because of their democratic desires, they’re often a space where many different writers – people who are publishing their first piece or don’t consider themselves writers at all – can write and be heard.

Ocupa-Escola-Students3
Type
Article
Category
Activism

Public education on fire

On 9 November, when students in São Paulo, Brazil, realised that the government would not open any dialogue with them, they began to occupy their schools. Students engaged in the Occupy Schools have organized themselves in a democratic manner, without hierarchies or leadership; they have formed their own daily assemblies and put together committees to clean the schools, to cook, to take care of school security, and to organise social and educational activities for each school.

Neko3
Type
Reflection
Category
Culture
Gaming

Purr ideology: the neoliberal pleasures of Neko Atsume

The name Kitty Collector recalls both the NSA’s ‘collect it all’ philosophy and ‘gotta catch ‘em all’, the classic pitch for Pokemon. This is not just a currency trading game; it’s an intelligence gathering sim for a post-Pokemon world. The successful player of Neko Atsume is not a dedicated cat fancier, but a dispassionate data analyst. You gain advantage through making frequent and unannounced visits to the yard. Even when you’re not there to snap photos, new visitors are mysteriously logged into your Catbook – flagged as subjects for closer scrutiny.

climate-emergency
Type
Article
Category
Politics
The environment

A capital climate consensus

References to human rights, originally included in the draft agreement, have all been deleted from the operational parts of the final deal. There are no mechanisms that force countries to comply with even their initial weak plans, and a new mechanism of five yearly reviews seems redundant given the urgency of the issue. If it’s all bad news, why are environmentalists and the Greens hailing it as a step forward?

melbcityofwords
Type
Reflection

John McLaren remembered

Early in the morning of 4 December, Overland lost a great friend and guide when John McLaren died. John was associate editor of Overland from 1966–1993, editor from 1993–1996, and a board member until 2014, when he stood down for health reasons to become, instead, an official Overland patron.

antfa
Type
Article
Category
Activism
Politics

Masks up

While still considered unusual in the Australian context, most of the arguments about masking up at public protests are well-rehearsed. Perhaps the most important point to consider is that, prior to the emergence of the internet, the documentation of protest activity, including the identification of those involved, was largely a matter for the state and media. This is no longer the case. With the advent of social media, what happens at such events is now the subject of intense scrutiny by participants and observers, and there is an ongoing battle to shape the narrative surrounding them.

shame
Type
Article
Category
Sexism
The internet

Shame on you

This is the story of three white men who lost their jobs. SBS sports reporter Scott McIntyre, for a series of critical tweets on Anzac Day; British lawyer Clive O’Connell, for a tirade captured on video against fans of the Liverpool football club, and people from Liverpool generally; Sydney hotel supervisor Michael Nolan, for posting abuse on the Facebook page of feminist writer Clementine Ford.

One of these things, of course, is not like the others.

eyeswideopen
Type
Reflection
Category
Culture
Film

Who killed the world?

The most provocative cinema in 2015 gave us a multi-faceted profile of contemporary capitalism and its woes. Transcending popcorn escapism, these four films that reflect the lived effects of the economic and social structures of our day collectively make an impassioned claim: that something is ill about the state of the world.