Progressive culture since 1954
Yesterday in its print edition, the Age ran a headline likening young South Sudanese-Australian men to animals. The headline – ‘Youths’ behaviour “like animals”’ – was, in part, a quote from a waiter at Brunetti, who had been supervising the café on Saturday night when the young men came in, scattering the furniture and, reportedly, terrifying all concerned.
The recent breakdown in the Labor-Greens relationship over the issues of voting reform and an alleged preference deal with the Liberal Party has highlighted the fact that it was electoral necessity, rather than ideology and values, which kept the two parties working together.
Facing each other across Lake Burley Griffin are two government buildings collecting information about the lives of Australians. On one side is the National Library, a concrete and marble edifice inspired by ancient Greek temples and open to the public seven days a week. Facing it are the new ASIO headquarters, the one-way glass exterior symbolising an organisation keen to see everything happening outside, even as it hides everything going on inside.
Given the public/private crossovers all our lives have become online, it’s hard for people to find the boundaries these days between personality and brand; between what’s appropriate and fun and what’s being a needy whiner.
Other than penning some columns for L’Espresso, as he had been doing on a weekly or fortnightly basis for over thirty years, and releasing one more novel, Year Zero, his final public act was to found a new publishing house. He and his collaborators called it the ‘ship of Theseus’, after the vessel that produced the ancient paradox by the same name – could an object still be considered the same object if you replaced all of its parts with identical ones? – and set its course to collide with ‘Mondazzoli’, the corporate behemoth created by the merger of the two largest Italian publishers, Mondadori and Rizzoli.
Natalie Wood had lived in the same house on Kippax Street in Surry Hills for most of her life. She was an elderly woman, a retired machinist at David Jones and a divorced war bride. It is likely that she died in early 2004, though police didn’t find her body until they searched her house in 2011. By then, part of her ceiling had caved in and a tree had spread into an upstairs room. Canisters of expired coffee and condensed milk were found amongst her other possessions, such as jewellery and her medications. There was dust and cobwebs.
Think about your own life. What would you do if the full-time working week was reduced to 30 hours?
But what the collection also reveals is the high level of craftsmanship and dexterity present in Australian writing today. Varied, affecting, and always containing some unexpected twist, many of these stories explore dark subject matter without being overwhelmed by it.
Sam Wallman on religion versus equality in public schools.
This elision between queers and paedophiles is an old trick for homophobes looking to whip up a little hysteria – one that goes back to Anita Bryant’s 1977 Save Our Children campaign – but refreshingly enough, it seems that most Australians are not buying it this time. Instead, a new narrative of queerness and childhood is emerging. Instead of the (asexual, presumably straight) child at risk from predatory queerness, this new narrative casts the queer child at risk from callous homophobia.
Overland magazine and the Malcolm Robertson Foundation are very pleased to announce the winners of the 2015 Judith Wright Poetry Prize.
The three judges for the first year of the competition – Alice Pung, Ellen van Neerven and Stephanie Convery – have now finished their blind judging and deliberation, and decided on a shortlist of eight outstanding stories with varying approaches to the theme, ‘travel’.
Over a month has passed since Australia Day, and Aboriginal affairs are once again receding into the horizon. The Closing the Gap Report attracted little popular attention, despite demonstrating that progress towards equality between white and black Australia remains stuck in the mud in five out of seven areas, including life expectancy.
The psychology of internet dating can best be described as a kind of schizoid hyper-vigilance, with violent swings of hope and doubt. In this environment in which connections are swift but commitments uncertain, one begins to despair and obsess over the quantity, quality, and frequency of messages. Dating websites might be very good at creating expectations, but they are not so good at helping you manage them.
I turn the situation obsessively, calculating routes and modes and travel times, but the result is always the same. I’m spending almost as long travelling to work as actually working. I’ve heard it said that Melbourne is a most liveable city, but how can that be? Travel between regional towns and centres, and the city, has stretched to unbelievable lengths for what is a twenty-first century, first-world context. The median cost of rent has jumped to over $400 a week in Melbourne.