Progressive culture since 1954
But Australia has a long history of ugly racism – against Indigenous Australians, against Chinese, Afghans, Greeks, Italians, Vietnamese, Sudanese – it’s something the political class has fed and bred for many decades. Richard Marles may claim that ‘offshore processing has been the single most important policy that any Australian government has made’, but Labor was very proud of the White Australia policy as well.
Regional street art initiatives in Australia are few and far between. A few notable examples include the Back Alley Gallery in Lismore, the May Lane Street Art Project in Bathurst and the Brim Silos in Victoria. Despite their rarity, street art commissions in regional cities have huge economic and cultural potential.
With Sanders’ eventual defeat, all of the spectacular fails of the party and punditry can be forgiven in the ritual rebirth through the primary process. My God, how liberals love process. As a loser, Sanders can be a liberal hero, a testament to big-tent neoliberalism as the party consumes his eccentric youthful wing. ‘See, the system works!’
All of this hinges on the fate of Bernie’s database.
This $20,000 prize encourages artists and writers of fiction, poetry and essays to be part of setting a new agenda for Australia. Winning entries will be published in a special Fair Australia supplement in Overland 225, to be launched in Melbourne in early December. Entry is free.
Under the strict guidance of Australian Border Force, occupants of MITA – more commonly known as Broadmeadows Detention Centre – have been segregated. Single men, single women and families, and ASIO detainees have all been placed in separate, locked compounds and are unable to socialise or move freely through the facility.
Yet in Wood’s novel we get the feeling that her dystopian future is not so far away, that the brutality that is levelled at the women in the book is right around the corner. So when I finished reading Wood’s novel, I was relieved and grateful that it had won The Stella. And I wondered if a book like this would have won a prestigious national prize in Australia before Stella was established.
At very least, the choice of historical inspiration is suspect. Brutal moments from the past are overrepresented on television: there’s a Manson murders show, a Hatfields-and-McCoys show, and angry history-inspired action-sex dramas set in a lot of different time periods. If an alien tried to understand human history based on our cable shows, they would probably think we have spent most of our time on top of this planet trying to hurt one another. We do not seem like a very cool species.
It would take a special sort of demagogue to argue against the essence of Thomas Jefferson’s famous assertion that ‘an enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic’ but we might also reasonably wonder what the upshot of Fray’s ideal of political accountability by fact-check is. Are politicians any more truthful, or even careful, as a result? (There is, in fact, some evidence that the more politicians lie, the better they poll).
Since at least the 1970s, writing on the experience of women in cities has focused on the ways in which the built environment acts as an expression of or enabler for the violence enacted upon women’s bodies: sexual assault and other violent crime, and the spatial separation of supposedly ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ space – that harmful dichotomy of public and private dividing the home from the street and workplace.
One might be under the impression that transgender people have never been so visible nor been so accepted, from the Time Magazine cover declaring the ‘trans tipping point’ to the coming out of reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner, to more meaningful progress in access to medical treatment and human rights across much of the world. But visibility has always been a double-edged sword for transgender people, and while there have always been transphobic responses to trans gains (Germaine Greer, for instance, has been predictably awful for forty years), it was inevitable at some point that a substantial political backlash would emerge.
But surely the question of genius is not an economic concern? Or is it? We certainly live in a world where economics is central in all areas of life, including art.
Genius is a tantalisingly vague concept. And yet its historical association with dead white males such as Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein, and in contemporary times, with Steve Jobs and the still very much alive Stephen Hawking, suggests its distinctly masculine character.
I was surprised to read the news that Daniel Andrews, premier of Victoria, was going to fund Australia’s first Pride Centre to the tune of $15 million. Mostly because I used to work in one in Sydney more than fifteen years ago.
I’ve been so bored with realist Australian fiction; sleepy stories that perhaps have one eye open, but aren’t looking at anything worth seeing. I’m guilty of it too. You should see the piece I’m working on at the moment; it’s terrible, and leaves me wanting to turn the pages inside out. Still, I summoned the nerve to plead for something different.
This is how the future looks through Hollywood’s eyes: Asian trappings, but minimal Asian people. Our real future will probably not look like that: with the likelihood of China continuing to dominate economically and scientifically, the points of difference between Earth now and our space-faring future aren’t going to be white people in Chinoiserie; it’s going to be brown people in modern Chinoiserie. And it’s going to be people speaking Japanese and getting to space on Japanese tech and actually being Japanese.
The game is ultimately one of endurance: the video-works total six hours screened back to back, and experiencing them is akin to stumbling upon a raucous sorority party, and fighting the urge to simply shut the door. While many of my fellow gallery-goers bowed out of the competition after mere minutes, I persevered, irradiating elitist triumph. Yet the truth was that I too felt alienated by the hyper-verbal characters on the screen before me; that their private speech codes and aspirational posturing made me feel old.
To implement the state of exception, Agamben argues, governments frame challenges and subjects in the language of national security or national interest – a political process where the language of war is used to justify an increase in government powers. Issues are represented through a militaristic language and the government is given rights to solve any issues seen as relating to security by any means.
Never has the requirement of specialisation been more prevalent than in the current Australian media landscape. Even when a story is written specifically about millennials, the resultant article will likely be written by a fifty year old. Why? Because millennials lack the requisite qualifications to write about their own lives.
The Overland Writers Residency, supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund, is a new initiative aimed at addressing a lack of opportunities for marginalised writers. In 2016, the Overland Writers Residency will focus on providing an opportunity for women writers who are also the sole primary carers of one or more children.
Announcing the winners of this year’s Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers.
What is different in Bartlett’s King Charles III is that he does not merely reframe a Shakespearean character drama with a contemporary background, in an attempt to demonstrate the timelessness of the human condition. He does rather the opposite: he takes contemporary social struggles and applies to them the context of an aristocratic political drama. While obviously a conceit, it is also quite a sweeping statement, brushing aside two hundred years of mass democracy within the United Kingdom in the name of pursuing the private dramas and ambitions of Britain’s elites.
Indeed, what is most illuminating about the World Aid report is the difference on display between company policy and company practice when it comes to the rights of production workers. Almost all of the companies evaluated by Baptist World Aid had supply and production policies in place, and 23 of the 87 companies (73 per cent) received an A rating or above for those policies. Despite that, only 4 companies received a rating over a C+ for ‘worker empowerment’: a rating based on workers receiving at or above a living wage.
A ‘good caricature, like every work of art,’ said the Italian Baroque painter, Annibale Carracci, ‘is more true to life than reality.’ This is why, I think, Bill Leak’s cartoons are so often failures. Like several pundits that take up column inches at the Australian these days, his views are so out of touch with the majority of the population that they can – in moments of ideologically charged rage – seem almost deranged.
The accident happened on a Friday. It was reported on the six o’clock news. At half-past four the cameras found the street and interviewed the nurse on the lawn. His neighbour; she just happened to be a nurse. She rolled him; he screamed. A tragedy, he was such a nice man. A young man, a teacher at the local school. A nice, quiet man.
I’ve long held a visceral hostility towards what I’ve called the ‘muesli theory’ of art. This theory maintains that art should be consumed because it’s good for you. Aside from anything else, the idea that art is good for you takes all the fun out of it. It gives art an air of lugubrious obligation that is completely at odds with the involuntary suspension of the self that is art’s most beautiful side effect.
We invited four Australian poets to reflect on race in the world today and, specifically, on the ways that racism manifests in the intellectual and literary fields, particularly in poetry, where thought and representation are crystallised and magnified.