The 2016 Overland NUW Fair Australia Prize shortlist
Overland and the National Union of Workers are pleased to announce and congratulate the following writers and artists who have been shortlisted for the 2016 Fair Australia Prize.
Progressive culture since 1954
The enemy within
Let’s be clear about how dire this situation is: an Australian trade union representing young, low-paid workers, who are disproportionately women, was found by the independent umpire to have knowingly pushed the wages and conditions of their members below the minimum legal standards. Why would a trade union do such a thing?
Authenticity & the market: the existential threat of art fraud
Notwithstanding the seismic shudders that cases like these send through the art world, what is most unsettling about art fraud are not the fakes that we know about, but those that we don’t. In criminology, this statistical and research blind spot is known as ‘dark figure’ crime, which is a suitably ominous way to describe the difficult-to-quantify incidence of a crime that largely goes undetected, unreported and unsolved.
The higher the hair, the closer to God
Parton’s contribution to popular culture in the form of her film roles and music demonstrates a commitment to women and women’s issues that cannot, and should not, be ignored. Her female characters aren’t feminist superheroes who break the mould; instead, they are women who work within existing structures and use them to their own advantage.
Want to write for Overland?
Whether you’re an emerging writer or you’ve been around the traps for a while now, Overland is sure to have an opportunity for you.
2016 Story Wine Prize: the shortlist
We received more than 500 entries in the third year of the Overland Story Wine Prize, the calibre of which greatly impressed our three judges – award-winning writer and screenwriter Michelle Law, novelist and winner of the 2015 Stella Prize Emily Bitto, and winner of the 2015 Overland Story Wine Prize, Melissa Manning.
Beyond diversity as mere representation
If we only ever talk about representation, then we may end up forgetting that these organisations are institutionally white, even while they hold diversity up in the spotlight. What we need to do next is shift the conversation to asking how we can begin to bring in diverse audiences.
An Australia ...
An Australia where everyone in public speaks and writes in rhyming poetry with the cadences of Henry Lawson. This is the most prized ability in the whole land. School children are prepped for gruelling contests of rhyme and wit, often with improvisations on a wide range of topics. All debates in parliament are rhymed, as is the evening news. The news takes on somewhat anecdotal quality, favoring a good yarn over factual accuracy. A whole country of Lawsonian Homers sings itself into legend by sheer metrical virtuosity.
The Awful Truth: Alex Gibney’s Zero Days
During the first US presidential debate in September, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were asked to explain how the escalating threat of cyber warfare would be combatted by their prospective administrations. Clinton, whose candidacy was undermined by a hack on Democratic National Convention emails in July, went immediately on the offensive, accusing Russia of waging cyber-attacks on the US and voicing concern about the increased risk of state-sanctioned intimidation via malicious web leaks.
The path to voting Trump
Sam Wallman, currently on the road in the US, covers the election through the eyes of ordinary people.
On the Occasion of Gig Ryan’s Sixtieth Birthday
This poem, compiling seventeen poets’ contributions, celebrates the occasion of Australian poet Gig Ryan’s sixtieth birthday.
Khaki fervour and the new militarism
For Trump, nation-building is essentially a form of ‘politically correct’ warfare, in which one tries to sort the good from the bad. The premise of nation-building – that other people were virtuous, ‘yearned for freedom’ and should be liberated from their oppressors, and turned into loyal American allies – is detached from its position on the political right, and re-attached to liberalism/progressivism, which is where it was located from Theodore Roosevelt to the fall of LBJ in 1968.
Giant Dog: our new poetry podcast
Welcome to Giant Dog, the new Overland poetry podcast! This inaugural edition focuses on the special seventeen-poet collaboration edited by Corey Wakeling that Overland recently published, ‘On the Occasion of Gig Ryan’s Sixtieth Birthday’, and the work of Gig Ryan more generally.
On nationalising Facebook, or perhaps just its architecture
Over the past few years I have been diligently collecting public pledges to abandon Facebook, a subset of the equally interesting genre of people saying they will quit the internet altogether. While I seldom agree with the arguments, I look for the sentiments hidden behind these declarations. What these pieces often don’t say but invariably mean is that the swift rise of the networked society has had a profoundly unsettling effect on people’s daily lives.
Double bind: on performing bisexuality
‘That’s the issue with bisexuals’ says my girlfriend, jokingly. ‘Double the choice, double the chance of cheating. You should be scared.’ She’s joking, of course. She’s bisexual, I guess; I don’t usually feel a need to express it so simplistically. She’s mocking the dialogue that goes on even in liberal circles. But she’s not offended as such. Like me, she recognises the trade off. Given the dialogue around bisexuality – that bisexuals are less real, more flippant – the homophobia directed at you can feel somewhat less real, less harmful.
It's a man's world: unpacking cinema's 'best-of' culture
You don’t have to look too far (or even leave your home) to be reasoned into an argument over which films are the best, the greatest, most-essential, must-see-before-you-die of-all-time variety. The internet is teeming with hyperbolic lists dedicated to this. But what do lists like this tell us about who gets to (visibly) make and influence culture?
The 400ppm tipping point
Over this past week, I’ve been watching the news roll in from Standing Rock, where protesters are fighting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline: dramatic images of police brutality woven through news of an election campaign where climate has been glaringly absent. In my newsfeed, a mix of independent and mainstream media, the images of the election and the images of #noDAPL sit side by side but never seem to interact, like an illustration of the chasm between climate policy and climate reality.
A plague on the Whitehouse
Gender oppression is only one part of this story. Simplistic analyses that see men as the problem – for which the binary solution is women – have led to a dead end. It’s time for something new. Or as the great Louise Michel summarised it nearly 150 years ago: ‘[a woman] bends under mortification; in her home her burdens crush her. Man wants to keep her that way, to be sure that she will never encroach upon his function or his titles. Gentlemen, we do not want either your functions or your titles’.
It might not feel like it right now, but there is a lot more to politics than elections.