Progressive culture since 1954
Writers, said Overland’s founding editor Stephen Murray-Smith in one of our early issues,
record the storms of history as they rage through the lives and minds of people. They must respond to the storm from whatever direction it is blowing. You cannot face one and turn your back on another.
I can’t remember learning how to read. I could read and write before I went to school, reportedly because I demanded to know how. There were books in the house, and presumably I saw my parents reading and, like all small children, wanted to emulate my elders.
Karl Marx once expressed the belief that the end of the capitalist era and the advent of communism would signal the end of human prehistory and the beginning of history proper. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the Futurists, for their part, wanted to destroy museums and libraries …
Late last year, in his widely shared essay ‘On Smarm’, Tom Scocca introduces the concept of writering: ‘We have a whole word here at Gawker, “writering,” to describe the tribe of writers whose principal writerly concern is being writerly, and who spend all their time congratulating one another on their writing and promulgating correct rules for writing.’
I often wish I were funnier, even though I can be reasonably quick off the cuff.
Friend: Oh my God! Someone poisoned ninety elephants in Zimbabwe!
Me: Sounds like a pachyderm lies to me.
But that practice of humour isn’t really funny.
Those who have talked about life behind the fences tend to do so with the protection of voice distortion and pixilation. There is good reason for this: any government employee or contractor who leaks operational information about how we treat detained refugees is threatened with detention of their own – up to seven years in prison.
In July 2013, a moot appeal at the Victorian Supreme Court ruled that Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant and his co-accused, George Witton and Peter Handcock, were unfairly tried for crimes committed during the final part of the Second Boer War (1899–1902). The three soldiers were court-martialled for the murder of nine captured Boers, and Morant and Handcock were executed on 27 February 1902. Last year’s non-binding verdict – along with a recent two-part documentary, Breaker Morant …
‘Hi, John, I’m the intern who’s been assigned to fact-check your article. I was hoping you could clarify how you determined that there are thirty-four strip clubs in the city while the source you’re using says thirty-one.’ So says Jim Fingal to John D’Agata in their co-written book, The Lifespan of a Fact, a text ostensibly based on Fingal’s fact-checking of a D’Agata essay on the suicide of a Las Vegas teenager, published in the Believer.
On 21 July 2011, forty-two years and one day after the Apollo 11 Moon landing, NASA’s space shuttle program – a program that had spanned three decades – concluded with the final return trip of Atlantis from the International Space Station (ISS). It felt like the end of an era – and it was. My son had just turned twelve, and it seemed the right time …
Dear Susan
When I first read your essays in 2012, I became so excited. There, in pieces written half a world away, half a century ago, were the same challenges that a new wave of critics are facing today. Like you, these critics are carving out new discourses and vocabularies around an oft-sidelined cultural form. I am talking about the new video game critics, those predominately young writers who are analysing video games as cultural and creative works.
The tumult and the shouting has died down since Julia Gillard delivered a formal apology to the victims of forced adoption, but the single mothers whose children were taken and the thousands of adoptee children affected have not forgotten their pain. It was alleviated by the apology, but big challenges still lie ahead for the adoption community. Not least among them is how a carcinogenic drug so dangerous that today it is legally restricted to use by vets for treating urinary incontinence in dogs was routinely administered to birthing single women in Australia’s leading hospitals.
The first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, published in 1953, kickstarted the modern fascination with spies. Well-known spy novelists such as Richard Condon, Alistair MacLean, Frederick Forsyth and John Le Carré, as well as a legion of lesser-known writers and pulp imitators, all followed in Bond’s wake.
In 2013, the Australian poetry scene was rocked by a number of high-profile instances of plagiarism. The poet Ira Lightman, who unmasked several perpetrators, debates the underlying issues with poet and critic Anthony Hayes.
There has, in recent years, been a push to rescue various ‘lost’ writers from obscurity. And yet the short story is a literary form deeply embedded in its time.
She’d set out later than she’d meant to, the four o’clock sun already sinking at her shoulder, threatening to drop behind the mountains and plunge the world into gloaming.
This story was published in Overland no 32, spring 1965. For our sixtieth anniversary, Josephine Rowe has revisited this story as part of the ‘Fancy cuts’ project.
When I opened the door she was so backlit by the afternoon sun that I couldn’t focus properly. In the confusion of her coming inside I think I forgot to welcome her.
The veins on Grandpa’s legs protruded like thick tidal lines. Sam and Caleb scrambled to catch up, their toes vanishing and reappearing in the chalky sand as they trailed him homewards.
Where no farmers had ploughed the trees or settled seeds to graze the soil, where the folded arms of scrub bar gullies, where the wide buttongrass plains swelter under peaks of old quartz …
Now in its seventh year, the Overland Judith Wright Prize for New and Emerging Poets is one of Australia’s richest poetry awards and the only major competition for poets in the early moments of their creative calling.
the soles of her sneakers scrape the gritty sand
a butterscotch-ripple-trail, glass and melted stone
and tufts of sunburnt grass that somehow find a way
she charts her steps carefully while I travel in leaps, heroic and haphazard
over the scarred edges of shallow craters containing rust-coloured rain
We could go, then, to the largest shopping
outlet of this lifetime, where among the
stops is the car park concrete roof we will
aim the car onto, much like Lumiere’s
forehead or Athena’s birth in breech.
We shake off the engine echo, dopplering
Over cliffs and shoals of glossy cloud
Where fly-suited radicals uplift
From wild Kombis to the hydrosphere
Ben Juers
Frances Howe
Joanna Anderson
Lee Lai
Megan Cope
Michael Hawkins
Murtaza Ali Jafari