Progressive culture since 1954
Slow TV (Sakte-TV) is a Norwegian concept that has captivated its native country, drawing in millions of viewers to watch the most mundane of events. The first episode, which aired in 2009, was a seven-hour train journey from Bergen to Oslo that was watched by a million Norwegians. Other shows followed, including twenty-four hours of salmon fishing, six hours of making a fire and watching it burn, and a twelve-hour knitting marathon.
We should discard arguments that suggest that Nazism was some sort of entirely ahistorical, anachronistic moment of madness or somehow a uniquely German production. In fact it was a consciously transnational, racially based movement with ideological roots in political antisemitism, pan-germanism and colonialism.
For the first time in its history, the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize has resulted in a tie; as such, the prize money for this year’s first and second place will be combined, and split evenly between the two poems that have placed equal first.
That initial enthusiasm gave way to apprehension and dismay as the video played. Styled on the Buzzfeed genre of Hip and Young Staff Trying New Things (think Guys Experience Periods For the First Time or Regular People Get Tricked Into Olympic High Diving), ABC RN’s video showcases a group of people trying chicken feet for the first time. The presenter, a young white man, tells the viewer that since it’s the year of the rooster and it’s traditional to celebrate the Lunar New Year with food, ‘we thought we’d get some CHICKEN FEET!’ That witty segue also marks the end of the informational part of the video, which lasted all of ten seconds.
New author Gina Cole bursts onto the Pacific writing scene with this absurdly good collection of short stories. Cole’s work has been described as Fijian infused, queer-inflected, and part of the Pasifika diaspora. But here is an author who refuses to be pigeonholed. Nuanced and sophisticated, Cole’s book challenges the idea that a cultural ‘other’ may only be one thing.
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.
For someone dealing with the grief, shame and anger after a sexual assault, it can be especially hard when one’s peers and relatives are the ones choosing not to believe them. I know this because I write from the point-of-view of a woman who has not been believed about being raped, and also as someone who chose not to believe another.
There’s a strange sort of surety that a lot of folks in countries like Australia and the United States carry from birth. It begins with the words: ‘that would never happen here.’ It’s couched in the sense that only a really flawed society would descend into the types of totalitarian regimes that plague nations in the Middle East. Last night, my cousin Shirin in North Carolina told me America is reminding her more and more each day of Iran. ‘And, I don’t mean in the good way,’ she said.
Since 1996, reports from the United Nation’s Special Rapporteur have stated that there is a major hidden housing crisis in Australia and their subsequent annual reports have reiterated this. The 2006 Report stated that the Special Rapporteur was ‘particularly troubled by the inadequate housing and living conditions’ and that, ‘unfortunately, this situation is not acknowledged by the authorities’. The crisis remains unacknowledged by authorities ten years later.
These cuts are usually defended by the cultural construction of the ‘bludger’: a largely mythological figure who prefers a life on welfare over working and who needs to be discouraged from their idleness by the formulation of harsh laws surrounding the eligibility of Centrelink recipients, already struggling, in financial and emotional distress, far below the poverty line.
The 2016 judges, Overland poetry editor Toby Fitch and poet Jill Jones, have finished blind judging the competition and, after deliberation, have selected a shortlist of nine poems.
Indeed, the ‘janitorial ring’ of ‘traditional custodians of the land’ of which Flournoy complains in her article is part of the symbolic problem she later raises: the practice has become routine, rehearsed. I would say the practice has become strategically corrupted: pithy Acknowledgements, heartfelt and perfunctory alike, are equally capable of trying to dislodge Indigenous belonging when they suggest Indigenous relationship to land is ‘traditional’, managerial and ‘custodial’, or position our claim to sovereignty as ‘past-based’, ‘non-possessive’ and merely reparative.
Artist Tia Kass on Centrelink’s Operation Debt Recovery.
The 1967 referendum remains a watershed moment in Australia’s civil rights history. On the 50th anniversary of the result, that saw over ninety per cent of Australians vote in favour of including First Nations people in the Commonwealth constitution, a special performance will pay homage to the era and its activists at the Sydney Festival.
There are stories threaded throughout from Maynard’s childhood in northern Tasmania, and older stories still – traditional stories that have carried over millennia. The play is hotly tipped to be a festival standout; it’s a decidedly more direct path to recognition than is usual for a first-time playwright, particularly a young Aboriginal one.
There’s one thing that baffles people who probe further and ask about our political structure and history, though, and that’s our apparently unbroken relationship with the British arrivistes of 1788. For many modern states like Mexico, revolutions and the birth of republics mark the ‘natural’ history of a people becoming a sovereign nation, and are thus tied to the personal identity of citizens as proud and independent people.
Today’s executive order excluded citizens from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen (but not, notably, Saudi Arabia) for 90 days, a period, one presumes, judged sufficient for Trump to do his aforementioned ‘figuring out’.
Was that a Muslim ban? Not at all, said Trump to reporters after signing the directive. Shortly thereafter, Michael Flynn Jnr, the son of Trump’s National Security Adviser, tweeted the slogan ‘Making American Great Again’ – and included the hashtag #MuslimBan.
Progressives who stay in one place for too long eventually come to resemble reactionaries. For instance, when Jonathan Luxmoore and Christine Ellis, who self-identify as amateur folk musicians, ask ‘where have all the protest songs gone?’, it is yet another example of nostalgia buffs expecting radical change to evolve out of redundant categories. Just as since the 1960s the unstable meta-classifications of folk, rock, pop and jazz have lost meaning through fragmentation and cross-pollination, so the folk-based protest song upon which Dylan made his name has long become an artefact of history.
My desire to write has often been met with a concoction of pity and disbelief. When I first started University at eighteen, I thought I would practise law during the day and write at night, like Franz Kafka or Elliot Perlman. By the time I realised I wanted to work in the arts full-time, I was too far in, HECS debt too large, to quit.
In the earliest days of capitalism, the emerging working and capitalist classes moved in and out of political allegiances with the aristocracy in debates over suffrage, food prices and working hours. Ever since, certain groups, such as pieceworkers and farmers, have occupied ambiguous positions, and thus present a perennial challenge to how we understand waged labour and the experiences of the working class. Changes in the economy in recent years, particularly since the end of the post-Second World War boom, obscure class divisions in new ways.
Watching Michelle Obama’s rejection of Donald Trump’s misogyny during the recent American presidential campaign, then Hillary Clinton’s defeat at the hands of said misogynist, it was hard not to draw parallels with recent experience in Australia: the apparently powerful naming of sexism, which proved not so powerful that it prevented electoral victory.