Masochism and memoir

Type
Reflection
Category
Violence
Writing

I’ve been at a few storytelling events in which adults bring in the diaries they kept as a teenager and laugh at the things they wrote. I laughed along, but with some sense of disquiet. There are limits to looking back on your direct experience – as you lived it then – with a jovial posture. Reading through my own old experiences would not be funny. My old diaries talk of a deep sense of misery and loneliness. Reading them aloud would be enacting a cruelty to a self that no longer exists but who I feel protective of, and sad for. I also don’t think it would be an ethical representation of a woman, nor of a person who lives with mental illness, nor of myself.

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Type
Review

February in fiction

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.

Australia Woods Jungle Forest Trees Landscape
Type
Article
Category
History
Liberalism
Philosophy

Is Hegel dead?

For many of us, the US election of 8 November was the apogee of a year of regressions. Historical progress implies directionality, and 2016 was a leap into the dark as far as human history is concerned.

2016 should have us reaching back into the past for answers. To find out how both the Left and the mainstream Right got history so unfathomably wrong, we should delve into previous conceptions of historical progress.

Landscape
Type
Announcement
Category
Prizes

Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize: the 2016 shortlist

The three judges for this year’s competition – Stephanie Bishop, Aviva Tuffield and Tony Wheeler – have finished their blind judging and deliberation, and decided on a shortlist of nine outstanding stories with varying approaches to the theme.

Hamnett Slogans 1983
Type
Reflection
Category
Culture
LGBTQI

‘Choose life’: a short history

1984 was the time of radical deregulation, ‘trickle down’ economics, extreme tax breaks for the rich and a freeze on wages. This was the year Margaret Thatcher identified trade union leaders as ‘the enemy within’. In March that year British miners went on strike and for the next 12 months, Thatcher’s government would deploy brutal state force to eventually break them, achieving a major victory for the neoliberal economic agenda.

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Type
Reflection
Category
United States

Vulnerable states: on being Iranian in America

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.

Bendigo st
Type
Article
Category
Activism
Housing
The law

The dream of a waking man: occupying Bendigo Street

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.

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Type
Polemic
Category
Inequality
Precarity

Dole-bludgers, leaners and other neoliberal fantasies

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.

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Type
Article
Category
Activism
Debate
writers festivals

Acknowledgement

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.

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Type
Review
Category
Indigenous Australia
Music

Music in the key of Yes

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.

Still from Bergen
Type
Article
Category
Culture
Television

Finding inner peace in a late-capitalist age

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.

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Type
Article
Category
Racism
Trump

The hour of enormous walls has well and truly arrived

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.

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Type
Article
Category
History
Holocaust
Trump

Against Trump: Politicising the Holocaust

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.

Bironpiece
Type
Article
Category
Activism
Music

The soundtrack of resistance

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.

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Type
Article
Category
Class
Precarity
Writing

‘Have you thought about law?’

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.

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Type
Announcement
Category
Prizes

The results of the 2016 Judith Wright Poetry Prize

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.

Chicken feet
Type
Polemic
Category
Food
Racism

Chicken feet with a side of racism

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.