Progressive culture since 1954
In Western Australia, problems aren’t there to be addressed, to be worked with creatively or innovatively – they’re there to be bulldozed, confronted, to prove our mastery of our beautiful and challenging environment.
But it is only hostile because we make it so. After all, Perth was founded by the felling of a tree. It’s a cultural legacy that seems rooted in our bedrock and unable to be removed.
French poet and mathematician Jacques Roubaud once proposed the following formula for maintaining an ideal book collection; by his working, 1 of 361 works: K + X > 361 > K – Z, where K = 361, X = a newly acquired book, and Z = a previously owned and since-relinquished book. While this formula amounts to a collection of books currently owned, rather than exhaustive cumulative tally of books read, it does at least set in our sights a number more manageable.
When rabbits are afraid, they freeze. This works about as well for them as inaction works for women in the face of injustice and degradation. For many, just surviving is an act of daily resistance.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We the undersigned have put together a letter of protest addressed to Victoria University (where Overland magazine is also based) regarding the university’s hosting of a Q Society fundraising event on Friday 10 February. We will be regularly updating with signatures; feel free to add your name below.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The United Patriots Front page boasts in excess of a hundred thousand likes, which guarantees its content a substantial readership. A clip in which Cottrell whines about his legal travails has been shared a stunning 600,000 times; another in which he blames Islam for the recent tragedy in Melbourne’s Bourke Street received 75,000 views and 1800 likes.
Even before Goldman’s radical political-feminist critique of sex work, Marx postulated that ‘prostitution’ might be most basically understood as a signifier or a metaphor for the relations between labourer and capitalist in a capitalist system. The simplicity of this argument, as well as the very complex and sociocultural plurality of the relationship between men and women, makes it a less favourable way of understanding producer-consumer relations in contemporary society.
I need to apologise – this is another piece on the death of the novel. On the death of the novel, but also on a fractured, stupefied publishing industry. More than that, it’s a piece on the decline in the public’s investment in literature as a cultural phenomenon.
Indigenous peoples and women are two groups that have experienced increases at an alarming rate. Indigenous women, in particular, are the fastest growing group in Victorian prisons. Indigenous women are frequently denied bail due to perceived unmet ‘needs’ in the community, and then released without conviction.