Progressive culture since 1954
For the first time in Trump’s presidency, large swathes of the liberal press applauded a man they had expended many thousands of spoken and written words denouncing as a neo-fascist bigot and buffoon. The missile strike, according to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, marked the moment ‘Donald Trump became president of the United States’. Even more absurd examples abounded.
Every morning I wake sometime between 3 and 4am to spend an hour worrying about how I’m going to have enough time to do the work I’m being paid to do and also make the work I want to make. I often follow this up by berating myself for not just getting up to write. Eventually I go back to sleep for at least half an hour so that I can wake again refreshed. I find that chronic insomnia and dwelling on daily anxieties like this helps to prematurely age me, giving my hair the ‘silver fox’ look I am increasingly going for as I hit middle age.
Discourses of privilege are widespread in Australian literary circles, but this rarely extends to simple, old-fashioned geography. I find this surprising. It’s no secret that there can be snobbishness towards art from the regions; geography and class can be closely related. One need only consider the loaded nature of the word ‘provincial’, or attitudes to certain suburbs in any given city.
Both the Women’s March on Washington in January and the international women’s strike that took place last month have raised questions about how to build a lasting resistance movement. How do we get the balance right, for example, between calling for bold political actions and consolidating the movement? How might we coalesce despite the uneven nature of the politics of broad coalitions?
Tempelhof airport sits at the southern tip of Berlin’s city centre. The immense building, 1230 metres in length, curls around the airfield. Tall, narrow windows cascade down its facade, and an almost human-sized metal eagle’s head stands at the main entrance. The airport, which ceased operations in 2008, was largely designed and built under the Nazi regime. Once at the centre of Hilter’s vision of ‘World Capital Germania’, the Nazis’ megalomaniacal project intended Tempelhof to be the gateway to a Europe commanded by the Third Reich.
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.
But the Church’s culpability for the violence that plagued post-colonial Rwandan society, of which the 1994 Genocide was the culmination, extends beyond its role in the invention and advocacy of ethnic ideology. As the violence and anti-Tutsi rhetoric escalated in the lead-up to the 1994 Genocide, the Church preached extirpation from the pulpit.
As a retail worker with more than ten years’ experience, I was saddened, though not particularly surprised, by the recent decision of the FWC to cut penalty rates in my sector. It strikes me as the logical outcome of the widening gulf between the ‘servants’ and the ‘served’ – a willed ignorance to the actual conditions of labour, that extends right through to the uniquely free-floating, disconnected lives of most of the political class.
The purpose of creative or artistic research is to produce a knowledge-type that allows readers/viewers/listeners to experience a composition of the world in an imaginary and speculative or animal and bodily kind of way, often simultaneously, to open the readers/viewers/listeners to a world that is simultaneously not of themselves, and of themselves.
So here we are: the LGBT community, once marginalised, once anathema to the values of the far right is now told that it’s only within the fold of the far right that we’ll be safe and welcome. Except that rather than the far right shielding us from attack, our rights and our existence are being used to shield groups like the FN from the charge that they’re socially backward.
Creative expression permeates West Papuan culture. As Lamech indicated, singing is one key example; dancing is another. And like so many Indigenous cultures with strong oral traditions, these performance arts have also always doubled as effective means of communication, never more so than when a community is under attack, as in West Papua during the last fifty years.
As a book with its institutional filters, Gularabulu can be a disquieting read. It is clad in notes: about Aboriginal English, explaining stories before they’re told, guiding pronunciation. Its transcription occasionally describes, rather than carries, Roe’s wordwork. His breaths, even background noises, are painstakingly noted.
I describe this as poetry, perhaps incorrectly. Others call Gularabulu a story collection.
While Sparrow’s admiration for his subject is palpable (and amply justified), the book is never triumphalist or hagiographic – or, worse still, nostalgic – nor are the central claims concerning the relevance of Robeson’s political thought uncomplicated. The book reads rather like the story of a haunting. What is it that moved a white Australian writer to travel the world in search of the ghost of a black American artist? And what did he learn?
As I read Ghost River, and the parallel narratives of Birch’s river men – their fear of police and hospitals – alongside Ms Dhu’s death and her family’s fight for justice, I tried to make sense of how to read these stories that are fictional and those that are true. And in the case of Ms Dhu, how to bear a true story that no one in positions of power cared to believe until it was too late.
But what does it mean to work, think, and act in profound solidarity? What are the links between solidarity and justice? I have been thinking about these questions while watching the fallout from the International Women’s Strike in the US – specifically the opposition, distaste and (perhaps) fear that has resulted from women who identify as Zionist feminists.
Overland, Trinity College and judges Tara June Winch, Jennifer Mills and Katherine Firth are very pleased to announce the final results of this year’s Nakata Brophy Prize.
In July last year, ABC’s Four Corners aired ‘Australia’s Shame’, a disturbing exposé on the abuse of juvenile Aboriginal prisoners at the Northern Territory’s Don Dale Youth Detention Centre. The story was picked up by a Yolŋu radio station, but the newsreader soon ran into a problem: there is no Yolŋu word for torture. They substituted the English.
Several years back I visited the former premises of Overland, a ramshackle house posing as an office on a residential street in Footscray (or so I remember). Within, ducking from room to room, was ‘Team Overland’, including former editor Jeff Sparrow and current editor Jacinda Woodhead.
That quiet afternoon, in which I was interviewed for an intern position, changed my life.
Duterte’s record as mayor of Davao, a position he held for almost three decades, said a great deal about how he would run the country. According to Duterte mythology, he transformed a gang-infested, crime-riddled backwater into a beacon of peace and prosperity.