Progressive culture since 1954
From my position as an Indian immigrant in Australia, a writer and scholar, Questions of Travel provided a selfie of a country that I and people like me could retweet and circulate, contributing to the flow of the literary selfie. In this book I saw a Sri Lankan Australian author writing about Sri Lanka, Australia and our larger world: a self enacting self. A text saying ‘see me showing you me’. Not through autobiography, but through the work that only fiction can do.
There’s a bigger and more fundamental question that is usually elided when debates like this pop up. Maybe it’s easier for me, as someone whose current stake in Australian literature is largely limited to that of a reader’s (and, I suspect, as one of the few civilians who has read two of the three shortlisted Miles Franklin novels mentioned by McAvan in her opening paragraph), to put this question into words: ‘Why does no one care about Australian books?’
It always shocks people to learn abortion is still a crime in New Zealand – we were, after all, the first country to enfranchise women. But an overhaul of our laws are desperately needed, and, be still my heart, abortion law reform could actually be an issue at the coming election.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
For you, everything holds the same unending miracle of being. You listen to stones and to children; you are as fascinated by the making of soup as by the complexities of art. Every thing is holy.