Progressive culture since 1954
At the start of the 2013 school year I stood at the front of a school gymnasium and outed myself as transgender to 250 Year 10 students. I believed myself to be a pragmatist. I was about to commence a medical transition that would alter my voice and appearance. I had changed my name. Disclosing my transition to the students whom I saw every day was an inevitability.
Screening of Dead-End Drive-In
From 9.30pm, Saturday 12 August at The Astor, Melbourne
In the spring issue of 1972, Overland published the short story ‘Crabs’ by then little-known writer from Bacchus Marsh, Peter Carey. In 1986, ‘Crabs’ was made into the film, Dead End Drive-In. To celebrate the forty-fifth anniversary of the story, Overland has teamed up with the Melbourne International Film Festival.
A few years back, News Corp was warning, almost every week, about antisemitism in Australia. Invariably, the claims were bogus: more about slating the Greens and the BDS movement than genuinely exposing bigotry. Today, with a small but significant coterie of genuine antisemites raising their heads, we find News Corps again in the thick of the action: not calling out the racists, mind you, but providing them with political cover.
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.
6.30pm, Thursday 17 August
The Wheeler Centre, Melbourne
Drawing on MIFF’s Sci-fi retrospective and looking at how cinema harnesses contemporary anxieties to show us where we might be headed, some of the best minds around dissect the darker corners of the future in this panel discussion about Dystopia on Film.
A complete* collection of Australian Prime Ministers, Dave Drayton’s P(oe)Ms is the neat, satisfying, wordplay that haters of poetry (and me) often forget is its benchmark. These kinds of engaging, playful works are increasingly coming from younger poets – politically and technologically on top of it, and very present. Or is that prescient? Anyway, P(oe)Ms is funny. Very.
The danger lies in seeing Trump or Brexit as an aberration, rather than a reaction to and by-product of liberalism. The received wisdom is that liberalism is somehow virtuous and inherently good. But this formulation makes it impossible to understand why politicians saying openly fascistic things are garnering wide support in supposedly principled liberal democracies.
Workers are providing free labour for Shires and private companies, and they face eight weeks suspension if they miss work. ‘It’s a form of slavery,’ Matthew Ryan explains. ‘We’re working hard for peanuts. People are hungry under the CDP changes … There’s less money to provide food for the kids. It’s starving our people … you might as well give us rations, like back in the old days.’
As a haver of autism myself, I felt kind of numb to it. I am, of course, morally repulsed by the concept of schooling run on social Darwinism. But when you consider what has been thrown at Australia’s minority of the intellectually disabled, and in many cases the greater disabled community as a whole, a proposal such as Hanson’s seems par for the course.
Instead of becoming the object of ridicule or humour, the laughing woman was an example of a new perspective in film that complicated the dominance of the male gaze. This happened when women laughed together. ‘Women’s laughter counteracts dominance when it constructs a counterknowledge, a counterknowledge that is collectively produced through female bonding across barriers of class and race.’
‘We will determine who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.’
I remember hearing this soundbite from John Howard’s speech in 2001. I was thirteen at the time, but was already acutely aware of the subtext of the statement.
Angela Nagle has written an indispensable book that allows both the extremely online- and meme-illiterate to grasp the IRL implications of the online culture wars. From the rise of Trump as a lulzy agent of base enjoyment and unrestrained conspiracy, to the collapse of meaning, all are products of an online culture that privileges affect and transgression.
But what if a discussion of The Handmaid’s Tale would be better served by viewing it in the context not of the Trump era or larger, historical traumas, but ‘small’ daily terrors? What is most frightening about Atwood’s novel and this television adaptation is how it represents a world for women not unlike the one we are currently living in; a world that is both familiar and unfamiliar.