The bloodiest campfire story: reading The War Nerd Iliad

Type
Review
Category
Poetry
Violence

Translation is more than just carrying a text from language to language; it’s also a passage from audience to audience. To its Greek listeners, the Iliad didn’t need footnotes or endnotes. It wasn’t ‘literature’ or a status marker for taste and education. It was popular entertainment, put on at boozy gatherings by MCs whose talent could get them free drinks. That mood is hard to recapture now, even if a translator’s philology is faultless.

the-iliad-
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Type
Polemic
Category
Politics

After liberalism: a response to ‘Safe White Spaces’

There has been recent noise around whiteness in the arts in Australia, Melbourne in particular, due in part to Andy Butler’s article ‘Safe White Spaces’. Some of us have been talking about this for some time, but now it feels different, on account of the voices being heard and the opinions being seriously considered. This might be the demographic reckoning that is starting to happen as a consequence of the end of the White Australia Policy.

Carey interview
Type
Fiction
Category
Politics
Writing

Talking ‘Crabs’

JM: Overland published ‘Crabs’ just before Whitlam was elected – historically a time we remember as full of political hope for the future. But the story is suffused with a punk sentiment of ‘no future’ nihilism. Where did that energy come from? What was it about the Australia of that time that produced such a dark story?

Reading (Paul Bence)
Type
Polemic
Category
Reading
Writing

Won’t someone think of the boys

During Children’s Book Week, I visited an elite private school where a deputy principal asked me if I thought I was doing boys a disservice by having such girly covers on my books. I politely but firmly replied that I thought people who told boys they weren’t supposed to read books with girls on the cover were doing everyone a disservice.

Greens promo
Type
Article
Category
Activism
Politics

Greenslide? On 25 years of the Greens

Celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary, the Greens seem a confident and coherent political alternative. This is certainly the message that the party leadership is sending. Speaking at the recent national conference, leader Senator Richard di Natale outlined an ambitious plan to capture twenty-five House of Representatives seats over the next twenty-five years, transforming the party into the third-force of Australian politics.

Kandinsky crop2
Type
Announcement
Category
Prizes

Fair Australia Prize 2017: the winners

Overland, the National Union of Workers, the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, and the National Tertiary Education Union (VIC) are very pleased to announce the winning entries of this year’s Fair Australia Prize.

bordiga
Type
Article
Category
History
Long read

Against anti-fascism: Amadeo Bordiga’s last interview

An important figure in Italian and European communism, Bordiga was every bit as prominent as his friend and rival Antonio Gramsci in the decade following the Russian Revolution of 1917. As leader of the abstentionist faction of the Socialist Party, he was at the centre of the split that led to the founding of the Communist Party of Italy, of which he served as secretary while Mussolini seized power.

hawke
Type
Article
Category
Australia
Work

Australia’s workplace laws: a narrative tragedy

Australia wasn’t perfect in 1989 by any means, but something approximating that could be imagined. However, there was a change of emphasis, as if the toss of a coin had landed on the side of economics instead of people. We could find our own way, or we could copy the US and the neoliberals. We chose the latter, via Margaret Thatcher.

Morrissey
Type
Polemic
Category
Music
Nationalism

Everybody’s heading for the exit

Emerging in the wake of a British music scene divided along sharp political lines – the Clash identified as leftists, the Sex Pistols as anarchists, while the Jam (by way of differentiation rather than conviction) initially aligned themselves with conservatism – Morrissey cut a thrillingly protean figure. It was precisely his cultivated opacity, in matters of gender and sexuality especially, that appealed to the kinds of outsiders he made the subjects of so many of his lyrics.

mil
Type
Article
Category
Activism
Millennials

The vice of virtue signalling and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour  

Though doubtless left and right use it, ‘virtue signalling’ is a reactionary catch-phrase. The context of Bartholomew’s ‘discovery’ of the term says much: he was researching a book denouncing the British welfare state. For Bartholomew, a virtue, rather, is a ‘sacrifice’ like ‘staying together for the sake of the children’, or it’s a charitable act like ‘delivering lunches to elderly neighbours’. It’s not political speech, certainly not online.

Follett3
Type
Article
Category
Women
Writing

Restless women

This ‘certain temperamental similarity – a restlessness’, is not exclusive to women, yet it seems to be driven in some ways by the weight of society’s expectations and restrictions on women’s lives. For some women, marriage and motherhood are the last things we want to dedicate our lives to, but the inevitability of this path looms all around us.

Wall in Newtown
Type
Polemic
Category
Queer politics
Racism

Analogies and excuses: racism and the marriage equality debate

Under the authoritative and seemingly benign objectivity of ‘demographics’, the survey results are selectively interpreted to demonstrate that one of these groups is more traditionalist, more conservative, more intolerant – in other words, less assimilable to dominant ‘Aussie values’.

However, because ‘they’ are homophobic, ‘we’ are not being racist in making these claims.

1200px-Tiziano_-_Venere_di_Urbino_-_Google_Art_Project
Type
Article
Category
Art
Women

Mons Pubis

On the night of his wedding to Effie Gray in 1848, Ruskin, who was also a noted writer, artist and philosopher, stood in front of his wife’s naked body, and was so disgusted by what he saw that he was unable to consummate the marriage. Six years later, the still-sexless marriage was annulled.

cool
Type
Article
Category
Class
writers festivals

The nature of the beast: the politics of writers festivals

As Millicent Weber pointed out a little while back in Overland, ‘literary festivals are complex beasts’. Particularly in recent years, they appear to have become more politicised, more contested spaces – exemplary of the tension that results when a ‘cultural project’, with presumed egalitarian aims, has a light shone on it by the market model it operates on, which doesn’t favour all people equally.

new one
Type
Article
Category
Australia
Nationalism

A federation of white anxiety

The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 was designed to keep Australia white via the administration of a dictation test in any European language. Because no prior notice of the chosen language was given, the test was impossible to pass. Dutton’s test was not quite so blatant in its discriminatory intent, but the level of English it required (IELTS level 6) would nevertheless have excluded almost everyone other than native speakers.

Still from Chauka
Type
Review
Category
Activism
Refugee rights

On birds and confinement wings

Boochani’s dedication to his work as a reporter and a creator is fundamental to this unique project. It can never be forgotten that this film was made at risk of further violence. We may never have known the confinement wing Chauka existed if it wasn’t for his tireless investigation, including waking friends to snatch an interview, asking painful questions and always always witnessing, listening, believing.

Friedmann
Type
Review
Category
History
Violence

December in nonfiction

These literary essays circle tightly around postpartum depression, but also explore themes including violence against women, art, writing and death. The strongest pieces are those that cut closest to the bone, making the reader witness to the author’s frankness.

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Type
Polemic
Category
Reading
Writing

The Other people: CALD and the ‘Cat person’

As a member of Sweatshop Western Sydney Literacy Movement, I have had countless conversations with other writers from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds about the responsibility we feel to our communities, and of the demands and restrictions that places on our work. When we critique narrow but socially dominant mimesis we are seen as bitter and demanding.