Progressive culture since 1954
Let’s get this out of the way. Prince was a song-writer, not a poet. While pop music does make use of poetic techniques, the modes of expression are fundamentally different. The craft and conventions of pop music are wholly different to those of poetry. Nevertheless, (as a teacher) I often use ‘Raspberry Beret’ to demonstrate the power of image over abstraction.
I’ve abandoned the set narrative path. After months of turning over inside my old head, wearing thin a commute between home and work and my ex’s house – a black rubber triangle that tightened with every trip and burnt as summer steamed in – I cut the cord and let go of that man, that lifestyle, that image of my best self.
Overland, the National Union of Workers, the Migrant Workers Centre, the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, and the National Tertiary Education Union (VIC) are very pleased to announce the winning entries for this year’s Fair Australia Prize.
After six years of shaping Overland’s fiction, our brilliant and inspiring fiction editor Jennifer Mills will be finishing up her editorship, with the final issue of 2018. As such, Overland is seeking a new fiction editor for the print magazine.
By this time next year the global number of podcasts may likely surpass the population of Queensland, and that’s even taking into account the giant melon currently occupying the town of Chinchilla. There are podcasts about inanimate objects, Nicolas Cage, urban mythology, fountain pen addiction, and even podcasts about podcasts — the latter being a kind of hellish inception far worse than one could ever begin to imagine.
We are pleased to announce the shortlisted writers and artists for the 2018 Fair Australia Prize.
I’m one of the delegates in my workplace – I have been so for about a year. In that time, I’m proud to say, we’ve successfully increased union membership from 30% to 96%. How did we do this? By taking up political questions in the workplace that are relevant to broader society such as marriage equality, refugees and the racist demonisation of the South Sudanese community, as well as agitating and campaigning around issues at our workplace to improve our working conditions.
In contrast to other core concepts of emancipation such as freedom or equality, solidarity is quite difficult to grasp. This is because it is even more clearly a relationship, a doing, one difficult to fix down by an external standard. Solidarity happens between us. This is exactly what makes it so attractive: it creates connections.
The 3–6pm Friday shift is known as one of the worst. Personally, I prefer it to Monday morning, maybe because I sympathise with people being leaving work, not getting to it. Anyway, Friday shifts are intense. They’re busy. School has finished. People leave work early. It’s the shift change for drivers. Trains are usually out somewhere. It’s bloody awful for everyone.
Overland is looking to expand its team of fiction and poetry readers, and to start a team of nonfiction readers. These volunteer positions only require a time commitment of a few hours per month.
Overland is seeking fiction submissions for a special online edition themed around ‘future sex’, to be edited by Michalia Arathimos. We are looking for stories that engage with what our changing sexualities look like, both now and in the future.
6 pm Friday 7 December
The Toff in Town, 252 Swanston Street, Melbourne
Overland and the National Union of Workers are hosting a lively end-of-year debate on the topic of automation and what it will mean for workers and labour.
In his book White Nation, Ghassan Hage argued that Australians who feel entitled to the ‘fantasy position’ of whiteness enact ‘governmental belonging’: a sense of one’s own innate right to decide how others are positioned within, or excluded from, the space of the nation.