Progressive culture since 1954
As a woman writer of colour who slowly cycles in everyday clothes to literary events, to shops, on school runs, and whose first published artwork and essay were both cycling-related, I wanted to find out where the women who looked like me were.
Overland and the Malcolm Robertson Foundation are very pleased to announce the entries that placed in the 2018 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize.
In Queensland we grow up with a conditioned disgust for cane toads. It’s a telling concern: they’re not from here. They first came across the seas to eat the cane beetles, sugarcane being one of the primary crops of local agriculture. But the beetles are high up in the cane and the cane toads can’t reach them, failing their first objective. From the few specimens brought over in a suitcase, cane toads have been spreading down the east coast and west across the top of Australia ever since.
I, too, use parental controls for their devices and stare with some concern at the shouting YouTubers making slime and playing Minecraft. But it has helped me, in the throes of my middle-class guilt, to know that moral panics about children and technology, or children and popular culture, are a particularly common feature of mass media as it relates to modernity.
It also shined a light on the existence of the leftist nerd: a common type of nerd (especially in trans communities) whose presence is continually overshadowed by the louder voices of reactionary gamers and pseudo-rationalist centrists claiming to be apolitical, even as they enthusiastically support the status quo.
Years later, Ana would confide that when she got lifts home, she’d ask her friends to drop her off around the block so no one would know she was houso.
In the era of robo-debt, the social welfare state has been so eviscerated that there is nothing left to strip, so corporate tax cuts must be funded by stealing welfare from the past. Think of it as the Coalition Government’s austerity time machine.
It is the eighth anniversary of the earthquakes that devastated Christchurch, and much of the rebuild is now complete. The brash new complexes in the retail core scream ‘progress’, with multiple outlets competing for the high-end clothing dollar, while craft beer bars and gastropubs overlook the Avon River as it meanders through the city. This is Christchurchland, a city that hums with dystopian unease, with new developments that erase not just the history but also the very purpose of the city.
The year is 1982. US President Ronald Reagan is ankle-deep in his first term. Across the pond, Margaret Thatcher will soon be elected Prime Minister of the UK. Everyone’s shaking hands with free market capitalism, neoliberal ideals, and a hostile brand of shark-eyed individualism that will endure for decades to come. Jim Henson is having none of it.
On 4 December 2018, the Australian rare earth mining company Lynas suffered a critical setback to its operations in the Malaysian city of Kuantan. The Malaysian minister of energy, science, technology, environment and climate change declared that the mining giant can no longer operate without a plan to safely dispose of its radioactive waste. The announcement came off the back of more than a decade of grassroots activism against the multinational company.
Koraly Dimitriadis hails from a strict Greek Orthodox migrant background and her work is a consistent and vividly burning ‘fuck you’ to tradition, to repression, and to the idea that we must accept the roles allotted us with strangled fortitude. If Dimitriadis’ narrative contains a recommendation it is that we get the hell out of there, wherever the oppressive there might be, and emerge, phoenix-like, from the ashes.
Clark Ashton Smith’s ‘weird’ short story from 1931, ‘The city of the singing flame’, presents the journals of Gilles Angarth (also a writer of weird fiction) and his accidental discovery of a portal to another dimension near the California-Nevada border – a place of lush vegetation surrounding a strange and cyclopean city.
But they’re symptomatic of our contempt for the coast. We ‘love’ the beach because of whatever enjoyment we can squeeze out of it (free swims, warmth, Instagram fodder) and godspeed to anything – endangered species, for example – that stands in the way.