Progressive culture since 1954
As the federal election looms, the familiar terrain of political conflict over immigration is being prepared. Going by recent reporting, the issue of undocumented migrant labour is likely to acquire a special significance.
The Christchurch mosque attacks have conjured waves of support and solidarity and shame. These are important and heartwarming, but they are not enough. Every attack of this kind opens floodgates of racialised violence. It legitimises and emboldens.
From across the ditch, the news that the Christchurch terrorist was an Australian was accompanied by a sinking feeling. The way in which our everyday public debate is steeped in concepts of white superiority made it all too predictable that such a horrendous crime should find its origins on our shores.
We are in shock and mourning, so I’ll keep this brief as I can.
On Friday we learned, in the most horrific way, that we live in a country where a man can walk down the street in broad daylight fully armed and livestream his massacre of Muslims at our place of worship.
Many of us immigrants have heard in the last few days that ‘this is not New Zealand.’ It’s meant to be a comforting sentiment. It’s understandable where it’s coming from. What can you possibly say about unspeakable horror, without needing to disavow it?
It isn’t hard to imagine an Australian Green New Deal, or how it might help us transform moral force into political power. If it seems a long way off, consider this: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t much older than the students who are striking today.
Even as the country was grieving with its Muslim community, a quiet process of revision began.
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.
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.
We are pleased to announce that Overland will be running two writing residencies in 2019, both of which are supported by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation. These residencies will again address a lack of opportunities for underrepresented writers, providing space, time, stipend and mentorship.
After a picturesque rail journey from Glasgow to Kings Cross station, I was in shock when confronted with the crowds, and not happy about lugging two suitcases up several flights of busy staircases. There was further affective congestion to come as I stayed in university accommodation near Oxford Street, took the packed tube to be a tourist and see friends, and struggled to enjoy walking on the hustling streets.
Power is not a blunt instrument. It doesn’t get applied evenly, and it doesn’t operate uniformly, in accordance with clearly identifiable categories and factors that each person fits into. Power traces invisible and barely conscious networks of bias built around prior knowledge, unexamined or underexamined assumptions, desires and practices.
Mr Dutton, how in all conscience can you continue to humiliate and dehumanise severely ill refugees in your own personal and political thirst for power? You continually use hate speech in order to prevent due justice to be given to us, the remaining refugees on Manus and Nauru. We are not responsible for shortages in hospital beds. We are dangerously ill only because many treatable illnesses and injuries have not been given adequate medical attention for years.
Sam Wallman reports from the pavement outside the Chemist Warehouse during the (ongoing) picket in Preston.
Authors are always put at the centre of Australia’s copyright debates, grounding claims for more rights or fewer exceptions. Despite that, our law has no explicit rights to protect authors in the case of unfair, unclear or outdated contacts. I criticised this state of affairs in the last spring issue of Overland, making a case for Australia finally joining the majority of the world’s nations by granting authors appropriate baseline protections.