Progressive culture since 1954
In the beginning, Godzilla was about us. The monster was made to show the ways in which we fail ourselves and harm each other. 1954’s Gojira, directed by Ishirō Honda for Toho studio, was the first in a franchise spanning more than 30 films. Gojira famously drew on Japan’s recent experiences of nuclear horror: the city-destroying, unfathomable monstrosity of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
In 2011, Egypt was a country that offered hope to people across the region, and across the world people were inspired. Millions took to the streets, at considerable risk, and for too many, at considerable cost. In just two and a half years, the fight for democracy was reversed, if not entirely defeated.
The poems themselves, though, leave little room for luxury. They are dizzying, blistering, attention-demanding. ‘The optional anchovy’ is an ode to takeaway pizza, ‘a query or two’ gives voice to a gnawing scepticism of the over-complication and perhaps over-consumerism of queer culture, while ‘pro-tractor’ is a real cat-scratch of a poem, refusing to be forgotten and moving deliriously between deceased estates, organic vegetables and psephology.
The Queensland Labor Government recent decision to approve Adani’s groundwater management plan is one of the party’s more shocking recent betrayals of the environmental movement and progressive politics more generally.
Overland is seeking a new editor, and for the first time in its history, the magazine is advertising the position.
Gabbie Stroud’s memoir Teacher is almost militantly unhappy with NAPLAN, and gives it considerably more than a walk-on role. Rather, it is a main player: a powerful, insidious antagonist which emerges, along with other forces of educational standardisation, to drive Stroud in despair from the profession that she loves.
We have come to rely on the dead to offer clarity about who we are and what we will become. We make them work overtime to sate our curiosities and pacify our fears.
My cousin was only a few hours old when Oranga Tamariki – New Zealand’s child welfare agency – came with their court order to take her away.
After a while, these stories of violence begin to pool and form an inky river. It runs around me, through the university, across the neat lawns and through the classrooms, leaving black grease in its wake.
Overland is seeking fiction submissions for a special online edition themed around the future(s) you would manifest, to be guest edited by Eda Gunaydin.
The Nakata Brophy Short Fiction and Poetry Prize recognises the talent of young Indigenous writers across Australia. Sponsored by the University of Melbourne’s Trinity College, the prize alternates each year between fiction and poetry; this year’s prize is for the best short story (up to 3000 words) by an Indigenous writer under 30.
Uber moved fast and broke the taxi industry. AirBnB has done the same to the rental property market. Lime and their competitors are certainly moving fast, but the thing they might end up breaking is our cities.
Tolerance is a counterweight against political discussion or genuine cultural contact. It maintains the polite, banal civil order and ensures that the business of de-politicised globalization forges on unimpeded.
Murray leaves a legacy of strong writing which, like much Australian literature, is tainted by indefensible principles and politics.
There have been three elections, four prime ministers and we are still being punished.
The prominence of women in a movement so dedicated to male supremacy generates certain obvious contradictions which have, just now, spectacularly come to a head.
Whether Abbott’s position is genuinely held or simply a vindictive political gesture is difficult to assess. I don’t think it matters as much as his goal – the goal of denialists more generally – to ‘keep minds turned off on the meta-level,’ as philosopher Elizabeth Minnich puts it, so there are ‘no questions about [the issue], no looking back and wondering, no reaching for connections to beliefs.’