Progressive culture since 1954
If you had told teenage me that I would one day be writing this, I would never have believed you. I grew up reading Rowling’s books, and they are a large part of why I write mine for trans and gender diverse children and teenagers. I consider this an honour. I’m proud of my work, and whenever I meet my audience at events, they make me proud too. They are tired of transphobia, racism, misogyny and ableism. They want and deserve better.
A short history of notable boats
We know that COVID-19’s effect on Australia’s literary and cultural industries is devastating, and its damages will likely mark the sector for years to come. In response to this predicament Overland has partnered with Creative Victoria to do our part to increase paid publication opportunities in the sector as best we can.
I never heard people when they told me what to do but April had a knack of helping me hear myself think. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see the part she played in my leaving my brother’s pharmacy, stumbling into taxi driving and falling in love with it at first try. For the first time, I was free: master of my time, working in blessed peace.
Support for workers during major global emergencies should include all workers, with special attention paid to vulnerable and marginalised communities. Rather than supporting these communities, the government is excluding and over-policing them. Sex workers’ organisations are doing as much as they can to stop people falling through the cracks.
The current pandemic has outdone the Death Ray, stopping DC and Marvel from releasing monthly new issues. That may not sound remarkable until you consider that not even World War II had managed to impede publication.
CW: sexual violence.
Once more, the substantial population living in contamination zones on land they don’t own are left to their own devices. There is no state to save them, no legal enterprise assured of victory to fund their fight. The only option provided by the powers that solely exist for this type of catastrophe is to surrender to the elements.
The new report on arts governance highlights a number of themes. The marvellous things our organisations achieve are made possible by small teams of dedicated, passionate (underpaid) arts workers – most of them women. Their already-stretched resources are being asked to stretch further. Our sector is overly dependent on the support of volunteers, who are often ill equipped to provide the support we really need. And the people who have traditionally filled those volunteer roles are becoming less inclined to do so over time.
Stead left Sydney in 1928, and had lived in Europe for almost six years when Seven Poor men of Sydney was published. The novel’s vision of the antipodes is as much a view of interwar Europe as of Australia; it finds in Sydney’s errors the greater failings of the unstable phenomenon of ‘Western civilisation’ which tears the bodies of earth, water, and flesh that constitute it. Through that century and into this.
Machado is building, fragment by fragment, another house. She is creating a context for abused queer people to locate themselves and shifting authority away from the palatial archive of heterosexual, male-on-female physical abuse to a place with room for the queer and the nuanced.
Along with efforts at environmental management – increasingly futile in the face of both climate change and the intensification of water hoarding – the dams along the Murray Darling Basin are the barricades that reveal the contested political economy of water.
It is the end of the world we knew. Just as cancer presents a schism in personal timelines, a radical before-and-after, we exist inescapably in a timeline where this pandemic is taking place.