Overland literary journal

After experiencing firsthand what it means to create work deemed by Creative Australia to have ‘incalculable risk’, I hope that questions will be asked of the organisation about how exactly individual projects will be identified and labelled as coming with ‘risk’, and what the ramifications for those artworks will be. Blacklisting artists based on the risk that their work will upset homophobic internet trolls or ultra conservative media would do nothing but entrench discrimination.

I write about university metrics — how we measure the worth of scholars and their work —not so much in my professional role as a senior lecturer nor as a representative of La Trobe University or any of its departments: I write primarily as a citizen using my public reason to speak to anyone who can read this.

Speaking as a media worker guided by universal human rights, integrity and truth, the complicity of the fourth estate in its reporting about Palestine is unacceptable, and is what has ultimately directed my career away from media organisations and into media advocacy and the independent documentary and arts sectors.

Since early October, we have watched Israel perpetrate attacks of an unprecedented scale on Gaza. Their bombing campaign has aimed to destroy Palestinian lives and render it impossible for Palestinians to live in Gaza. Israel has destroyed universities and schools, cultural institutions, libraries, and archives. As historians we know this as an attack on a […]

We write as teachers, school staff, and education affiliates to express our sincere and serious concern over the wellbeing of children and young people locally and internationally, and the safety of all Palestinian people in Gaza.

We are the artists, producers, front of house staff, audiences & beyond who keep this industry alive. We’re here, unified in ‘Australia’, a colonised country built on the genocide and dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation from colonialism, apartheid & […]

Every morning I checked the Director’s calendar to ensure there were no meeting clashes, no opportunity for her polished façade to slip. Once I’d made the mistake of booking two meetings without leaving ten minutes between them, thus forcing her to run across the sprawling campus. She arrived late for her meeting with the Provost, […]

The pastoral is our setting for the good life that puts the 'ethical' in 'ethical sausage'. The websites for small-scale farms and ethical meat butchers around the world look like brochures for retirement living. Together, the happy animals, their conscientious handlers, and ceremonial butchers form a picture of aligned values.

Masculinity, like hunting, cannot on its own explain the persistent tensions between environmentalism and labour. Work itself dominates the formation of our relationship with nature, so that even in play and leisure we are shaped by the physical and mental techniques applied to us in employment.

Let this be a line in the sand. Let us learn our history. Let us listen to liberation movements around the world. Conflicts for land and water will shape the decades to come. Showing up for each other and building power to demand justice is our only hope for a humane future.

I coined the concept of the colonial debtscape while working to understand the relation between debt and sovereignty in the wake of the 2007 Global Financial crisis. Despite the referendum held in Greece in 2015 where the people voted against austerity, austerity as punishment, was imposed anyway. As this was a colonising move, that is, the imposition of an external and foreign law on local populations against their will, it was to Aboriginal scholars here that I turned to begin to put the pieces together.

The Plains charts the psychic terrain of the freeway in miniature, peeling back the lid of the private vehicle to expose just one of the millions of dramas taking place in simultaneity, severed from one another yet still part of the same city-wide traffic ballet.

Some of the stories that have already been shared on shitrentals.org show not only the horrible state of Australia’s housing landscape, with hundreds of images uploaded showing mould in its various stages of progression, caved-in ceilings and electrical work that could only be the product of a drunk landlord — but also the more insidious nature of the real estate industry.