Overland literary journal

MWF – Writing Indigenous Australia

I’m writing a PhD on Indigenous Australia and have been travelling the Top End researching for six months or so. The Melbourne Writers Festival began the very day after I arrived home. Given the topic of my PhD, attending the Writing Indigenous Australia seminar seemed like an appropriate thing to do.

The panel was made up of one Indigenous and three non-Indigenous writers. Hannah Rachel Bell opened with a brief talk about Storymen – ‘an excavation of converging world views exposed through personal memoir, letters, paintings and conversations’ – which meditates on her relationship with Ngarinyin lawman Bungal Mowaljarlai, the fiction and philosophies of Tim Winton, and the relationships between land, story, and male rites of passage. ... read more

Written by Stephanie Convery on 9-09-2010, No comments

MWF – A year for Australian writing

MWF session: A year for Australian writing

This session had it all, from heckling to backslapping, from scholarly commentary to dogged insistence. It was what you could call a well-rounded experience. Funnily, looking back, the topic, based on the publication of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature and The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, may have been buried among everything else. Even the delivery, wiry and technical, a skilful performance of university-polished quality, seemed enshrouded in the controversy of what these works weren’t, rather than what they were. ... read more

Written by SJ Finn on 9-09-2010, 3 user comments

Meanland: Doctorow on Copyright vs Creativity

Cory Doctorow spoke in Melbourne on Thursday night as part of the Meanland and Melbourne Writers Festival ‘Big Ideas’ lecture series. For those unable to attend, I have transcribed below as much as I could from my indecipherable notes on the lecture, ‘Copyright vs creativity’.

Rule number 1: If there’s a lock for something and you haven’t been given the key, it’s not for your benefit. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 6-09-2010, No comments

MWF Writing Women – a review

2.30 at Fed Square and there’s a queue fifty people strong cluttering up the paving-stones, waiting to go in to ACMI for the Melbourne Writers Festival. The doors are shut. Chaos reigns. ‘Is this the museum?’ asks a lost tourist. The MWF volunteers are doing a sterling job, blithely ignoring any queue-disgruntlement and pointing the lost tourist in the right direction.

‘May I smoke?’ asks an older man ahead of me. He looks like a writer, to me – dishevelled and blinking in the sunlight. ‘I think you should,’ replies his polite companion. Not what I would’ve said.

At last, the doors are open and the queue begins to move. ‘Sorry to have kept you waiting, but it’s our first day,’ says a MWF volunteer. As this is the twenty-fourth Melbourne Writers Festival, I find this a remarkable explanation but what the heck, here we go, the well-oiled machine rolls on. ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 3-09-2010, 1 user comment

Meanland – ‘No thanks, I’ve seen an old issue at the library’: on the responsibility of the reader for the decline of publishing

So you, the reader, want to save independent publishing in Australia? Go forth and buy a book. Be daring: buy an armful. The truly intrepid might add a subscription, or several, to one of Australia’s exceptional literary journals – a commitment to the health of the Australian literary scene, if you will.

This isn’t to imply that readers have money to burn, or that they should spend all of their disposable income on books and journals. Yet, readers – above all, those of the aspiring writer variety – are often reluctant to part with their cash when it comes to investing in Australian publishing. And for aspiring writers and readers alike, this is precisely how we can define purchasing local printed commodities: an investment. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 18-08-2010, No comments

Almost (not) famous – or published

Here are ten reasons why you shouldn’t despair if you have an unpublished manuscript. These famous rejections are sure to cheer you up:

1. Can you imagine a world without Possum Magic? Apparently many publishers could. Mem Fox's classic was rejected nine times over five years. Little Hush would have remained invisible were it not for Omnibus Books in Adelaide. Originally called Hugh, the Invisible Mouse, Omnibus suggested changing the mice to possums, and the rest, as they say, is history. Since 1983 Possum Magic has sold 3.5 million copies, making it the bestselling Aussie kids’ book of all time. Speaking of magic leads me to … ... read more

Written by Irma Gold on 2-08-2010, 6 user comments

The democratisation of publishing (and a bit of Clay Shirky for good measure)

A brandspanking new Meanland post:

The idea that the printing press democratised reading, writing and ideas is widely embraced. This is not to suggest it was – or remains in its internet incarnation – politically progressive or, indeed, revolutionary. Matthew Battles reminds us:

The printing press never only produced the kind of deep reading we admire and privilege today. It also produced propaganda and misinformation, penny dreadfuls and comic books offensive to public morality, pornography, self-help books, and much that was generally despised and rejected by polite culture. Any account of the history of “The Gutenberg Era” that lacks these is incomplete — just as any picture of the Internet that privileges LOLcats and 4chan is insufficient. We must consider both — for pornography, misinformation, and sheer foolishness have thrived from the age of incunables to the advent of the Internet.

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 29-07-2010, No comments

Meanland extract – Amazon and that old fudging figures manoeuvre

Unless you slept through yesterday (or for some incomprehensible reason went offline), you probably heard how Amazon won the book wars, summed up so succinctly in this New York Times headline: E-Books Top Hardcovers at Amazon:

Monday was a day for the history books — if those will even exist in the future.

Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest booksellers, announced Monday that for the last three months, sales of books for its e-reader, the Kindle, outnumbered sales of hardcover books.

In that time, Amazon said, it sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition.

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 22-07-2010, No comments

Vale Laurie Clancy

Laurie Clancy’s death this July is a great loss to Australia’s literary community, and a particular cause of sorrow to Overland. Although Laurie was b inclination attached to Overland, a chance combination of circumstances led to his inclusion in the Meanjin team for one of the annual cricket matches that enacted the rivalry between the two magazines. In later years he became not only captain of Meanjin, but one of the main organisers of the match. He celebrated this event in one of the stories he published in Overland. This also appeared, slightly modified, in his novel The Wildlife Reserve. The description of the comic progress and violent end of a cricket match between supporters of rival literary magazines demonstrates the deep knowledge and love of sport that was so much a part of Laurie’s life. In the book it also introduces the hero to the divisions he will find in an English Department tormented by cultural, pedagogical and sexual politics. ... read more

Written by John McLaren on 21-07-2010, 2 user comments

On atrocities and equivocal jokes

So anyway, as I was passing through Brisbane last week at the end of a long journey, I caught up with a friend of mine who reads my blogs. Brisbane always seems to me to be a city where a great catastrophe has at some time taken place, a catastrophe that no one wants to speak of. And there is still a sense in the air that something terrible happened there once, if we could just remember what it was. We were sitting in a hideous cafe in a hideous building at a university – hideous in a way that only universities can accomplish – when my friend said to me, vis-à-vis the blogs, ‘I really like your blog writing. But why don’t you write more about what you think about the solutions to the problems you write about? It’s like you’re complaining – and there’s lots to complain about – but I never know what you really think.’ ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 21-07-2010, 12 user comments

On Manning, Lamo, WikiLeaks, Greenwald, new media and old journalism

I have an article up at Drum about all of the above:

How has the online temperament of news changed journalism? In Katrina Fox’s article on objectivity, transparency and advocacy in journalism, “What’s your bias?”, Marcus O’Donnell, lecturer in journalism, explains:

[O]bjectivity was a trust mechanism we relied on in media that didn’t do links. But now we can make it perfectly clear where we are coming from, what our sources are and what our values are, and it is this transparency that is the new trust mechanism that both readers and writers have to rely on.

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 21-07-2010, 1 user comment

The Muslim voice pushing through

The politically conscious hip-hop group The Brothahood ask ‘Why?’

Five Muslim spoken-word/rap artists born in Australia with Lebanese backgrounds, The Brothahood are smashing stereotypes with their album Lyrics of mass construction, and tracks like ‘Why?’ When I accidentally stumbled across them a few months ago I was asking myself why haven’t I heard of these guys? All of Australia needs to turn off their televisions and listen:

Now if a wake up one morning and grow myself a beard /
people start talkin and getting themselves scared /
but – Mr Goldberg he lives down the block /
when he grows a beard no-one ever gets a shock /
why when my sister walks properly dressed /
she wears a headscarf they think she’s oppressed? /
then you got the nuns dressed in black and white head to toe /
but no-one questions them – why – i dont know

Hesh, Ahmed, Moustafa, Jehad and Timur work full-time jobs, live on opposite sides of the city in suburbia and struggle to find time to come together, but when they do, they produce raw and confronting material that challenges the propagandist mainstream newsfeeds the Australian public sees every day. They may not have flashy video clips but the content is honest and allows the Muslim voice in Australia, commonly silenced by fear, to be heard.

Only recently introduced to their work, by the Nothing rhymes with RRR podcast, my initial reaction was: why aren’t these guys funded by an arts council? Why do these guys have to struggle to create? Governments complain of the racism in Australia but do nothing about it. Why not start by funding people like The Brothahood and other diverse voices from different backgrounds? Only through art can we appreciate the many cultures we have in Australia.

The Brothahood began their career years ago as spoken-word artists performing with a beat boxer and have since incorporated music in their performances. Their track ‘The Silent Truth’, a response to the Cronulla riots, was featured on Triple J’s Unearthed in 2007:

I can feel ya eyes on me but i aint in the wrong /
keepin to yourself scared that my beard hides a bomb /
tensions climbin higher than that ape king kong /
label me a thug coz i'm from Lebanon /
butcha WRONG, im like any other aussie /
try to ride a train but u always gotta stop me /
coz of 9/11 now you all wanna wanna drop me /
little do you know that your thinkins kinda sloppy

But The Brothahood don’t only write about issues faced by Muslims in Australia. My favourite track is ‘Act on It’, which voices anger over the state of Israel and the suffering of Palestinians:

It was born on injustice, theft and murder /
Driving Palestinians out further and further /
Now don't get me wrong Judaism ain't to blame /
But we must understand that Zionism ain't the same /
Now I know you're mad at me, blunt brutality /
The Z ain't got no links to Jewish spirituality /
Huh, now you wanna twist, call me terrorist /
Yes, I'm anti Zionist, Expect me to resist

This Thursday morning, 15 July from 9–9:30, I’ll be interviewing Jehad from The Brothahood on 3CR’s Spoken Word program (855 AM). We’ll be discussing spoken word, lyrics and politics. You can also listen online at www.3cr.org.au

Written by Koraly Dimitriadis on 12-07-2010, 8 user comments

Meanland extract – At the mercy of our instruments

A writer needs their tools.

Chisel
Quill
Ink
Parchment
Chalk
Pencil
Paper
Crayon
Biro
Fountain pen
Notepad
Typewriter
Word Processor
ThinkPad
Personal Computer
Macbook
iPhone
iPad
Tablet

What do all these tools have in common? They help us make permanent that thing that makes us human: language. Language marshalled into journals, books, literary fiction, non-fiction, blog posts, lists – but how do all these tools change the way we write and think?

‘Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.’

In Nicolas Carr’s now [

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 8-07-2010, No comments

On Carey’s version of literacy and democracy

I recently watched Peter Carey’s closing address to the Sydney Writers’ Festival. In the video, he lectures earnestly about people once reading in the ‘shearing sheds, lending libraries, mechanics institutes’ and ‘the trenches’ (he even uses Gallipoli, and Burke and Wills to stress his point), imploring everyone to teach children Shakespeare because it will even work in the ‘ghetto’. It doesn’t matter what colour the child is, nor their life experience, because reading is about exploring people other than you. After all, he argues, who would want to be Madame Bovary or Nabokov's Humbert Humbert? ... read more

Written by Benjamin Laird on 7-07-2010, 13 user comments