Overland 225

Jacinda Woodhead (editor), Overland 225 (Summer 2016)

I’m late at getting to this issue of Overland – sorry! One advantage of lateness, though, is that just about everything from this issue has been uploaded to the Overland web site, so I can give lots of links.

There’s always a prize or two in Overland. Nº 225 has the Fair Australia Prize, supported by the National Union of Workers, and the Story Wine Prize, whose winners get to appear on the labels of wines produced by The Story Wines, a small Melbourne company.

The Fair Australia Prize includes prizes for poetry, fiction, a cartoon and an essay. Of the winners, Stephen Wright’s essay On setting yourself on fire, stands out: it begins with the horrifying phenomenon of self-immolating Tibetan monks and expends into a rumination on the demands of activism. (Incidentally, he talks about dozens of monks, but I believe it’s more like hundreds – see Martin Kovan’s article in a 2013 Overland.)

Only the first place winner of the wine prize, ‘Sweeping‘ by Cameron Weston, appears in the hard copy journal. It’s a masterly piece of compression. The runners-up are online.

Elsewhere, as always with Overland, the articles provide useful counterpoint to the mainstream narrative, with an occasional oddity. The one I found most interesting was ‘The antis‘ by Liam Byrne, about the campaign against conscription in the First World War. Byrne starts with the assertion that this is a forgotten piece of Australian history, which surprised me, but if he’s right – in spite of writing as if the campaign happened almost entirely in Victoria thing, he has done a good job of jogging the collective memory:

At its root, the conscription campaign was about the future of a country being decided by the mass of people who lived in it. It was about them deciding who would go to war; either those who chose to, or those the government selected. This act of mass democracy unleashed social energies in an act of political creation. It was a time when the working-class citizens of the country, so often denied a political voice, made themselves heard.

There are essays on Donald Trump (accompanied by an image of Trump as the Joker) and Pauline Hanson (by Vashti Kenway, a nice reminder when read alongside David Marr’s Quarterly Essay that parliamentary politics is not the only game in town), on class, women (one on Joan Didion’s influence, one on ‘feminine’ robots) and Indigenous Australia (‘Cultural appropriation is not empathy. It is stealing someone else’s story, someone else’s voice’ – Jeanine Leane) . An article on Julia Gillard’s speeches sets out to discuss their poetics, but pays attention mostly to the manner of their delivery and their reception by the press and social media. Another on the state of the working class  gives university lecturers, hardly the group most people would think of as typical workers, as a key example of increasing precariousness. Alison Croggon’s regular column distinguishes interestingly between invisibility (sometimes desirable) and erasure (definitely not desirable).

There are two fine short fictions apart from the prize winners – Liam by Tony Birch and  Agistment by Alex Philp.

The big poetry feature is a collaborative work, On the occasion of Gig Ryan’s sixtieth birthday. Seventeen Australian poets contributed two stanzas each to a Sapphic ode for the event. The result is as impressively impenetrable as much of Ryan’s work.

There are some fabulous illustrations. Sam Wallman, who did the cover art, has a double spread that beautifully fills the promise of its caption, ‘Hand made signs at the anti-Trump rally in New York City on the first Saturday after the election November 2016’. Brent Stegeman gives us Donald Trump as the Joker and Pauline Hanson as a literally flaming redhead.