Category: Blog

Metal Gear Socialist

SoutherlyBlog

By Mark Steven   In Lenin’s Plan for Monumental Propaganda, first announced in April 1918, we encounter a moment of direct, unmediated contact between state power and the aesthetic regime. Lenin’s objective was a public art that affirmed socialism by using the material stuff of urban space. “The masses,” explains Susan Buck-Morss, “would see history as they moved through the city. The revolution entered the phenomenal world of the everyday.” The best-known take on Lenin’s idea comes from Anatoly Lunacharsky, People’s Commissar of Education, who made its announcement to a meeting of artists: I’ve come from Vladimir Ilich. Once again…

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The Poetry of Reaction

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By Mark Steven September 1884. Battle Mountain, Queensland. 100 kilometers northeast of Mount Isa, deep in the Cloncurry Ranges. Land-owning stationmaster Alexander Kennedy and Sub Inspector Frederick Charles Urquhart lead a mounted assault against the region’s indigenous inhabitants, the Kalkadoon. While the stated motivation for their attack was the spearing of Kennedy’s station co-owner, James Powell, the massacre is wholly explicable within the broader history of colonization. Because of their well-documented resistance to the settlers, as manifest in a commitment to guerrilla warfare, the Kalkadoon registered as human collateral to the advancement of capital – mere fetters on the profits…

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Marxism’s Australian Origins

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By Mark Steven     Here’s my hypothesis: the Russian Revolution of 1917 is an indictment of the thing we call Australia. That sounds ludicrous, but only because it’s a statement that wants for mediation. To make good on this claim we need to establish a third term that orchestrates the transfer of energies between these two seemingly autonomous entities – what the economists call a “lateral field of causality” – and that is precisely what I want to do with this post: secure a concrete mediation between Australia and the Russian Revolution. If “mediation” is a key term for…

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Moscow, 1917 – Sydney, 2017.

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By Mark Steven October 2017. One hundred years since the Russian Revolution. This profoundly universalist event transformed global politics, it recast the twentieth century as a battle for real emancipation, and it did so with a frontal assault on capitalism and its various mainstays. Indeed, the Russian Revolution was an unprecedented moment during which the working class of the world seized from our enemies the fortress of a superannuated absolutism and in its place established a new center for the communist international. For this writer, 1917 is shorthand for a political sequence that is both epochal and inspiring. An historical…

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Emplacement

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by Jessica White ‘One can never fault a Brisbane winter,’ I smugly tell my friends in the south. The air is mild, the light golden, and one only needs a jumper in the evenings. Come summer, though, it’s a different story. I’m far from smug when I’m lying on the couch before a fan blowing hot air into my face. I’ve never lived in a home with air-conditioning and neither do I want to; I resent the sense of being boxed in. On oppressive days I usually go to public places such as a pub or the State Library, but…

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Extending Our Selves

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by Jessica White Every afternoon after school, I changed my black school shoes for joggers and ran through the paddocks for half an hour. On weekends I ran through the hills at the back of our house, my joggers slipping on bark and leaf litter. Heat rose from the earth and coiled around my ankles. Slabs of granite gave off a warm, clean scent and cicadas wove a thicket of sound. At my footfall, roos bounded away and wild goats stepped nervously through pine trees. On hot summer days, I defied my mother and ran out in the baking heat.…

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Romance and the Deaf Girl

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by Jessica White The bus trip from our family property to primary school in town took forty minutes, and with my siblings and cousins aboard, it was a noisy journey. I sat on the left hand side of the bus, so that if someone spoke to me I’d be able to hear them with the ear that still had some hearing. Usually, I found it too hard to join in so I read my book, or looked at the passing grey-green gum trees, low granite outcrops dotted with prickly pear and stands of pine trees, or paddocks crammed with rust-coloured…

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Fierce/Peace: The Creativity of Disability

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by Jessica White Everything begins with the body. With lying on a trampoline on a spring morning, the season in which wattle bursts across dun hills and chilly air tickles bare legs. Except now it scrapes my cheeks and the clear light hurts my eyes. An ache spills from my shoulders, across my neck and down my back. My mother, sensing something is wrong, scoops me up and takes me to the local doctor in town, a half-hour drive away on gravel roads. He sends us to the regional hospital, another hour’s drive. They stick a needle in my back…

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New monthly blogger – Jessica White!

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An enormous thanks to David Musgrave for his fascinating posts. Our newest monthly blogger is Jessica White. Her bio is below. Jessica is the author of A Curious Intimacy and Entitlement. Her short stories, essays and poems have appeared widely in Australian and international literary journals and she has won awards, funding and residencies. She has recently completed a literary memoir, Hearing Maud: A Journey for a Voice, and is currently an ARC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Queensland, where she is writing an ecobiography of 19th century Western Australian botanist Georgiana Molloy. Jessica can be found at www.jessicawhite.com.au

Nibbling on the hand that feeds me, with an occasional sharp nip

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by David Musgrave Co-editing Contemporary Australian Poetry with Martin Langford, Judith Beveridge and Judy Johnson was one of the biggest projects I’ve ever worked on: it was like doing a PhD all over again, but without the pool-playing. Because the anthology covered poetry published in the period 1990-2015 (excluding verse novels), I want to make a few general comments about the state of the artform as I experienced it from researching and reading pretty comprehensively in the period. Any Australian writer who wishes that they were American, like a novelist of my acquaintance, need only have a look through the…

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Does Australia Need an ICAC for Poetry?

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by David Musgrave I’ve been running a publishing company for over 12 years now, and as part of this series of blogs for Southerly, I’ve been asked to write on some aspect of the inner workings of a publishing company, and so I will – on the most important part, which is how it makes me feel: deeply ambivalent. I’ll deal with the positive stuff first. One of the great things about running an independent literary publishing house is the people you mostly work with, the authors. The overwhelming majority of them are a pleasure to deal with, which is…

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Inside-out or outside-in?

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by David Musgrave In May I had the good fortune to be invited to the 4th China-Australia Literary Forum in Guangzhou. There I met four Chinese poets: Yang Ke, whose work I was already familiar with through Simon Patton’s translations, Xi Chuan, Professor at Beijing Normal University, Huang Lihai, a Guangzhou-based poet published by Kit Kelen’s Flying Islands Books (feed birds rainbows, 2014) and Zheng Xiaoqiong, who I’ll talk about first[1]. The poetry panel, which was chaired by Xi Chuan, and also featured Yang Ke, Kate Fagan, and Zheng Xiaoqiong, consisted of each poet reading a brief paper about their…

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