179: THE CIVILISATION MYTH
ISBN 0 9750837 6 7
WINTER 2005

Overland contributors look beneath the surface of Australian society and public commentary to examine the nation’s sustaining myths. In this issue a diverse group of writers draw into question the assumption that Australia is part of a civilised West.

The United States, writes GEOFF BOUCHER, ANGELA MITROPOULOS and BRETT NEILSON, rules the world by force rather than reason, democratic mandate or a concern for humanity. Australia’s foreign and public policy, suggests KENNETH DAVIDSON, are now mindlessly sycophantic towards the US, to an extent that is seriously damaging towards our own interests. Australian attitudes towards the rest of the world, and particularly the non-Western world, are characterised by ignorance, ambivalence and anxiety, as detailed by JOHN FITZGERALD and PHILLIP DARBY. There is an increasing intolerance of dissent, evident in ‘anti-terror’ laws discussed by STAN WINFORD, in the ongoing attacks on intellectual ‘elites’ examined here by GRAHAM WILLETT, and in the escalating pressure on high school and university educators to avoid political controversy. Developments in the education sector are covered by DAMIEN CAHILL, MITROPOULOS and NEILSON.

These profoundly ‘uncivilised’ social trends have effects on the nation’s artistic imagination. KEN GELDER finds that recent Australian novels are “more inward-looking, more introspective, and more claustrophobic than Australian fiction has ever been”. And BRIGID MAGNER finds that D.B.C. Pierre and Gregory David Roberts, Australian authors who have found international literary stardom through writing about their experiences in culturally diverse, overseas settings, tend to be reclaimed as ‘dinky-di’ Aussies by insecure journalists.

On the positive side, TSEEN KHOO,
SOM SENGMANY, GOLDIE OSURI, KYLIE SMITH and STAN WINFORD set out practical and philosophical alternatives to the contemporary political and cultural status quo. Memoirist
ANNE-MARIE TAPLIN and fiction writers MAGGIE JOEL, JOHN BINGHAM and ROBERT HODDER explore in different ways the ‘uncivilised’ underside of Australian people. And J.V. D’CRUZ finds in his interview with MABEL LEE, second-generation Chinese migrant and translator of Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain, which won the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature, an optimistic perspective on human possibility in this country.

Click here to order